Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/207

Rh son, king, is well." And the king said, "I knew my son was not dead."

And the Great Being's six years' penance became noised abroad, as when the sound of a great bell is heard in the sky. But he perceived that penance was not the way to Wisdom; and begging through the villages and towns, he collected ordinary material food, and lived upon it. And the Thirty-two signs of a Great Being appeared again upon him, and his body became fair in colour, like unto gold.

Then the five attendant mendicants thought, "This man has not been able, even by six years' penance, to attain Omniscience; how can he do so now, when he goes begging through the villages, and takes material food? He is altogether lost in the Struggle. To think of getting spiritual advantage from him is like a man, who wants to bathe his head, thinking of using a dewdrop. What is to be got from him?" And leaving the Great Being, they took each his robes and begging bowl, and went eighteen leagues away, and entered Isipatana (a suburb of Benāres, famous for its schools of learning).

Now at that time, at Uruvela, in the village Senāni, there was a girl named Sujātā, born in the house of Senāni the landowner, who, when she had grown up, prayed to a Nigrodha-tree, saying, "If I am married into a family of equal rank, and have a son for my first-born child, then I will spend every year a hundred thousand on an offering to thee." And this her prayer took effect.

And in order to make her offering, on the full-moon day of the month of May, in the sixth year of the Great Being's penance, she had driven in front of her a thousand cows into a meadow of rich grass. With their milk she had fed five hundred cows, with theirs two hundred and fifty, and so on down to eight. Thus aspiring after quantity, and sweetness, and strength, she did what is called, "Working the milk in and in."