Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/213

Rh twelve leagues to right and left of him, behind him it reaches to the rocky limits of the world, above him it is nine leagues in height; and the sound of its war-cry is heard, twelve leagues away, even as the sound of an earthquake.

Then Māra, the angel, mounted his elephant, two hundred and fifty leagues high, named, "Girded with mountains." And he created for himself a thousand arms, and seized all kinds of weapons. And of the remainder, too, of the army of Māra, no two took the same weapon; but assuming various colours and various forms, they went on to overwhelm the Great Being.

But the angels of the ten thousand world-systems continued speaking the praises of the Great Being. Sakka, the king of the angels, stood there blowing his trumpet Vijayuttara. Now that trumpet is a hundred and twenty cubits long, and can itself cause the wind to enter, and thus itself give forth a sound which will resound for four months, when it becomes still. The Great Black One, the king of the Nāgas, stood there uttering his praises in many hundred stanzas. The archangel Mahā Brahma stood there, holding over him the white canopy of state. But as the army approached and surrounded the seat under the Bo-tree, not one of the angels was able to stay, and they fled each one from the spot where the army met them. The Black One, the king of the Nāgas, dived into the earth, and went to Manjerika, the palace of the Nāgas, five hundred leagues in length, and lay down, covering his face with his hands. Sakka, taking the Vijayuttara trumpet on his back, stopped on the rocky verge of the world. Mahā Brahma, putting the white canopy of state on to the summit of the rocks at the end of the earth, went to the world of Brahma. Not a single deity was able to keep his place. The Great Being sat there alone.

But Māra said to his host, "Friends! there is no other man like Siddhattha, the son of Suddhodana. We cannot