Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/316

200 wife, and lived a household life as a virtuous and attractive woman. And in due time she conceived, but she knew it not.

Now in that city they proclaimed a feast. All the dwellers in the city kept the feast, and the city was decked like a city of the gods. But she, up to the time when the feast was at its height, neither anointed herself nor dressed, but went about in her every-day clothes. Then her husband said to her, —

"My dear! all the city is devoted to the feast; yet you adorn yourself not."

"The body, Sir, is but filled with its thirty-two constituent parts. What profit can there be in adorning it? For this body has no divine, no angelic attributes: it is not made of gold, or gems, or yellow sandal-wood; it springs not from the womb of lotus-flowers, white or red; it is not filled with the nectar-balm of holiness. But verily it is born in corruption: it springs from father and mother: its attributes are the decomposition, the wearing away, the dissolution, the destruction, of that which is impermanent! It is produced by excitement; it is the cause of pains, the subject of mournings, a lodging-place for all diseases. It is the receptacle for the action of Karma; foul within, without it is ever discharging: its end is death: and its goal is the charnel-house, — there, in the sight of all the world, to be the dwelling-place of worms and creeping things!"