Page:Sacred Books of the Buddhists Vol 1.djvu/40

 the excellent path of world-renunciation. Now, the doors of evils being shut, as it were, but the ways of happiness widely opened like high roads, it once happened that the Great-minded One ( n) was rambling along the shrubby caverns of the mountain well adapted to the practices of meditation ( a), in order to enjoy at his ease this existing order of things. Agita, his disciple at that time, accompanied him.

13-15. Now, below in a cavern of the mountain, he beheld a young tigress that could scarcely move from the place, her strength being exhausted by the labour of whelping. Her sunken eyes and her emaciated belly betokened her hunger, and she was regarding her own offspring as food, who thirsting for the milk of her udders, had come near her, trusting their mother and fearless; but she brawled at them, as if they were strange to her, with prolonged harsh roarings.

16, 17. On seeing her, the Bodhisattva, though composed in mind, was shaken with compassion by the suffering of his fellow-creature, as the lord of the mountains ( u) is by an earthquake. It is a wonder, how the compassionate, be their constancy ever so evident in the greatest sufferings of their own, are touched by the grief, however small, of another!

And his powerful pity made him utter, agitation made him repeat to his pupil, the following words manifesting his excellent nature: 'My dear, my dear,' he exclaimed,

18. 'Behold the worthlessness of Samsâra! This animal seeks to feed on her very own young ones. Hunger causes her to transgress love's law.

19. 'Alas! Fie upon the ferocity of self-love, that makes a mother wish to make her meal with the bodies of her own offspring!

20. 'Who ought to foster the foe, whose name is self-love, by whom one may be compelled to actions like this?

'Go, then, quickly and look about for some means of appeasing her hunger, that she may not injure her young ones and herself. I too shall endeavour to avert