Page:The Heart of Jainism (IA heartofjainism00stevuoft).djvu/82

 and the interval of time between him and his predecessor was nine crores of sāgara.

King Viṣṇudeva, who ruled in Siṁhapurī, possessed a most beautiful throne, but unfortunately an evil spirit took up his abode in it, so that no one dare sit there. His wife, however, so longed to sit on it that she determined to do so at any risk; to every one's astonishment she was quite uninjured, so, when her son was born, he was named Śreyāṁsanātha, the Lord of Good, for already he had enabled his mother to cast out an evil spirit and so do a world of good (śreyāṁsa). His sign is the rhinoceros; one crore of sāgara of time had intervened before his birth; and his height was eighty bow-shots.

Before the birth of the twelfth Tīrthaṅkara the gods Indra and Vasu used to go and worship the father of the future saint, and as the father's name was Vasupūja and the god Indra used to give him jewels called vasu, the child was naturally enough called Vāsupūjya. His sign is the male buffalo, and he passed to mokṣa from his birthplace, Ċampāpurī, accompanied by six hundred Sādhus. Fifty-four sāgara of time had intervened, and his height was seventy arrow-shots.

The sign of the thirteenth Tīrthaṅkara is the boar. He got his name Vimaḷanātha, Lord of Clearness, through the clearness (vimaḷatā) of intellect with which he endowed his mother before his birth, and which she displayed in the following manner. A certain man and his wife unwisely stayed in a temple inhabited by a female demon, who, falling in love with the husband, assumed his real wife's form. The miserable man was quite unable to tell which was his true wife, and asked the king of Kampilapura to distinguish between them. It was the queen, however, who solved the difficulty. She knew the long reach that witches and only witches have, and telling the husband to stand a long distance off, challenged the two wives to prove their chastity by touching him. Both