Page:The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (1884).djvu/256

222 perform religious acts. They that have wives can lead domestic lives. They that have wives have the means to be cheerful. They that have wives can achieve good fortune. Sweet-speeched wives are as friends on occasions of joy. They are as fathers on occasions of religious acts. They are as mothers in hours of sickness and woe. Even in the deep woods, a wife to a traveller is his refreshment and solace. He that hath a wife is trusted by all. A wife therefore is one's most valuable possession. Even when the husband leaving this world goeth into the region of Yama, it is the devoted wife that accompanies him there. A wife gone before waits for the husband. But if the husband goeth before, the chaste wife followeth close. For these reasons, O king, doth marriage exist. The husband enjoyeth the companionship of the wife both in this and the other world. It hath been said by learned persons that one is himself born as one's son. Therefore should a man whose wife hath borne a son look upon her as his mother. Beholding the face of the son one hath begot in his wife, like his own face in a mirror, one feeleth as happy as a virtuous man on attaining to heaven. Men scorched by mental grief or suffering under bodily pain feel as much refreshed in the companionship of their wives as one perspiring (under the hot sun) in a cool bath. No man even in anger should ever do anything that is disagreeable to his wife, seeing that happiness, joy, and virtue, everything dependeth on the wife. A wife is the sacred field in which the husband is born himself. Even Rishis cannot create creatures without women. What happiness is greater than what the father feels when the son running towards him, even though his body be smeared with dust, clasps his limbs? Why then dost thou treat with indifference such a son who hath approached thee himself and who casteth wishful glances towards thee for climbing thy knees? Even ants support, without destroying, their own eggs. Then why shouldst not thou, virtuous as thou art, support thy own child? The torch of soft sandal paste, of women, of (cool) water, is not so agreeable as the touch of one's own infant son locked in one's embrace. As a Brahmana is the foremost of all bipeds, a cow the foremost of all