Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1
Religion
Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1
Jataka stories, English
These grey hairs that have come upon my head
Are angel messengers appearing to me,
Laying stern hands upon the evening of my life!
’Tis time I should devote myself to holy thought!
Having thus spoken, he laid down his sovranty that very day, and became
a hermit; and living in the Mango-grove of Makhā Deva, of which he
had spoken, he spent eighty-four thousand years in practising perfect
goodwill towards all beings, and in constant devotion to meditation.
And after he died he was born again in the Brahma heaven; and when his
allotted time there was exhausted, he became in Mithilā a king called
Nimi, and reunited his scattered family.[275] And after that he became
a hermit in that same Mango-grove, and practised perfect goodwill
towards all beings, and again returned to the Brahma heaven.
* * * * *
The Teacher, having thus discoursed on the subject that not then only,
but formerly too, the Successor of the Buddhas had abandoned the world,
proclaimed the Four Truths. Some entered the First Stage of the Path to
Nirvāna, some the Second, some the Third. And when the Blessed One had
thus told the double story, he established the connexion, and summed up
the Jātaka as follows: “The barber of that time was Ānanda, the prince
was Rāhula, but Makhā Deva the king was I myself.”
END OF THE STORY OF MAKHĀ DEVA.
No. 10.
SUKHAVIHĀRI JĀTAKA.
The Happy Life
_“He whom others guard not,” etc._--This the Teacher told while at
the Anūpiya Mango-grove, near the town of that name, about the Elder
named Bhaddiya the Happy-minded. Bhaddiya the Happy-minded took the
vows when the six young noblemen did so together with Upāli.[276] Of
these, Bhaddiya and Kimbila and Bhagu and Upāli became Arahats, Ānanda
entered the First Stage of the Road to Nirvāna, Anuruddha attained
to the Knowledge of the Past and the Present and the Future, and
Devadatta acquired the power of Deep Meditation. The story of the six
young noblemen, up to the events at Anūpiya, will be related in the
Khaṇḍahāla Jātaka.
Now one day the venerable Bhaddiya called to mind how full of anxiety
he had been when, as a king, caring for himself like a guardian angel,
and surrounding himself with every protection, he had lolled in his
upper chamber on his royal couch: and now how free from anxiety he was,
when, as an Arahat, he was wandering, here and there, in forests and
waste places. And realizing this change, he uttered an exclamation of
joy, “Oh, Happiness! Happiness!”
This the monks told the Blessed One, saying, “Bhaddiya is prophesying
about Arahatship!”[277]
The Blessed One replied, “Mendicants! not now only is Bhaddiya full of
joy; he was so also in a former birth.”
The monks requested the Blessed One to explain how that was. Then the
Blessed One made manifest an event hidden through change of birth.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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