Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1
Religion
Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1
Jataka stories, English
Then they agreed; and took the pinnacle and completed their hall with
it.[319] They fixed benches in the hall, and set up pots of water
in it, and provided for it a constant supply of boiled rice. They
surrounded the hall with a wall, furnished it with a gate, spread it
over with sand inside the wall, and planted a row of palmyra-trees
outside it.
And Thoughtful made a pleasure ground there; and so perfect was
it that it could never be said of any particular fruit-bearing or
flowering tree that it was not there!
And Pleasing made a pond there, covered with the five kinds of
water-lilies, and beautiful to see!
Well-born did nothing at all.[320]
And the Bodisat fulfilled the seven religious duties--that is, to
support one’s mother, to support one’s father, to pay honour to age, to
speak truth, not to speak harshly, not to abuse others, and to avoid a
selfish, envious, niggardly disposition.
That person who his parents doth support,
Pays honour to the seniors in the house,
Is gentle, friendly-speaking, slanders not;
The man unselfish, true, and self-controlled,
Him do the angels of the Great Thirty Three
Proclaim a righteous man!
Such praise did he receive; and at the end of his life he was born
again in the heaven of the Great Thirty Three, as Sakka, the king of
the Gods, and there, too, his friends were born again.
* * * * *
At that time there were Titans dwelling in the heaven of the Great
Thirty Three.
And Sakka said, “What is the good to us of a kingdom shared by others?”
And he had ambrosia given to the Titans to drink, and when they became
like drunken men, he had them seized by the feet and thrown headlong
upon the precipices of Mount Sineru.
They fell just upon “The abode of the Titans;” a place so called, upon
the lowest level of Sineru, equal in size to the Tāvatiŋsa heaven. In
it there is a tree, like the coral-tree in Sakka’s heaven, which stands
during a kalpa, and is called “The variegated Trumpet-Flower Tree.”
When they saw the Trumpet-Flower Tree in bloom, they knew, “This is not
our heaven, for in heaven the Coral-Tree blossoms.”
Then they said, “That old Sakka has made us drunk, and thrown us into
the great deep, and taken our heavenly city!”
Then they made resolve, “We’ll war against him, and win our heavenly
city back again!”
And they swarmed up the perpendicular sides of Sineru like so many ants!
When Sakka heard the cry, “The Titans are up!” he went down the great
deep to meet them, and fought with them from the sky. But he was
worsted in the fight, and began to flee away along the summit of the
southern vault of heaven in his famous Chariot of Glory a hundred and
fifty leagues in length.[321]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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