The Bodhisattva answered: 'I got to it by myself, Your Majesty, I did not receive it from anybody else. While sitting or sleeping on the hard ground strewed only with thin straw, the body suffers, and the religious duties cannot be performed at ease. Now, I saw a large monkey in the hermitage and thought so within myself: "Oh! here is the right instrument I want to perform my religion, if I had but the skin of this monkey! sitting or sleeping on it, I shall be able to accomplish the rules of my religion, without caring even for royal couches spread with the most precious clothes." In consequence of this reflection, after subduing the animal I took his skin.' On hearing that account, the king who was polite and well-educated replied nothing to the Bodhisattva, but feeling something like shame, cast down his eyes. His ministers, however, who before that already bore a grudge to the Great Being, seized this opportunity of declaring their opinion, and looking with beaming faces at the king and pointing at the Bodhisattva, exclaimed: 'How entirely the Reverend is devoted to the love of his religion which is his only delight! What a constancy is his! What ability to put into effect the best means for the realisation of his aims! It is a wonder that being alone and emaciated by penance, he was able to subdue so large a monkey, who had just entered his hermitage! At all events, may his penance be successful[166]!' In reply to them, the Bodhisattva, without losing his placidity of mind, said: 'Your honours, blaming me, should not disregard the fair tenets of your doctrines. This is not the way by which to make the glory of learning shine. Your honours must consider this. [166] The last words are the usual complimentary blessing said to ascetics. When asking after their health, it is similarly said: 'is your penance successful?' 23. 'He who despises his adversaries with such words as are destructive to his own doctrine, such a one, so to speak, wishes the dishonour of his enemy at the cost of his own life.' After thus reproaching those ministers collectively, the Great Being, wishing to revile them once more individually, addressed that minister who denied causality in these terms: 24. 'You profess that this universe is the product of essential and inherent properties. Now, if this be true, why do you blame me? What fault is mine, if this ape died in consequence of his nature? Therefore, I have rightly killed him. 25. 'If, however, I committed a sin by killing him, it is evident that his death is produced by an (external) cause. This being so, you must either renounce your doctrine of non-causality or use here such reasoning as does not befit you.