So with angry words they went off to the zemindar. But when the matter was gone into, it was the fisherman's wife who was fined; and she was tied up and beaten to make her pay the fine. Now when the Tree-Sprite saw how misfortune had befallen both the wife in the village and the husband in the forest, he stood in the fork of his tree and exclaimed, "Ah fisherman, both in the water and on land thy labour is in vain, and twofold is thy failure." So saying he uttered this stanza:--

His blinding, and her beating, clearly show
A twofold failure and a twofold woe .

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[484] His lesson ended, the Master identified the Birth by saying, "Devadatta was the fisherman of those days, and I the Tree-Sprite."

Footnotes

^299:1 The Pali word here, as in No. , is kahapana. But there it is shewn by the context to be a golden coin; whereas here the poverty of the fisher-folk supports the view that the coin was of copper, as commonly. The fact seems to be that the word kahapana, like some other names of Indian coins, primarily indicated a weight of any coined metal,--whether gold, silver or copper.

^299:2 Cf. Dhammapada, page 147.

[j140]