When the ascetic heard these words which the Bodhisatta spake, he stood up in the midst of the sea, and resuming his interrupted trance, he rose through the air, and went away to his dwelling place. Thought the Bodhisatta, "Yon ascetic, with so great a burden, goes through the air like a fleck of cotton. [331] Why should not I like him cultivate the trance, and pass through the air!" So he returned to his hut, and led the woman among mankind again; then he told her to be gone, and himself went into the jungle, where he built him a hut in a pleasant spot, and became an ascetic; he prepared for the mystic trance, cultivated the Faculties and the Attainments, and became destined for the world of Brahma.

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When this discourse was ended, the Master declared the Truths: (now at the conclusion of the Truths the backsliding Brother became established in the Fruit of the First Path:) "At that time," said he, "I was myself the youth that had never had anything to do with women."

Footnotes

^228:1 The Scholiast gives the following lines in his note:

Hallucination, sorrow, and disease,
Mirage, distress (and solid bonds are these),
The snare of death, deep-seated in the mind--
Who trusts in these is vilest of his kind.

[j264]