Once he left his hermitage on Vulture Peak to go buy salt and seasoning. While he was away, this brahmin spoke in just the same way to his son, as now. The lad begged him to point out a proper place, and he came and pointed out this very place. As he was descending, with his son, he observed the Bodhisatta, and approached him, and the Bodhisatta put the same question as I did just now, and received the son's answer. "Ah," said he, "we'll see whether this place which your father has shown you is contaminated or not," and made them go with him up the hill again. "The space between these three hills," said the lad, "is pure." "My lad," the Bodhisatta replied, "there is no end to the people who have been burned in this very spot. Your own father, born a brahmin, as now, in Rajagaha, and bearing the very same name of , has been burnt on this hill in fourteen thousand births. On the whole earth there's not a spot to be found where a corpse has not been burnt, which has not been a cemetery, which has not been covered with skulls."

This he discerned by the faculty of knowing all previous lives: and then he repeated these two stanzas:--[56]

"Fourteen thousand Upasalhas have been burnt upon this spot,
Nor is there the wide world over any place where death is not.

"Where is kindness, truth, and justice, temperance and self-control,
There no death can find an entrance; thither hies each saintly soul."

When the Bodhisatta had thus discoursed to father and son, he cultivated the Four Excellences and went his way to Brahma's heaven.

_____________________________

When this discourse was ended, the Master declared the Truths and identified and the Birth:--at the conclusion of the Truths father and son were established in the Fruit of the First Path:--"The father and son were the same then as they are now, and the ascetic was I myself."

Footnotes

^38:1 This added suffix makes no practical difference in the word: it is often put on to adjectives and substantives without affecting their meaning. But sometimes it has a diminutive force.

[j167]