And the king marched forth with a great army and invested the city of a certain king and took him prisoner. And by similar means he gained the sovereignty of all India, and with a thousand kings in his train, he went to seize upon the kingdom of Takkasila. The Bodhisatta repaired the walls of the city and made it impregnable to its enemies. And the king of Benares had a canopy set up over him and a curtain thrown round about him, at the foot of a big banyan tree on the banks of the Ganges. And having a couch spread for him, he took up his quarters there. Fighting in the plains of India he had taken captive a thousand kings, but failing in his attack on Takkasila, he asked his priest, "Master, though we have come hither with a host of-captive kings, we cannot take Takkasila. What now are we to do?"

"Great king," he answered, "put out the eyes of the thousand kings [160] and ripping open their bellies let us take their flesh and the five sweet substances and make an offering to the guardian deity of this banyan. And surrounding the tree with a rimmed circumference let us fill it with blood five inches deep. And so shall the victory soon be ours."

The king readily assented and concealing mighty wrestlers behind the curtain, he summoned each king separately, and when the wrestlers had squeezed them in their arms till they had reduced them to a state of insensibility, he had their eyes put out, and after they were dead, he took the flesh and caused the carcases to be carried away by the Ganges. Then he made the offering, as described above, and had the drum beaten and went forth to battle. Then came a certain Yakkha from his watch-tower and tore out the right eye of the king. Severe pain set in, and maddened by the agony he suffered, he went and lay down at full length upon the couch prepared for him at the foot of the banyan tree. At this moment a vulture took a sharp-pointed bone, and perched on the top of the tree, in eating the flesh it let drop the bone, and the sharp point falling as with iron spikes on the king's left eye, destroyed that eye too. At this moment he recalled the words of the Bodhisatta and said, "Our teacher when he said "These mortals experience results corresponding to their deeds, even as fruit corresponds with the seed," spoke, I suppose, with all this before his mind's eye." And in his lamentation he addressed Pingiya in two stanzas:--

Ah! now at last I recognize the truth
The Master taught me in my heedless youth:
"Sin not," he cried, "or else the evil deed
To thine own punishment may one day lead."

Beneath this tree's trim boughs and quivering shade
Libation due of sandal oil was made.
'Twas here I slew a thousand kings, and lo!
The pangs they suffered then, I now must undergo.

[161] Thus lamenting, he called to mind his queen-consort, and repeated this stanza:--