At this time the king remembered him and said, "What has become of my friend? He is nowhere to be seen." His ministers told him he had taken orders, and was living, they heard, in some delightful grove. The king asked the place of his abode, and said to a councillor named Sayha, "Go and bring my friend back with you. I will make him my chaplain." Sayha readily assented, and going forth from Benares in course of time reached a frontier village and taking up his abode there, he went with some foresters to the place where the Bodhisatta dwelt and found him sitting like a golden statue at the door of his hut. After saluting him with the usual compliments he sat at a respectful distance and thus addressed him: "Reverend Sir, the king desires your return, being anxious to raise you to the dignity of his family priest." [32] The Bodhisatta replied, "If I were to receive not merely the post of chaplain but all Kasi and Kosala, and the realm of India and the glory of a Universal Empire, I would refuse to go. The wise do not again take up the sins they have once abandoned any more than they would swallow the phlegm they have once raised." So saying he repeated these stanzas:--

No throne on earth should tempt me to my shame,
No sea-girt realm, safe-guarded in the deep;
Accursed be the lust of wealth and fame
That dooms poor man in "Suffering Worlds" to weep.

Better through earth a homeless waif to stray,
And bowl in hand to beg from door to door,
Than as a king, to sinful lusts a prey,
To bear a tyrant rule and vex the poor.

Thus did the Bodhisatta though again and again importuned by him reject his offer. And Sayha, being unable to prevail on him, saluted him, and returned and told the king of his refusal to come.

[33] When the Master had brought his lesson to an end, he revealed the Truths and identified the Birth:--At the conclusion of the Truths the backsliding Brother attained to fruition of the First Path. Many others too experienced like fruits of Conversion:--"At that time Ananda was the king, Sariputta was Sayha, and I myself was the family priest."

Footnotes

^21:1 These stanzas occur again in Jataka 433.