Next day thought the wife to herself, "My four sons have refused the White Umbrella to follow the life of the religious; my husband has left his fortune of eighty thousand, and his position of royal chaplain to boot, and gone to join his sons:--what am I to do all by myself? By the way my son has gone I will go also." And quoting an ancient saw she recited this stanza of aspiration:

"The rain-months past, the geese break net and snare,
With a free flight like herons through the air;
So by the path of husband and of son
I'll seek for knowledge as they two have done."

"Since this I knew," she said to herself, "why should I not renounce the world?" With this purpose she summoned the brahmin women, and said to them: [485] "What do you mean to do with yourselves?" They asked, "What do you?"--"As for me, I shall renounce the world."--"Then we will do the same." So leaving all her splendour, she went after her sons, taking with her a league-long company of women. To this company also Hatthipala declared the Law, sitting poised in the air.

Next day the king asked, "Where is my chaplain?" "My lord," they replied, "the chaplain and his wife have left all their wealth behind, and have gone after their sons with a company that covers two or three leagues." Said the king, "Masterless money comes to me," and sent to fetch it from the chaplain's house. The chief queen now wanted to know what the king was doing. He is fetching the treasure," she was told, "from the chaplain's house." "And where is the chaplain?" she asked. "Gone to be a religious, wife and all." "Why," thought she, "here is the king fetching into his own house the dung and the spittle dropt by this brahmin and his wife and his four sons! Infatuate fool! I will teach him by a parable." She got some dog's-flesh, and made a heap of it in the palace courtyard. Then she set a snare round it, leaving the way open straight upwards. The vultures seeing it from afar swooped down. But the wise among them noticed that a snare had been set around it; and feeling they were too heavy to rise up straight, they disgorged what they had eaten, and without being caught in the snare rose up and flew away. Others blind with folly devoured the vomit of the first, and being heavy could not get clear away but were caught in the snare. They brought

one of the vultures to the queen, and she carried it to the king. "See, O king!" said she, "there is a sight for us in the courtyard." Then opening a window, "Look at those vultures, your majesty!" Then she repeated two stanzas:

"The birds that ate and vomited in the air are flying free:
But those which ate and kept it down are captured now by me.