No. 525.

CULLA-SUTASOMA-JATAKA.

"Good friends," etc. This story the Master while residing at Jetavana told concerning the perfect exercise of self-abnegation. The introductory story corresponds with that of the Mahanaradakassapa Birth.

Once upon a time what is now Benares was a city called Sudassana and in it dwelt king Brahmadatta. His chief consort gave birth to the

[paragraph continues] Bodhisatta. His face was glorious as the full moon, and therefore he was named Somakumara. When he arrived at years of discretion, owing to his fondness for Soma juice and his habit of pouring libations of it, men knew him as Sutasoma (Soma-distiller). When he was of age, he was instructed in the liberal arts at Takkasila, and on his return home be was presented with a white umbrella by his father and ruled his kingdom righteously and owned a vast dominion, and he had sixteen thousand wives with Candadevi as chief consort. By and bye when he was blest with a numerous family, he grew discontented with domestic life and retired into a forest, desiring to embrace the ascetic rule. One day he summoned his barber and thus addressed him, "When you see a grey hair on my head, you are to tell me." The barber agreed to do so and by and bye he espied a grey hair and told him of it. The king said, "Then, sir barber, pull it out and place it in my hand." The barber plucked it out with a pair of golden tweezers and laid it in his hand. The Great Being, when he saw it, exclaimed, "My body is a prey to old age," and in a fright he took the grey hair and descending from the terrace [178] he seated himself on a throne placed in the sight of the people. Then he summoned eighty thousand councillors headed by his general and sixty thousand brahmins headed by his chaplain and many others of his subjects and citizens and said to them, "A grey hair has appeared on my head; I am an old man, and you are to know that I am become an ascetic," and he repeated the first stanza:

Good friends and citizens assembled here,
Hearken, my trusty counsellors, to me,
Now that grey hairs upon my head appear,
Henceforth it is my will a monk to be.

On hearing this each one of them in a fit of dejection repeated this stanza:

Such random words as these in uttering
Thou mak'st an arrow quiver in my heart:
Remember thy seven hundred wives, O king;
What will become of them, shouldst thou depart?

Then the Great Being spoke the third stanza:

Their sorrows soon another will console,
For they are young in years and fair to see,
But I am bent upon a heavenly goal
And so right fain am I a monk to be.