Then the men say, “We all three are ascetics,” they said. After that the Prince, calling the three persons, went to the palace. Having gone [there] the Prince told the Princess to cook rice for twelve.
After she cooked he said, “Having set twelve plates of cooked rice, place them on the table.”
After she put them [there] the Prince told the ascetics to sit down to eat cooked rice. After they sat down he said, “Tell the three wives of you three persons to sit down.” [They came out and sat down.] Then when he told the three men (minis) who are in the three betel boxes of the three women to sit down, all were astonished.
Then he told the Princess to call that Vaeddā, and return. “I don’t know [anything about him],” the Princess said untruthfully. Then the Prince pulled that cord; the Vaeddā came running. Afterwards the whole twelve sitting down ate cooked rice.
Afterwards, those said three ascetics and the Prince having talked, abandoned this party, and the whole four went again to practise austerities (tapas rakinḍa).
Tom-tom Beater. North-western Province.
In The Jātaka, No. 145 (vol. i, p. 310), the Bōdhisatta is represented as remarking, “You might carry a woman about in your arms and yet she would not be safe.” In No. 436 (vol. iii, p. 314), an Asura demon who had seized a woman kept her in a box, which he swallowed. When he ejected it and allowed her liberty while he bathed, she managed to hide a magician with her in the box, which the unsuspecting demon again swallowed. An ascetic knew by his power of insight what had occurred, and informed the demon, who at once ejected the box. On his opening it the magician uttered a spell and escaped.
In the Arabian Nights (Lady Burton’s ed., vol. i, p. 9), two Kings whose wives had been unfaithful, saw a Jinni (or Rākshasa) take a lady out of a casket fastened with seven steel padlocks and placed in a crystal box; he went to sleep with his head on her lap under the tree in which they were hidden. Noticing the men in the tree, she put the Jinni’s head softly on the ground, and by threatening to rouse her husband made them descend. In her purse she had a knotted string on which were strung five hundred and seventy seal rings of the persons she had met in this way though kept at the bottom of the sea, and adding their rings to her collection she sent them away. In vol. iv, p. 130, the story is told of a Prince, and the woman had more than eighty rings.
In the Totā Kahānī (Small), p. 41, a Yōgī took the form of an elephant, and to insure his wife’s chastity carried her in a haudā or litter on his back. A man climbed up a tree for safety from the elephant, which halted under the tree, put down the litter, and went off to feed. The man descended and joined the woman, who took out a knotted cord and added another knot on it, making a hundred and one, which represented the number of men she had met in that way.