It then came to pass that the king and his wives came into this wood to amuse themselves, and while the latter took a bath in a brook, which ran there, the former fell asleep.
Awaking he didn’t see them any more. They had strayed to the hermit and listened to his preaching. The king found them there, and angrily called the preacher a liar, and menaced him with his sword. The wise man however, remained calm, and the king, embittered as he was by his wives’ supplications, came up to the pious teacher, and cut his hands, ears, nose and feet.
The martyr, who only feared that the king could be said to have killed an innocent person, suffered much more from his sorrow for the king’s fall than from his own wounds, but when the evildoer left the dying man he saw the ground opening itself before him, and fell into the flaming depth.
The frightened courtiers thought that the preacher himself had punished their master, and they asked for mercy, and dying the poor man blessed them, and also the murderer whose ruin had remained unknown to him.
On 10 we see the king asleep, on the corner-sculpture we see him go off to seek for his wives. I suppose the first and 2nd sculpture behind the corner [W. L. 105 and 106] refers to the widows on their way home.
Second corner, 5 [W. L., 111].
This sculpture brings us again in the presence of a king, the unbelieving prince of Videha, who lived a life of unjustice renouncing all virtues. There was a time when the Lord lived as a devarshi Brahmâloka, and descended to earth to convert the unbelieving ruler.
As sure—he says—as this life has been preceded by other lives there will once come other future lives. He then speaks about the tortures of hell which fall to the evil-doer and unbeliever when he doesn’t mend his life, and ... the king acknowledges that he is in the right, and bids the Lord to lead him henceforth on the right path[51].
The sculpture need no further explication.
Second corner, 6, 7, 8 and 9 [W. L., 112, 113, 114 and 115].