“Noble persons, I have promised to eat with the Lady Amra.”
And again they threw up their hands exclaiming:
“We are outdone by this mango-girl. Great shame to us is this!”
And the Lord Buddha robed himself early in the morning and took his begging bowl and his disciples followed, and he went to the Street of Flowers, and Amra set sweet milk-rice and cakes before the Lord and his followers and she herself attended upon them in great humility and they ate the food they had not thought to eat, and when it was eaten, she sat lowly by his side and folding her hands, said:
“Holy One, I present this house to the Order. Accept it, if it be your will.”
And the Blessed One accepted the gift, seeing the heart that made it, and after inciting and gladdening her with high discourse, he rose and went his way.
And in merciful deeds and right living this lady grew, and the Heart of Wisdom strengthened in her, and in this very life she became a perfected saint—a great Arhat—and entered the Nirvana—the Peace. For, as the lotus flowers do not grow on dry land but spring from black and watery mud, so even by the strength of her passion and sin and the deeps of experience she reached the heights. And she it was who made The Psalm of Old Age, and smiled in its making.
“Glossy and black as the down of the bee my curls once clustered.
They, with the waste of years, are liker to hemp or to bark-cloth,
Such and not otherwise, runneth the rune of the Soothsayer.