Thus, by the folly of that king, was the kingdom utterly wasted and destroyed, so that it became a desert, inhabited only by lizards and serpents, and demons....
NOTE. This and the following fable belong to the curious collection translated by M. Stanislas Julien from a Chinese encyclopædia, and published at Paris in 1860, under the title, "Les Avadânas"—or "The Similitudes"—a Sanscrit term corresponding to the Chinese Pi-yu, and justified by the origin of the stories, translated by the Chinese themselves, or at least reconstructed, from old Sanscrit texts. I have ventured, however, to accentuate the slightly Chinese coloring of the above grotesque parable. L. H.
[A PARABLE BUDDHISTIC]
...Like to earthen vessels wrought in a potter's mill, so are the lives of men; howsoever carefully formed, all are doomed to destruction. Nought that exists shall endure; life is as the waters of a river that flow away, but never return. Therefore may happiness only be obtained by concealing the Six Appetites, as the tortoise withdraws its six extremities into its shell; by guarding the thoughts from desire and from grief, even as the city is guarded by its ditches and its walls....
So spoke in gathas Sakya-Mouni. And this parable, doubtless by him narrated of old, and translated from a lost Indian manuscript into the Chinese tongue, may be found in the fifty-first book of the "Fa-youen-tchou-lin ":
... A father and his son were laboring together in the field during the season of serpents, and a hooded serpent bit the young man, so that he presently died. For there is no remedy known to man which may annul the venom of the hooded snake, filling the eyes with sudden darkness and stilling the motion of the heart. But the father, seeing his son lying dead, and the ants commencing to gather, returned to his work and ceased not placidly to labor as before.
Then a Brahman passing that way, seeing what had happened, wondered that the father continued to toil, and yet more at observing that his eyes were tearless. Therefore he questioned him, asking: "Whose son was that youth who is dead?"
"He was mine own son," returned the laborer, ceasing not to labor.