And the sweet stranger answered, in tones softer than of flutes of gold: "I also, lovely one, am returning to the white city Rajagriha; let us journey together, that we may comfort each other by the way."
And Pundari answered: "Yea, O fairest maiden! thy beauty draws me to thee as the flower the bee, and thy heart must surely be precious as is thy incomparable face!"
So they journeyed on; but the lovely stranger became weary at last, and Pundari, sitting down, made a pillow of her round knees for the dainty head, and kissed her comrade to sleep, and stroked the silky magnificence of her hair, and fondled the ripe beauty of the golden face slumbering, and a great love for the stranger swelled ripening in her heart.
Yet while she gazed the face upon her smooth knees changed, even as a golden fruit withers and wrinkles, so wizened became the curved cheeks: strange hollows darkened and deepened about the eyes; the silky lashes vanished with their shadows; the splendid hair whitened like the ashes of altar fires; shrunken and shriveled grew the lips; tooth-less yawned the once rosy mouth; and the bones of the face, made salient, fore-shaped the gibbering outlines of a skull. The perfume of youth was gone; but there arose odors insufferable of death, and with them came the ghastly creeping things that death fattens, and the livid colors and blotches that his shadowy fingers leave. And Pundari, shrieking, fled to the presence of Buddha, and related unto him the things which she had seen.
And the World-Honored comforted her, and spake:
"O Pundari, life is but as the fruit; loveliness but as the flower! Of what use is the fairest body that lieth rotting beside the flowings of the Ganges? Old age and death none of us may escape; yet there are worse than these—the new births which are to this life as the echo to the voice in the cavern, as the great footprints to the steps of the elephant.
"From desire cometh woe; by desire is begotten all evil. The body itself is a creation of the mind only, of the foolish thirst of the heart for pleasure. As the shadows of dreams are dissipated with the awakening of the sleeper, even so shall sorrow vanish and evil pass away from the heart of whosoever shall learn to conquer desire and quench the heart's thirst; even so shall the body itself vanish for those who tread well in the Five Paths.
"O Pundari, there is no burning greater than desire; no joy like unto the destruction of the body! Even as the white stork standing alone beside the dried-up lily-pool, so shall those be whose youth passes from them in the fierce heat of foolish passion; and when the great change shall come, they will surely be born again unto foolishness and tears.
"Those only who have found delight in the wilderness where others behold horror; those who have extinguished all longings; those self-made passionless by meditation on life and death—only such do attain to happiness, and, preventing the second birth, enter into the blessedness of Nirvana."...