“What is it you are saying, dear? This family is of great wealth, and you are our only daughter. You cannot be allowed to take the vows.”
When, after repeated asking, she was unable to obtain her parents’ permission, she thought, “Let it be so. When I get to another family, I will make favour with my husband, and take the vows.”
And when she grew up, she entered another family as wife, and lived a household life as a virtuous and attractive woman. And in due time she conceived, but she knew it not.
Now in that city they proclaimed a feast. All the dwellers in the city kept the feast, and the city was decked like a city of the gods. But she, up to the time when the feast was at its height, neither anointed herself nor dressed, but went about in her every-day clothes. Then her husband said to her,—
“My dear! all the city is devoted to the feast; yet you adorn yourself not.”
“The body, Sir, is but filled with its thirty-two constituent parts. What profit can there be in adorning it? For this body has no divine, no angelic attributes: it is not made of gold, or gems, or yellow sandal-wood; it springs not from the womb of lotus-flowers, white or red; it is not filled with the nectar-balm of holiness. But verily it is born in corruption: it springs from father and mother: its attributes are the decomposition, the wearing away, the dissolution, the destruction, of that which is impermanent! It is produced by excitement; it is the cause of pains, the subject of mournings, a lodging-place for all diseases. It is the receptacle for the action of Karma; foul within, without it is ever discharging: its end is death: and its goal is the charnel-house,—there, in the sight of all the world, to be the dwelling-place of worms and creeping things!”[283]
“Dear Lord! what should I gain by adorning this body? Would not putting ornaments on it be like painting the outside of a sepulchre?”
“My dear!” replied the young nobleman, “if you think this body so sinful, why don’t you become a nun?”
“If you grant me leave, dear husband, I will take the vows this day!”
“Very well, then; I will get you ordained,” said he. And giving a donation at a great cost, he took her, with a numerous retinue, to the nunnery, and had her admitted into the Order of Nuns—but among those who sided with Devadatta. And she was overjoyed that her wish had been fulfilled, and that she had become a nun.