“Drink, Purana. I still see a tear on your cheek. Did not the blessedness of peace press it from your eyes?”
The wise sages spent the next three weeks in accustoming their mouths to eating and drinking and their limbs to moving, and during these three weeks they slept in the temple and warmed each other with the heat of their bodies till their strength returned.
At the beginning of the fourth week, they stood at the threshold of the ruined temple. Below at their feet lay the green slopes of the mountain descending into the valley.... Far in the distance were the winding rivers, the white houses of the villages and cities where people lived their normal lives, busied with cares, passions, love, anger and hate, where joy was changed for sorrow, and sorrow was healed by new joy, and where amid the roaring torrent of life men raised their eyes to heaven, seeking a star to guide them.... The sages stood and looked at the picture of life spread out at the entrance to the old temple.
“Where shall we go, friend Darnu?” asked the blinded Purana. “Are there no directions on the walls of the temple?”
“Leave the temple and its deity in peace,” answered Darnu. “If we go to the right, that will be in accordance with Necessity. If we go to the left, that too is in accordance with her. Don’t you understand, friend Purana, that this deity acknowledges as its laws everything that our choice decides upon. Necessity is not the master but merely the soulless accountant of our movements. The accountant marks only what has been. What must be—will be only by our will....”
“It means....”
“It means,—let us permit Necessity to worry over her calculations, as she will. Let us choose that path which leads us to the homes of our brothers.”
With cheerful steps both sages went down from the mountain heights into the valley, where human life flows on amid cares, love, and sorrow, where laughter echoes and tears flow....
“And where our steward, O Kassapa, covers the back of the slave Jebaka with welts,” added wise Darnu with a smile of reproach.
This is the story which the cheerful sage Ulaya told to the young son of the Rajah Lichava, when he had fallen into the idleness of despair.... Darnu and Purana smiled, denying nothing and affirming nothing, and Kassapa heard the story. Buried in thought he went away toward the home of his father, the powerful Rajah Lichava.