"The travellers who passed by, believing me dead, cast clods of earth upon me!
"Only the temptation of the Devil remained!
"His sons came,--hideous, scale-covered, nauseous as charnel-houses,--shrieking, hissing, bellowing; interclashing their panoplies, rattling together the bones of dead men. Some belched flame through their nostrils; some made darkness about me with their wings; some wore chaplets of severed fingers; some drank serpent-venom from the hollows of their hands;--they were swine-headed; they were rhinoceros-headed or toad-headed; they assumed all forms that inspire loathing or affright."
THE BUDDHA. "Then did he send me his daughters--beautiful with daintily painted faces, and wearing girdles of gold. Their teeth were whiter than the jasmine-flower; their thighs round as the trunk of an elephant. Some extended their arms and yawned, that they might so display the dimples of their elbows; some winked their eyes; some laughed; some half-opened their garments. There were blushing virgins, matrons replete with dignity, queens who came with great trains of baggage and of slaves."
THE BUDDHA. "Having vanquished the Demon, I nourished myself for twelve years with perfumes only;--and as I had acquired the five virtues, the five faculties, the ten forces, the eighteen substances, and had entered into the four spheres of the invisible world, Intelligence became mine! I became the Buddha."
[Illustration: Intelligence became mine! I became the Buddha.]
(_All the gods bow themselves down. Those having several heads, bend them all simultaneously. He lifts his mighty hand aloft, and resumes_:)
"That I might effect the deliverance of beings, I have made hundreds of thousands of sacrifices! To the poor I gave robes of silk, beds, chariots, houses, heaps of gold and of diamonds. I gave my hands to the one-handed, my legs to the lame, my eyes to the blind;--even my head I severed for the sake of the decapitated. In the day that I was King, I gave away provinces;--when I was a Brahman I despised no one. When I was a solitary, I spake kindly words to the robber who slew me. When I was a tiger I allowed myself to die of hunger.
"And having, in this last existence, preached the law, nothing now remains for me to do. The great period is accomplished! Men, animals, the gods, the bamboos, the oceans, the mountains, the sand-grains of the Ganges, together with the myriad myriads of the stars,--all shall die;--and until the time of the new births, a flame shall dance upon the wrecks of worlds destroyed!"