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all was supplanted by a sublime indifference. Then he retired 10 a cave in the high Himalayas and there, steeped in the profoundest contemplation, lost all consciousness of the external world-but while in this state was again sharply bitten by a snake. The poison burned; but he did not lose his peaceful equilibrium. He welcomed death, and expired in a spiritual atlitude of sublime submission.
The serpent, of course, was again the usual enemy, who, fol. lowing his murder of the clephant, had descended to the fifth hell where the sufferings for a period of sixicon oceans of time had been indescribable. Then he had returned to the earth, still in the form of a snakc, and at the sight of Agnivega committe again his characteristic sin. The hermit-king, at the very mo ment of his death, was elevated to the status of a god-this time for a period of twenty-two oceans of years; but the scrpent descended to the sixth hell, where its torments were even greater than in the fifth.
Once again a cycle has been completed; this time comprising one earthly life and one heavenly-and-infernal interlude. The pattern of three in the early cycle gave stress to the earthly transformation of an individual whose center of spiritual gravity had just been shifted from matcrial to spiritual things. For Marubhūti, the virtuous brother and the trusted minister of the king, was a man of noble disposition in the service of the state, whereas Vajraghoșa stood at the beginning of a career specifically saintly. Though apparently on a lower plane than the king's minister, the elephant was actually on the first step of a higher series: the sudden death of the man of affairs and the birth, then, of the childlike, wild but tractable lamb-elephant of God symbolizing precisely the crisis of one who has undergone a religious conversion. This crisis begins the series of the soul's mighty strides to the height, the first step being that of spiritual realization-as in the life, just reported, of the kingly hermit, Agnivega; the second that of the Cakravartin, bringer
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |