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THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
crease of some ascetic's spiritual power, he sends a heavenly damsel, incredibly beautiful, to intoxicate the senses of the spiritual athlete. If she succeeds, the saint, in a sublime night (or even eon) of passion, pours away the whole charge of psychophysical force that he has spent his lifetime striving to accumu. late. The consequence for the world, then, is the birth in due time of a child of fabulous endowments, and for the holy man, the wreckage of his power-project.
In the case of a Bodhisattva the requirements of his peculiar spiritual attitude are, humanly speaking, so severe that were he not established perfectly in his knowledge and his mode of being the danger of his subversion would be practically universal. Temptation is concealed in every incident of life, even the slightest detail, yet for the fulfilled Bodhisattva the possibility of relapse is nonexistent. Since he is the one who is truly without ego, he feels no temptation whatsoever to assert the value of his purely phenomenal personality-not even to the extent of a moment's pause for thought when confronted with an arduous decision. The legends of the Bodhisattvas show them sacrificing their limbs, life, and even wives and children, to what would seem to any normal intellect the most unwarranted demands. Possessions that any ordinary man (přthag-jana) would regard as the most precious and sacred in the world, the Bodhisattva immediately surrenders to some inconsequential or completely indefensible claim-for example, the plea of a troubled bird or tiger-cub, or the command of some wicked, greedy, and lustful old Brāhman.
The tale is told, for example, in the popular story of the Children of King Vessantara,84 of how this pious monarch, who was an earlier incarnation of the Buddha, took a vow never to refuse anything demanded of him: "My heart and eye, my flesh and blood, my entire body-should anyone ask these of me, I
84 Jätaka 547. (Also, Jatakamälā 9; J. S. Speyer, The Jätakamälä, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, Vol. I, London, 1895, pp. 71-98; cf. infra, p. 549, note 91.)
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