Читать книгу Garland of the Buddha's Past Lives (Volume 2) - Aryashura - Страница 24

tween forests and royal gardens.18 In ‘The Birth-Story of Kshanti·vadin’ (28), a king thus enjoys wine, women and song among garden-like (28.9, 28.12) forests of exquisite beauty that also happen to be inhabited by an ascetic. The tension inherent in the joint use of the forest by both ascetic and king becomes strained when the king’s women, “smitten by the loveliness of the groves” (28.25), accidentally encounter the ascetic and listen to his sermons, the mere sight of him making them “feel overcome by his radiant ascetic power” (ibid.). While the ascetic’s intentions are of course entirely virtuous, the story seems keen to probe the conflict between the ascetic and royal spheres (and intensify the contrasting significance placed on the shared motif of forest beauty) by depicting the ascetic’s sermons as a form of pious seduction that threatens the king’s desire-based outlook. Indeed, it is precisely the king’s jealousy that leads him to treat “the ascetic like a foe” (28.55) and assault him.

A similar conflict is expressed in “The Birth-Story of the Great Monkey’ (27), in which a fig-tree, depicted as the centerpiece of an idyllic forest scene, serves as the home of a harmonious community of monkeys in an “area seldom accessed by humans” (27.19). Here again the refined pleasures of a forest inhabited by virtuous animals act as a seduction for human beings driven by the negative emotions of desire, when a fruit from the fig-tree accidentally floats down a river to a royal party and intoxicates a king with its fragrant taste. The contrast between the (superior) pleasures of the forest and the (inferior) pleasures of human society is explored by the story in terms of differing levels of aesthetic and sensual quality: