諸經要集 7.18

7.18

Furthermore, the Dazhidulun states: As for the nature of women, if they receive respectful treatment, it causes the husband's mind to grow haughty; if respectful treatment is emotionally abandoned, it causes the husband's mind to be terrified. Women thus constantly bring affliction, anxiety, and fear. How could one become intimately close to a woman? As is told: A king had a daughter named Kumudā. There was a fisherman named Śūpaka who was walking along the road and saw the king's daughter from afar in a high tower. Seeing her face in the window, he imagined her and became attached, his mind unable to let go of her for a moment. As days and months passed, he could neither eat nor drink. His mother asked him the reason, and he answered his mother with his true feelings, "I saw the king's daughter, and my heart cannot forget her." The mother admonished her son, saying, "You are a lowborn person, and the king's daughter is noble and exalted; she is unobtainable." The son said, "My heart desires and yearns for her and cannot forget her for a moment. If it is not fulfilled, I cannot live." For her son's sake, the mother went into the royal palace, constantly delivering fat fish and bird meat to present to the king's daughter without taking any payment. Wondering at this, the king's daughter asked her, "What wish do you seek?" The mother addressed the king's daughter, "I pray you dismiss your attendants, and I will speak the truth. I have only one son; he reveres and longs for you, Princess, and his emotions have knotted into illness, so that his life will not last long. I pray you look upon him with pity and bestow life upon him." The king's daughter said, "Go, and on the fifteenth day of the month, wait behind the deity's image in such-and-such shrine of the gods." The mother returned and told her son, "Your wish has been granted," telling him as above. Having bathed and put on new clothes, he waited behind the deity's image. When the time came, the king's daughter addressed her father, the king, "I have an inauspicious omen, and must go to the shrine of the gods to pray for good fortune." The king said, "Very good." He immediately prepared five hundred chariots to go out to the shrine. Having arrived, she ordered all her attendants to stop at the gate and entered the shrine alone. The heavenly deity considered: "This ought not to happen; the king is a dānapati, and this lowborn person must not be allowed to defile and dishonor the king's daughter." He then cast a spell of sleep upon the man, causing him to sleep without waking. When the king's daughter entered and saw him sleeping, she pushed him repeatedly, but he did not awake. Thereupon, she left behind a necklace worth a hundred thousand liang of gold and departed. After she left, the man awoke. Seeing the necklace and inquiring among the people, he learned that the king's daughter had come. His desire unfulfilled, filled with grief, regret, and agony, the fire of lust erupted within him, burning him to death. By this it is known that the minds of women make no distinction between noble and base, but follow only lust.