Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c6.136

v1.c6.136

The son of a Brahman, who had been gotten after much trouble, had died while still a child with great eyes, seized by a demon of children’s sickness. Filled with sorrow, his own took him, and bore him, that was all to his family, weeping and overcome by woe, out to the field of the dead. And as now with the dead darling on their arm they went along sobbing, they kept on telling one another everything he had said while he was still alive (cp. iii, 298.8). Outside in the place of the dead they laid him down on the earth, but could not part themselves from him. Then a vulture heard them weeping, and came up and spoke : “ Thousands of men, and thousands of women, have brought their kindred hither, and then gone back home. See how the whole world is ruled by pleasure and pain ! Union and separation fall to men in the wheel of change. Those who come here, indeed, with the dead, but go back without them,² they themselves go hence with the fast set measure of the length of their lives. No one was ever awakened again to life, when once he had fallen before the law of time, beloved