Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c20.64

v2.c20.64

² It is from this that we find an explanation, at least in part, of why in Indian literature the man often seems so much colder in love than the woman. Were he more fiery, he would be less exemplary. It is especially the Jātaka that is always showing how harmful, foolish, and evil it is to depend not only on any woman, but even on the wife. Pictures of the fondest, tenderest love in the man, pictures of a love that even in danger and death thinks only of the wife, are set before us, but all this is meant to be by way of a warning. A fish was playing in the water with his mate. Fishermen caught him, threw him on the hot sand, and put up a spit to roast their catch in a fire. But the fish only kept on wailing: “Not the spit nor the fire does torment me, but the thought that my dearest one believes I have left her for another.” Bodhisatta, who was then a house-priest of the king in Benares, and who understood the sounds of all creatures, came by: he saw that the creature in its passion must go to hell, and set it free (Jāt., 34 and 216). In Benares a festival was being held. A poor man washed his coarse garment, and set it out in a thousand pleasing folds that it might serve him for the day of joy. But his wife said: “I want a safflower gown (cp. Kuṭṭanīmatam, 675), and, hanging on to thy neck, to enjoy myself at the festival in it.” “Whence can I, a poor man, get it?” “Then go with another woman.” At last he resolved on her persuasion to get one by night from the king’s house of safflower garments. But the watchmen heard the fence crack as he pressed it down, caught the thief, and he was impaled. But from his lips parched in torment the cry that came in his agony was: “It is not the stake that tortures