Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.119

c8.119

In his palace the prince was surrounded by beautiful, gaily-attired handmaids, who sought to dissipate his thoughts with music and dance: but he neither looks upon nor listens to them, and soon falls into sleep. He wakes up at night and sees by the light of the lamps those dancing-girls wrapt in slumber, some talking in their sleep, some with running mouths, and of others again the clothes have become disarranged and exposed repulsive deformities of the body. At this sight it was to him as if he were in a burial-place full of disfigured corpses, as if the house around him were in flames. "Alas! danger surrounds me," he cried, "alas! distress surrounds me! Now is the time come for me to go on the great pilgrimage." Before hastening away, he thinks of his new-born son: "I will see my child." He goes to his wife's chamber, where she is sleeping on a flower-strewn couch, with her hand spread over the child's head. Then the thought occurs to him: "If I move her hand from his head to clasp my child, she will awake. When I shall have become Buddha, I shall return and see my son." His trusty steed Kanthaka is waiting outside, and thus the prince flies, seen by no human eye, away from wife and child and from his kingdon, out into the night, to find rest for his soul and for the world and the gods, and behind him follows Mâra, the tempter, shadow-like, and watches till perchance a moment may come, when a thought of lust or unrighteousness, entering the struggling soul, will give him power over the hated enemy.