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The Kādambarī of Bāṇa. Bhūṣaṇabhaṭṭa
Читать онлайн.Название The Kādambarī of Bāṇa
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Автор произведения Bhūṣaṇabhaṭṭa
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Public Domain
‘He was as the child of the Vindhya Mountains, the partial avatar of death; the born brother of wickedness, the essence of the Iron Age; horrible as he was, he yet inspired awe by reason of his natural greatness,131 and his form could not be surpassed.132 His name I afterwards learnt. In my mind was this thought: “Ah, the life of these men is full of folly, and their career is blamed by the good. (66) For their one religion is offering human flesh to Durgā; their meat, mead, and so forth, is a meal loathed by the good; their exercise is the chase; their çastra133 is the cry of the jackal; their teachers of good and evil are owls;134 their knowledge is skill in birds;135 their bosom friends are dogs; their kingdom is in deserted woods; their feast is a drinking bout; their friends are the bows that work their cruel deeds, and arrows, with their heads smeared, like snakes, with poison, are their helpers; their song is what draws on bewildered deer; their wives are the wives of others taken captive; their dwelling is with savage tigers; their worship of the gods is with the blood of beasts, their sacrifice with flesh, their livelihood by theft; the snakes’ hood is their ornament; their cosmetic, elephants’ ichor; and the very wood wherein they may dwell is utterly destroyed root and branch.”
‘As I was thus thinking, the Çabara leader, desiring to rest after his wandering through the forest, approached, and, laying his bow in the shade beneath that very cotton-tree, sat down on a seat of twigs gathered hastily by his suite. (67) Another youthful Çabara, coming down hastily, brought to him from the lake, when he had stirred its waters with his hand, some water aromatic with lotus-pollen, and freshly-plucked bright lotus-fibres with their mud washed off; the water was like liquid lapis lazuli, or showed as if it were painted with a piece of sky fallen from the heat of the sun’s rays in the day of doom, or had dropped from the moon’s orb, or were a mass of melted pearl, or as if in its great purity it was frozen into ice, and could only be distinguished from it by touch. After drinking it, the Çabara in turn devoured the lotus-fibres, as Rāhu does the moon’s digits; when he was rested he rose, and, followed by all his host, who had satisfied their thirst, he went slowly to his desired goal. But one old Çabara from that barbarous troop had got no deer’s flesh, and, with a demoniac136 expression coming into his face in his desire for meat, he lingered a short time by that tree. (68) As soon as the Çabara leader had vanished, that old Çabara, with eyes pink as drops of blood and terrible with their overhanging tawny brows, drank in, as it were, our lives; he seemed to reckon up the number in the parrots’ nests like a falcon eager to taste bird’s flesh, and looked up the tree from its foot, wishing to climb it. The parrots seemed to have drawn their last breath at that very moment in their terror at the sight of him. For what is hard for the pitiless? So he climbed the tree easily and without effort, as if by ladders, though it was as high as many palms, and the tops of its boughs swept the clouds, and plucked the young parrots from among its boughs one by one, as if they were its fruit, for some were not yet strong for flight; some were only a few days old, and were pink with the down of their birth, so that they might almost be taken for cotton-flowers;137 some, with their wings just sprouting, were like fresh lotus-leaves; some were like the Asclepias fruit; some, with their beaks growing red, had the grace of lotus-buds with their heads rising pink from slowly unfolding leaves; while some, under the guise of the ceaseless motion of their heads, seemed to try to forbid him, though they could not stop him, for
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Or, curls.
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Or, with clouds.
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She-rhinoceros.
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Or, rainbows.
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Or, Çikhaṇḍi, a son of Drupada, a friend of the Pāṇḍavas.
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Or, mirage.
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Or, eager for the Mānasa lake. The Vidyādhara was a good or evil genius attending the gods.
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Yojanagandhā, mother of Vyāsa.
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Or, ‘bearing the form of Bhīma.’ He was Bhīma’s son.
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(
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Hiraṇyakaçipu.
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Or, an ambitious man surrounded by bards (to sing his praises).
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Or, loving blood.
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(
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Or, great wealth.
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Black.
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Or, Durgā.
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Or, mountain.
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Owls are supposed to be descendants of the sage Viçvāmitra.
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As omens.
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Lit., ‘creating a doubt of.’