Note 8 — Chapter III

“There lived formerly in Benares a king named Brahmadatta. He saw a pair of swans flying in the air at night. They shone with the lustre of gleaming gold, and were begirt with hundreds of white swans, and so looked like a sudden flash of lightning, surrounded by white clouds. And his desire to behold them again kept increasing so mightily that he took no pleasure in the delights of royalty. And then having taken counsel with his ministers he caused a fair tank to be made according to a design of his own, and gave to all living creatures security from injury. In a short time he perceived that those two swans had settled in that lake, and when they had become tame he asked them the reason of their golden plumage. And then those swans addressed the king with an articulate voice. ‘In a former birth, O king, we were born as crows; and when we were fighting for the remains of the daily offering8 in a holy empty temple of Śiva, we fell down and died within a sacred vessel belonging to that sanctuary, and consequently we have been born as golden swans with a remembrance of our former birth’;—having heard this the king gazed on them to his heart’s content, and derived great pleasure from watching them.