Note 259 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

The word badhiras means here the crooked, the crippled one, and not the deaf (from the root badh or vadh, to wound, to cut); the more so that here the name of the blind man's companion is Mantharakas, a word which properly means the slow one. The curved line and the slow line correspond; and the curved one, who cannot stand upright, may be the hunchback just as well as the cripple, the crooked, the lame.—Cfr. The chapter on the Tortoise.