The Birth of Bhamandala and Sita to King Janaka

Gautama told King Shrenika that when Janaka's queen Videha conceived, a certain god longed to carry off her child at birth, and Shrenika asked why. The cause lay in a past life: in Chakrapura, Chittotsava, daughter of King Chakradhvaja and Queen Manasvini, studied at the same school as Pingala, son of the royal priest Dhumrakesha and his wife Svaha, and because their hearts became attached to each other, neither gained any learning.

Pingala carried Chittotsava off to the distant city of Vidagdhapura, where he lived in a doorless hut outside the town and barely kept them both alive by gathering and selling wood and grass. Kundalamandita, the king there, son of King Prakashasimha and Queen Pravaravali, was smitten by Chittotsava, wounded by all five arrows of Kama (the god of desire), and had a female go-between bring her to his palace by night, where he lived with her in pleasure.

Returning with his load of wood to find her gone, Pingala wept and appealed to the king, who deceitfully had his minister order a search, while a servant, winking, lied that he had seen her on the road to Podanapura with someone, ready to take up austerities among the aryikas (Jain nuns). Pingala searched the temples and gardens of Podanapura in vain, and when he came back to Vidagdhapura the king's cruel men beat him with sticks, staves and stones and drove him away.

Wandering in grief, he met the great Acharya Aryagupti in a forest outside a city, heard the dharma, took refuge in the Jina's teaching and received digambara diksha (initiation as a sky-clad monk). Dwelling by rivers, mountains, cremation grounds and forests, he endured the rains, the winter winds and the summer sun unshaken, until the waters of the Jina's words cooled the fire of separation and austerity left his body like a half-burnt tree.

Meanwhile Kundalamandita, secure in his fortress, plundered many districts of King Anaranya of Ayodhya, Dasharatha's father, and killed many of his vassals, until Anaranya could not rest for worry. His general Balachandra marched with the fourfold army, captured Kundalamandita as easily as one binds a deer while he lay sunk in pleasure with Chittotsava, brought him bound to Anaranya, placed his kingdom under Anaranya's rule and was richly rewarded.

Stripped of elephants, horses, chariots and soldiers and left with nothing but his body, Kundalamandita wandered on foot full of remorse, came to a hermitage of monks and asked the Acharya how one who cannot become a monk, bound by the four cravings for food, fear, sex and possessions, can practise dharma as a householder. The guru taught that dharma is compassion, that confessing one's faults to the guru frees one from sin, and that meat must be given up, for every creature has been one's kin in some past life, so meat-eaters devour their own family, and neither daily bathing, a shaven head, gifts, worship nor fasting can save them from hell.

He explained that passion-ridden hermits who practise the five-fire austerity are born among the lowly Bhavanavasi and Vyantara gods, who dwell in the Khara and Panka portions of Ratnaprabha, the first earth; its Abbahula portion holds the first hell, six more lie below, the seven spanning six rajus (cosmic units), and below the seventh lies a raju holding only nigoda beings (the subtlest life-forms), which fill all three worlds. In hell the cruel inmates know not a moment's rest: they are thrown into the stinking brine of the Vaitarani river, slashed by the sword-edged leaves of Shalmali trees, tormented through the Asurakumara gods and made to drink molten copper with their mouths pried open by tongs, so liquor, meat and honey must be shunned.

Asked about the righteous, the monk said that those of right faith who firmly keep the householder's vows are fit for heaven and liberation, that even those who merely give up liquor, meat and honey escape bad births, that through non-violence even mlecchas (barbarians) and chandalas win birth as gods or humans, and that a right believer keeping the anuvratas (minor vows) becomes a great Indra and then, born human again, becomes a monk and attains moksha. Unable to take the anuvratas, Kundalamandita nevertheless renounced liquor, meat and honey, gained samyagdarshana (right faith) and set out southward, hoping his valiant maternal uncle would help him win back his throne.

On the road, racked by disease, he lost his right faith and died in mithyatva (wrong belief), and at that moment entered the womb of Queen Videha, wife of King Janaka; at the same time the soul of Vedavati, which had once been Chittotsava, also died and entered the same womb, to become Sita by the power of her austerities. Pingala, who had died as a monk and become a Bhavanavasi god, learned this through avadhi jnana (clairvoyance) and, holding the dependent Chittotsava blameless but Kundalamandita his mortal enemy, resolved to strike him once he was born rather than harm the innocent queen.

In due time Videha bore twins, a son and a daughter, and the god carried off the boy, meaning at first to dash him on a rock; then he recoiled, reflecting that no sin equals killing a child and that he had won his divine state as a monk who harmed no living being. Moved by compassion, he dressed the baby in ornaments and shining earrings and, by the power of the Parnalaghvi vidya (a magical science that lets one float down light as a leaf), set him down from the sky in a safe place and returned to his own abode.

That night the Vidyadhara Chandragati saw the glowing child falling from the sky, at first taking it for a falling star or lightning, caught him with joy and laid him between the thighs of his sleeping, childless queen Pushpavati, crying, ‘Wake up, queen, you have borne a son!’; when she asked where earrings unknown on earth had come from, he told her the truth, said the boy's marks showed noble birth and that even a son of one's own womb may turn enemy, and had her announce from the lying-in chamber that she had had a hidden pregnancy. At dawn Rathanupura held a splendid birth festival, and because the boy was wreathed in the rays of his jewelled earrings his parents named him Prabhamandala (‘halo of light’), later called Bhamandala, and gave him to a nurse, and he became the darling of the whole inner palace.

In Mithila, Videha wailed for her stolen son, reflecting that she must once have parted some child from its mother; Janaka assured her the boy was alive, only stolen, and wrote to his dear friend King Dasharatha, and the two kings searched the whole earth in vain before burying their grief.

Meanwhile Janaki (Sita) grew up delighting the family and easing their grief for Prabhamandala; called Sita because she was forbearing like the earth, she had lotus eyes, a sweet voice, a face that outshone the moon and hair dark as sapphire, and she played amid seven hundred maidens, lovelier than Shachi, Indra's queen, or Subhadra, a chakravarti's chief queen. Seeing her beauty, virtue and modesty, Janaka resolved that, as Rati is fit only for Kamadeva, she was fit only for Rama, the eldest son of King Dasharatha.