Hemalekha replies,
Listen to me, O Prince. It is not that I do not love you, only that I am trying to discover what the greatest joy in life is, which will never become distasteful. I am always searching for it, but have not attained it yet.
Hemachuda responds,
Women are indeed silly. For do not even the birds and beasts, nay the crawling insects know what is good and what is bad? Otherwise, how are they guided in the pursuit of good, and how do they escape from bad? That which is pleasing is clearly good and that which is not so, is bad.
Hemalekha asks,
- O King, subtle judge that you are, you have found happiness and misery to be the results of what is pleasing or otherwise.
- But the same object yields pleasure or pain according to circumstances. Where is then the finality in your statement?
- Take fire for example. Its results vary according to seasons, the places and its own size or intensity.
- It is agreeable in cold seasons and disagreeable in hot seasons. Pleasure and pain are, therefore, functions of seasons; similarly of latitudes and altitudes.
- Again, fire is good for people of certain constitutions only and not for others. Still again, pleasure and pain depend on circumstances.
- The same reasoning applies to cold, to riches, to sons, to wife, to kingdom and so on. See how your father, the Maharaja, is daily worried even though he is surrounded by wife, children and wealth. Why do not others grieve like this? What has happened to enjoyments in his case? He is certainly on the lookout for happiness; are not his resources all directed to that end?
- No one seems to possess everything that is sufficient for happiness. The question arises: cannot a man be happy, even with such limited means? I shall give you the answer.
..............
Excerpts from Chapter 4, Tripura Rahasya
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