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IN SEARCH OF NEW LIGHT
§ 1. Halt at Brighu’s Ashram
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With the desire to pursue other ways, Gautama left Rajagraha to meet Arada Kalam.
On his way he beheld the hermitage of Brighu and entered it out of curiosity.
The Brahmin inmates of the Ashram who had gone outside for the sake of fuel, having just come back with their hands full of fuel, flowers, and kusa grass, pre-eminent as they were in penances, and proficient in wisdom, went just to see him, and went not to their cells.
Then he being duly honoured by those dwellers of the hermitage paid his homage to the Elders of the Ashram.
He, the wise one, longing for liberation, traversed that hermitage, filled with the holy company desirous of heaven,—gazing at their strange penances.
He, the gentle one, saw for the first time the different kinds of penances practised by the ascetics in that sacred grove.
Then the Brahmin Brighu, well-versed in the technique of penance, told Gautama all the various kinds of penances and the fruits thereof.
“Uncooked food, growing out of water, and roots and fruits,—this is the fare of the saints according to the sacred texts ; but the different alternatives of penance vary.
“Some live like the birds on gleaned corn, others graze on grass like the deer, others live on air like the snakes, as if turned into ant-hills.
“Others win their nourishment with great effort from stones, others eat corn ground with their own teeth ; some, having boiled for others, keep for themselves what may chance to be left.
“Others, with their tufts of matted hair continually wet with water, twice offer oblations to Agni with hymns ; others, plunging like fishes into the water, dwell there with their bodies scratched by tortoises.
“By such penances endured for a time,—by
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