Basket of Conduct 12

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1. The Conduct Leading to Buddhahood
2. The Chapter on an Elephant
3. The Perfection of Ethics (2nd)
4. The Dragon Bhūridatta’s Conduct
5. “Then again when I was
6. Bhūridatta, a dragon of great psychic power,
7. together with Virūpakkha the Great King
8. I went to a heavenly realm.
9. There I saw gods
10. wholly given over to pleasure.
11. For the sake of going to that heaven,
12. I undertook the observance of ethics.
13. After tending to me physical needs,
14. and eating enough to get by,
15. I resolved on the four factors,
16. and lay down atop a termite mound, thinking:
17. ‘My outer skin and inner, flesh,
18. sinews and bones:
19. whoever has use for these,
20. they are already given, please take them.’
21. While lying there the ingrate
22. Ālampāyana grabbed me.
23. He threw me in a basket
24. and made me perform in places all over.
25. Though thrown in a basket
26. and crushed by his hands,
27. I did not get upset with Ālampāyana,
28. for fear of breaking my ethics.
29. To give up my own life
30. was as light as a blade of grass.
31. To transgress my ethical principles
32. was like overturning the earth.
33. In a hundred successive lives
34. I would give up my own life.
35. I would not even violate my ethics
36. for the sake of the four continents.
37. For the sake of protecting ethics,
38. and fulfilling my perfection of ethics,
39. I did not let my mind change,
40. even when thrown in a basket.”