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Story 160: Silly Prince Consort

Silly Prince Consort

Author: Anonymous

A wise man can understand the proverbs with wisdom,
but a fool is not like that;
although the sun’s light shines all over the earth,
an owl cannot see any light at all.

In ancient times, there was a very smart king named Brahman. When he was debating with his teacher, Brahman Shengyou and other scholars, he admired his teacher’s profound knowledge and wanted to marry his daughter Jinsheng to him. But his daughter disagreed with this marriage and objected to him, saying, “My knowledge is better than his. If there is someone who is better at Buddhism than me, I will be willing to marry him!”

Brahman’s teacher Shengyou was very angry and thought, “You don’t like a scholar like me, I must teach you a lesson!” So he thought of looking for a fool in the city to fulfill his wish. In the end, he didn’t find a fool. He came to a remote place and saw a handsome but mentally confused shepherd boy climbing on the top of a tree. He threatened the shepherd boy to come down by chopping down the tree. Only then did he realize that he was really a fool, so he calmly led him to the princess and said, “I have such a learned master, respect him as the princess’s consort and the king’s offering!” Then he led the fool to a shady place, bathed him with milk, and taught him to learn the sutra “Om Suo Di”.

On the wedding day, he dressed the foolish shepherd boy like a pandit, led him to the grand banquet, and asked him to recite the sutra “Om Suo Di”. He also asked him to present a bouquet of flowers to the king’s head. Apart from this, he was not allowed to answer anyone else. When the host and the guest sat down, the shepherd boy presented flowers to the king’s head according to the set of training he had received in advance, but he did not expect that he remembered the sutra he had learned wrongly and said the ugly word “Om Sanjur” by mistake.

This made everyone in the audience angry and ready to scold him, but the master Shengyou defended him, saying, “What he said was ‘this person is good at'”. After his explanation, everyone’s emotions immediately calmed down.

The princess asked the shepherd boy dressed as a pandit, “Adiga Sazidawa Bisha?” which means “Do you have more profound and amazing words?” The shepherd boy did not answer. Shengyou hurriedly defended himself, saying, “My master is a great scholar. How can he answer the shallow questions asked by a woman?”

The princess believed him and took him to the palace. She asked him again, but he still did not answer. The princess took him to the temple and talked to him about some issues about the statues, but he did not glance at the Buddha statues. When he saw the livestock pen in the reincarnation picture on the wall behind the temple door, his old habit of herding cattle recurred. He pointed there and shouted, “The buffalo is coming, the buffalo is coming!”

The princess thought to herself, “Shengyou finally deceived us. However, if this young man is willing to learn, I can teach him the study of logic and the study of logic, so that he can become a more capable person than Shengyou.”

Later, the princess asked him to cultivate his mind, but he did not gain any wisdom. She asked him to practice with the Goddess of Wonderful Sound, but he did not succeed. The princess was very disgusted with him and said, “Let’s just leave these issues alone!”

So she told her maidservant’s daughter named Namu, “Go to the Wonderful Sound Temple where he practiced before, hide behind the clay statue of the Goddess of Wonderful Sound, and at dawn, ask him if he needs any magic. If he stretches out his hand and says he needs magic, put this rice ball that I spit out of my mouth into his mouth!”

The girl went to the Wonderful Sound Temple as she was told.

At that time, the foolish prince consort who was practicing Buddhism thought that the rice balls were really fed to him by Saraswati Goddess. As soon as he swallowed them, his mind suddenly became clear and he became a great scholar.

When he returned to the palace, the princess asked him again: “Do you have any profound and amazing language?” He said: “Now I can write three small phonological works, “The Source of Girls”. At that time, people changed his name to Pandita Ramakrishnan.

A person’s intelligence can only be improved gradually through learning and practical training. It is certainly not enough to rely solely on closed-door practice. If the stupid and foolish prince consort really became a great scholar, it can only be said that he was influenced by the wisdom of the princess during his long-term contact with her.