Sesavati — Sesavati's Mansion

Tipitaka >> Sutta Pitaka >> Khuddaka Nikaya >> Vimanavatthu>>Sesavati — Sesavati's Mansion

Translated from the Pali by John D. Ireland
[Vangisa:] I see this delightful and beautiful mansion, its surface of many a color, ablaze with crystal and roofed with silver and gold. A well-proportioned palace, possessing gateways, and strewn with golden sand.

As the thousand-rayed sun in the autumn shines in the sky in the ten directions, dispelling the dark, so does this your mansion glow, like a blazing smoke-crested fire in the darkness of the night.

It dazzles the eye like lightning, beautiful, suspended in space. Resounding with the music of lute, drum, and cymbals, this mansion of yours rivals Indra's city in glory.

White and red and blue lotuses, jasmine, and other flowers are there; blossoming sal trees and flowering Asokas(trees), and the air is filled with a variety of fragrances.

Sweet-scented trees, breadfruits, laden branches interlaced, with palm trees and hanging creepers in full bloom, glorious like jeweled nets; also a delightful lotus pool exists for you.

Whatever flowering plants there are that grow in water, and trees that are on land, those known in the human world and heavens, all exist in your abode.

Of what calming and self-restraint is this the result? By the fruit of what deed have you arisen here? How did this mansion come to be possessed by you? Tell it in full, O lady with thick eyelashes.

[Sesavati:] How it come to be possessed by me, this mansion with its flocks of herons, peacocks, and partridges; and frequented by heavenly water-fowl and royal geese; resounding with the cries of birds, of ducks and cuckoos;

containing divers varieties of creepers, flowers and trees; with trumpet-flower, rose-apple, and asoka trees — now how this mansion came to be possessed by me, I will tell you. Listen, venerable sir.

In the eastern region of the excellent country of Magadha there is a village called Nalaka, venerable sir. There I lived formerly as a daughter-in-law and they knew me there as Sesavati.

Scattering flower-blossoms joyfully I honored him skilled in deeds and worshipped by gods and men, the great Upatissa(*1) who has attained the immeasurable quenching.

Having worshipped him gone to the ultimate born, the eminent seer bearing his last body, on leaving my human shape I came to (the heaven of) the thirty (-three) and inhabit this place.

Notes:

1. The personal name of Sariputta, who is said to have come originally from Nalaka