16. 'Raw human flesh, freshly cut off and still warm, and human blood, O lotus-eyed monarch, is the food and drink of Yakshas, O you who are strict in keeping your engagements.'
After which, they reassumed their own disfigured and frightful features, exhibiting their mouths rendered ferocious by large teeth, their eyes fierce and red, flaming and squinting, their flat noses, wide-opened and misshapen. Their hair and beard had the tawny colour of flames, and their complexion was as dark as clouds big with rain. Looking at them, the king knew them to be goblins[1], not men, and understood that for that reason they did not like the food and drink served by his orders.
17. And according to his compassionate nature and his pure-heartedness, the pity of the monarch towards them increased by this reflection.
Absorbed with commiseration and pitying those Yakshas, he entered surely upon this thought:
18, 19. 'For a merciful man such food and drink is not only hard to be found, but it were also to be searched for day after day. Oh, the immense grief it would cause him! A cruel man may be either able to get it for them, or not. If not able, his effort would have no other effect than that of mere destruction; if able, what can be more miserable than such a one constantly exercising that evil practice?
20. 'These Yakshas, on the other hand, who live on food of that kind, with hearts wicked and pitiless, are destroying their own happiness every day. When will their sufferings ever end?
'This being so, how is it possible for me to procure
- ↑ Lit. 'to be Pisâkas,' apparently a general term. The different classes of goblins, Yakshas, Râkshasas, Pisâkas, are often confounded; in stanza 27 the general appellation is Râkshasas. In Story IX, verse 66, yaksha and pisâka are used promiscuously in the sense of 'ogre.' In the sixth story of the Pâli Gâtaka (translated by Rhys Davids in his Birth Stories, p. 180) the water-sprite is sometimes called rakkhaso, sometimes yakkho.
