The First King and the First Alms

The opening of the story

At the beginning of our age the world was so easy that nobody had ever needed to learn anything. Children were born in pairs, a boy and a girl together, and the pair grew up side by side and spent their lives together. Ten kinds of wish-fulfilling trees, the kalpavrikshas, gave them fruit, clothes, light and shelter. Nobody farmed, nobody cooked, nobody owned more than a neighbour, and so nobody needed a king. But time, the teachers say, is a wheel, and the wheel was turning. Year by year the trees gave a little less. Where there had been plenty, people began to say "mine", and where they said "mine", they began to quarrel.

Wise leaders called kulakaras guided them through the change, and the last of them was Nabhi. His wife Marudevi saw fourteen great dreams one night, the first of them a white bull, and the son she bore had the mark of a bull on his thigh. They named him Rishabh. He grew up calm and strong, with a mind so clear that it seemed to have been born already knowing. He married two girls. One was Sumangala, who had been born with him as his twin. The other was Sunanda, found wandering alone in the forest after her twin brother had been struck by a falling palm fruit and killed. People spoke of it in whispers, for it was the first death anyone could remember that had come before its time.