The Necklace Called Moonlight

The opening of the story

About a thousand years ago, in the city of Dhara, a poet named Dhanapala sat down to write a long story in Sanskrit prose for King Bhoja, a king who loved fine stories. Dhanapala had been born a Brahmin and had once argued against the Jains, until his younger brother Shobhana, a monk, won him over to the Jina's teaching. Now he wrote a romance full of palaces, sea voyages, flying chariots and lovers who cannot find each other. Under the silk and the jewels, though, he laid a quieter thread: a soul does not begin at birth, and what it loved and owed in one life follows it into the next. This is his story, told again.

In Ayodhya ruled King Meghavahana with his queen Madiravati. The kingdom was at peace, the treasury was full, and the king was just. But the palace had no son, and as the years went by the king felt the silence of the inner rooms more than any war. One day a sage of the Vidyadharas, the sky-going people of the northern mountains, came down to the palace. The king received him with honour and told him his sorrow. The sage taught him a sacred formula and told him to worship Shri, the goddess of fortune, with a steady heart.