Lives of Alcyone

FORTY-SEVENTH LIFE 253
Life XLVII
In the forty-sixth life of our list Alcyone had much mental
suffering, but yet he had remarkable advantages in his close
association with Mercury and Zarathushtra. In this forty-seventh life,
which we have now to consider, his advantages were to be greater
even than those; yet his birth was by no means a favourable one. It
took place in the year 2472 of the Kaliyuga (630 B.C.), the fourth
year of King Kshattranjas, near the town of Rajgriha.
It is true that his father Jagannadha was a Brahman and a rich
man, bur his character left much to be desired. He was a grasping
man, who had all kinds of ways of making money, some of which
came perilously near to the verge of dishonesty.
With some other Brahmans he owned a temple, and the
arrangement was that each of these joint owners took sole charge of
the temple in turn and managed it for a certain specified time, and
during that time all the offerings made by pilgrims and others came
to him, and were his private property. This curious system led to a
great deal of sharp practice on the part of these Brahmans; for
example Jagannadha had agents along the main tracks in all parts
of India, who were instructed to warn him far in advance when any
rich pilgrim, or any specially large party of pilgrims, was setting out.
When he received the news, he tried to arrange it so that such
pilgrims should arrive during his period in charge of the temple, and
he directed his agents to contrive some pretext for hurrying or
delaying them so that this might be managed. It was in this way that