Part 15: Fight with Asitākṣa

The Yakṣa Asitākṣa, an enemy of your friend from a former birth, came there like a new Kṛtānta to slaughter him. ‘O villain, stop! You have been watched by ṃe for a long time, like an elephant by a hungry lion. How far will you go?’ Abusing him in this bragging way, he uprooted a tree and threw it—he, a low fellow—at Āryaputra, as easily as a stick. Your friend knocked away the falling tree with his hand and made it fall, like an elephant making fall the bellows of an elephant-driver. Then the Yakṣa made the earth dark with thick dust, as if the end of the world had suddenly taken place. He created Piśācas by magic with bodies gray as smoke, twin-brothers of darkness, with terrifying forms. They, with faces horrible with jets of flame like living funeral pyres, uttering bursts of laughter like the noise of a falling thunderbolt, with red hair and red eyes like mountains with fires, with pendent tongues like trees with snakes in their cavities, with sharp mouths with large fangs like saws, they ran to Āryaputra, like flies to honey.

When Āryaputra saw them wandering about, distorted in shape like actors from a stage, he was not in the least terrified. He bound the bold Āryaputra, who was unterrified by the Piśācas, with magic nooses resembling nooses of untimely Yama. Āryaputra tore them all apart easily with a blow of his hand, like an active elephant a bower of vines. The Yakṣa, disconcerted, then struck him with blows of his hand, like a lion a mountain-plateau with blows of his tail. Āryaputra struck him with his fist, the essence of the thunderbolt, like an angry elephant-driver striking an elephant with an iron ball. The Yakṣa struck Āryaputra with a very heavy hammer bound with iron, like a cloud striking a mountain with lightning. Āryaputra struck the Yakṣa, who was increasing (in size), with a sandal tree which he had pulled up and the Yakṣa fell to the ground, completely exhausted, like a dry tree.

The Yakṣa lifted a mountain as easily as a large rock and, angry, threw it on top of Āryaputra. He became unconscious at once from the blow with the mountain, his lotus-eyes closed as if in a pool in the evening. When he had become conscious again, Āryaputra scattered the mountain, like a great wind scattering a cloud, and began to fight vigorously with his arms. Your friend hit him (the Yakṣa) with the staff of his arm, like Yama with a rod, and broke him into little pieces. But he did not die, because he was a god. Then Asitākṣa fled with speed like the wind, howling disagreeably like a pig about to die. Goddesses and Vidyādhara-women, who had been watching the spectacle of the fight, rained flowers on your friend, like Śrīs of the seasons themselves.