75. The goddess Candraorabha appears lo her former husband

In the text we read that the apparition of the queen as godess took place while king Rudrayana was lying alone on the upper terrace of his palace. The meeting happens quite otherwise on the monument in a closed pavilion and, to judge by the trees outside, on the ground-floor. The king sits on the right on a bench with a back, the usual vases underneath it; the godess stands in front of him on the left and by her gesture seems to be telling him how he may attain the same beatific condition. Candraprabha wears no halo but is splendidly dressed, though there is nothing to shew whether she appears as queen or godess, if the text did not enlighten us. Outside the building we see the royal attendants; three men on the right, the rest on the left. Among the latter, behind whom the royal insignia are fixed up, are some armed ones, as strewn by the swords above them; some are carrying vases. There is nothing to account for the figure of a yaksa sitting away on the left, he is unmistakable with his rough mass of curly hair and large round earrings. The text says nothing about him and if he had some special part in another version of the tale, he would surely not be pushed away into a corner. I believe the presence of this figure is due merely to the sculptor's fancy and has no more importance to the tale than the gatekeepers in yaksa-shape we found in the court-scenes of the Buddha-story. They are a proof of how misleading such figures on a relief are, when we have no text as guide; just such unusual persons as this yaksa may be seized upon as starting-point in the search for a corresponding text and probably with results as disastcrous as would here be the case, if we set out to discover the text of this tale with the yak$a as guide.