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Aṇḍabhūta Jātaka (No. 62)

On the innate wickedness of woman. A girl is bred from infancy among women only, never seeing any man but her husband, the king’s chaplain. The latter had embarked on the enterprise of so bringing up the girl, in order to defeat the king at dice, because the king was in the habit of winning by a declaration of truth to the effect that all women were treacherous; the chaplain wanted to find an exception in order to falsify the declaration. For a time the experiment succeeds, but later, as a result of the king’s scheming, the girl starts an intrigue with a flower-seller as a lover and is discovered (J.i.289 ff). The Jātaka is so called because the woman in the story was guarded from the time she lay in her mother’s womb as a foetus (aṇḍabhūta).

The story was related concerning a monk who was worried by his passions.