Isidāsī was utterly miserable and considered committing suicide rather than having to go on bearing such suffering. Now it so happened that on that same day a Buddhist nun named Jinadattā came to her father’s house on her alms round. Seeing the nun’s peaceful countenance, Isidāsī thought that she should become a nun herself. She made her wish known, but her father, reluctant to lose his only daughter, pleaded with her to stay at home. Here, he said, she could perform meritorious deeds that would lead to her future welfare. But Isidāsī wept and begged her father to let her go forth. By this time she had realized that her incomprehensible fate must be due to some deeper cause, some evil kamma created in a former life. Finally her father relented:

Then my father said to me,

“Attain enlightenment and the supreme state,

Gain Nibbāna which the best of men

Has himself already realized.”

(Thī 432)

Thus Isidāsī took leave of her parents and her circle of relatives. She followed the elder nun to the monastery and went forth into the homeless life.

After her ordination she spent seven days in utmost exertion, and by the end of the week she had realized the three higher knowledges— the recollection of past lives, the knowledge of the passing away and rebirth of beings, and the knowledge of the destruction of defilements. Through her ability to remember previous lives Isidāsī found the underlying causes behind her marital failures in this life, and much else that lay hidden in the dim recesses of saṃsāra.

Looking past into the past Isidāsī saw that eight lives ago she had been a man—a goldsmith, handsome and rich, full of the intoxication of youth. Dazzled by physical beauty, this dashing goldsmith had seduced the wives of others, with no regard for decency and morality. He loved to conquer other men’s wives, one after another, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. He played with love and felt no compunction over the damage he could cause. All he wanted was the thrill of conquest, the titillation of lust, but never any responsibilities, any commitment, any obligation to love. He wanted to take his pleasure, again and again, and he wanted change. He broke his victims’ hearts, and did not care in the slightest what happened to them. Whether he broke hearts or marriages was for him a matter of indifference. And so he danced for a while, as it were, on the top of a volcano—until his time was up.

Then he fell into the dark abyss that he had dug out for himself by his own reckless conduct. He was reborn in hell, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, and there he experienced a thousand times over the suffering that he had inflicted upon others. He had been infinitely ruthless in deed and in intention, so in hell he was subjected to infinitely ruthless punishment, without pity and without mercy, just as he himself had been pitiless and cruel on earth. The special punishment for adulterers and lechers in hell, they say, is an excursion without respite through a forest where every leaf is a sword. They see a beautiful woman in the distance, run after her, and are cut on all sides by the razor-sharp sword edges. And the woman, like Fortune on her sphere, runs ahead and beckons but can never be reached. Yet the lecher, impelled by obsessive desire, cannot help himself. Time and again he throws himself into the forest and is cut to shreds by the sharp leaves. “And I suffered torment for a long time,” says Isidāsī the nun (Thī 436). She clearly remembered her human existence as the goldsmith and knew full well why he had to undergo such bitter atonement.

After completion of this hellish punishment, he moved on in saṃsāra. In his next life he had forgotten everything and was reborn in the womb of a monkey. As he had worked through the worst consequences of his misdeeds, he was beginning to rise slowly from the depths. After having done penance for the hate that was in him when he coarsely rejected the women he had seduced and despised their deceived husbands, he still retained the drives of a purely animal craving, and through the influence of these tendencies he assumed the form of an animal. This is a literal manifestation of the saying of Dionysius the Areopagite: “The nature of desire is such, that it turns a man into the thing he desires.” That man—who had indulged his lustfulness without scruples or inhibitions—now became a being not subject to the rule of reason, an animal, and precisely the animal that is nearest to man: a monkey. Only seven days after his birth, however, the leader of the monkey tribe bit off the newborn’s sexual organs, to prevent future rivalry:

A great monkey, leader of the troop,

Castrated me when I was seven days old.

This was the fruit of that kamma

Because I had seduced others’ wives.

(Thī 437)

After dying as a monkey, he was reborn as a sheep, the offspring of a lame one-eyed ewe. Further, he was made a gelding, unable to satisfy the sexual urge. He lived in misery thus for twelve years, suffering from intestinal worms and constantly obliged to transport children. His third animal existence was as an ox, castrated, and forced to pull the plough and cart throughout the year, with hardly any rest (Thī 440–41). Hard work was precisely what the licentious goldsmith had always avoided, and now hard work was precisely what he could not escape. He had many duties to perform and very little pleasure, not only because he was castrated, but also because he had to pull heavy loads all day long and, at one point, also lost his eyesight.

In the next life, he who had been successively goldsmith, hell dweller, monkey, sheep, and ox, again arrived at human status—but as a hermaphrodite, a cross between male and female (Thī 442). Because in his earlier existence he had been so obsessed with sexual organs, both his own and those of women, now he found himself having both at the same time—which, of course, again precluded all satisfaction, making of him an outsider in society, especially since he was the son of a slave girl and had been born in the gutter. He eked out an unhappy existence for thirty years and then died.

In the next existence, the being who had gone from manhood to a life in hell, from hell to animal life, and from animal to hermaphrodite, was reborn as a woman. This completed the sex change. He had now become what was formerly the object of his desires: a woman. Indeed, desire turns a man into the things he desires. The newborn girl was the daughter of a man in the lowest social caste, an impecunious carter who failed in everything he undertook and ended up owing everybody money. As his creditors were constantly harassing him and he had nothing to give them, he offered to one of them, a wealthy merchant, his daughter as a slave. The merchant released him from his debts, gave him some money as a bonus, and took the girl. She wept and grieved, but all to no avail—she was taken from home into slavery.

When she was sixteen years old, and an attractive virgin, the son of the house fell in love with her and took her as his secondary wife. He was already happily married to an honourable, virtuous wife, who loved him above everything. She was naturally very distressed when her husband took another wife and felt rejected. The younger woman, however, did everything in her power to defend her newly won position and succeeded in sowing discord between husband and wife. Having known the misery of utter poverty and the burdens of a slave’s life, she was determined to defend her position as the wife of a rich man, and thus she did everything possible to displace her rival. This brought about much feuding and quarreling, until she finally managed to sever the tie between her husband and his first wife (Thī 443–46).