Plot
A king by the name of Caccantan loses himself in sexual enjoyment with his queen and inadvertently gives control of his kingdom to his corrupt minister Kattiyankaran. Kattiyankaran attacks Caccantan, and before the king dies he sends his now pregnant wife away on a flying peacock machine. Exiled in a cremation ground, she gives birth to Civakan, the titular character. Civakan grows up in a merchant's home and becomes the epitome of a Jain hero. He precedes through a number of adventures, marrying numerous women over the course of these events and all the while carrying on an affair with a dancing girl. Eventually, Civakan returns to take vengeance on Kattiyankaran, winning back the throne. He then marries his eighth and final wife, a personification of omniscience. Soon after he becomes weary of worldly life and, after meeting with Mahavira, he renounces the world. The book concludes that all the worldly pleasures Jivaka enjoyed was nothing but illusions distracting him from the path of spiritual salvation.
Read more about this topic: Civaka Cintamani
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
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“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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