A thief once entered a palace at night and found the king and the queen conversing in their bedroom. The queen was telling the king that their daughter had attained marriageable age and the king should seek a proper young man to whom she could be married. After some discussion, they decided that as the princess had a religious bent of mind she should be given in marriage to a holy man.
The palace was situated near the Ganges, on the banks of which a large number of holy men used to live practising penances and austerities. The next day, the king asked the Dewan to go there and see if any one could be found who was suitable and willing to marry the princess.
The thief, who had overheard the conversation between the king and the queen on the previous night, decided to put on the garb of a holy man and sit on the bank of the Ganges next day, and he acted accordingly.
The Dewan went from one holy man to another but all of them refused to marry the princess and enter into worldly life. When, however, he came to the thief in the holy man’s garb and told him that if he married the princess he would get half the kingdom as her dowry and he would inherit the other half on the death of the king, the thief remained silent. Suddenly a thought flashed across his mind that if he could get half the kingdom with the princess by merely disguising himself as a holy man, what better and more valuable things he would not get by really becoming a Sadhu (man of religion). The man became completely changed all of a sudden and he decided to take to the religious aspirant’s life.