NON-ATMAN AND PREJUDICE.[14]
There once was an ignorant man;
So afraid of the sky was he
That piteously crying he wandered away.
Of its sudden collapse he was fearful.
But the sky has no boundary,
And to nobody ’t will be harmful.
It was due to his ignorance
That he trembled so fitfully.
With the Bhikshus and Brahmans
It is even so, who are prejudiced.
Learning that empty is the world,
Alarmed are they at heart;
And wrongly imagine that if empty were the nature of Âtman
Nothingness would be the end of all work.
NON-ACTION.
As the vacuity of sky,
Being so clear and free of cloud and fog,
Upon the earth below,
Betrays no signs a shower to give:
So the enlightened
Betray no learning, no intelligence:
And we, sentient beings,
Can trace no efforts in their deliverance of the Law.[15]
SELF-DELUSION.
There lived once a painter,
Who such a monstrous Yaksha painted
That he himself was terrified
And losing all his senses on the ground he fell:
’Tis even so with vulgar minds;
Infatuated, self-deluded by the senses,
Of their own error they are unaware,
And go from birth to birth without an end.
ALL IN ONE.