6. My mind was employed in the discrimination of the nature of things which led me gradually to discard all thoughts of sensual enjoyments.
7. What are these worldly pleasures good for, (thought I), and what means the multiplication (of our species) on earth? Men are born to die, and they die to be born again.
8. There is no stability in the tendencies of beings whether movable or immovable. They all tend to vice, decay and danger; and all our possessions are the grounds of our penury.
9. All objects (of sense) are detached from each other as iron rods or needles from one another; it is imagination alone which attaches them to our minds.
10. It is the mind that pictures the existence of the world as a reality, but the deceptiveness of the mind (being known) we are safe from such deception.
11. If the world is an unreality, it is <a> pity that ignorant men should be allured by it, like the deer tempted by a distant mirage (appearing) as water.
12. We are sold by none (to any one) and yet we remain as if enslaved to the world; and knowing this well, we are spellbound to riches, as it were by the magic wand of Sambara.
13. What are the enjoyments in this quintessence (of the world) but misery; and yet we are foolishly caught in its thoughts, as if clogged in honey (like bees).
14. Ah! I perceive after long that we have insensibly fallen into errors, like senseless stags falling into caverns in the wilderness.
15. Of what use is royalty and these enjoyments to me? What am I and whence are all these things? They are but vanities, and let them continue as such without any good or loss to any body.