39. Avarice like (Pandora’s) box is filled with miseries, decrepitude and death, and is full of disorder and disasters like a mad bacchanal.
40. Our wishes are sometimes as pure as light and at others as foul as darkness; now they are as clear as the milky way, and again as obscure as thickest mists.
41. All our bodily troubles are avoided by our abstaining from avarice, as we are freed from fear of night goblins at the dispersion of darkness.
42. So long do men remain in their state of (dead like) dumbness and mental delirium, as they are subject to the poisonous cholic of avarice.
43. Men may get rid of their misery by their being freed from anxieties. It is the abandonment of cares which is said to be the best remedy of avarice.
44. As the fishes in a pond fondly grasp the bait in expectation of a sop, so do the avaricious lay hold on any thing, be it wood or stone or even a straw.
45. Avarice like an acute pain excites even the gravest of men to motion, just as the rays of the sun raise the lotus blossoms (above the water).
46. It is compared with the bamboo in its length, hollowness, hard knots, and thorny prickles, and yet it is entertained in expectation of its yielding the manna and a pearly substance.
47. Yet it is a wonder that high-minded men, have been able to cut off this almost unseverable knot of avarice, by the glittering sword of reason:
48. As neither the edge of the sword, nor the fire of lightening, nor the sparks of the red-hot iron, are sharp enough to sever the keen avarice seated in our hearts.