41. All mankind are deluded to entrap themselves in the snare of avarice, and to be afflicted with all evils in life, as the deer entangled in the thickets of a jungle.
42. The term of human life in this world, is decreased in each generation in proportion to (the increase of their wicked acts). The desire of fruition is as vain as the expectation of reaping fruits from a creeper growing in the sky: yet I know not why men of reason would not understand this truth.
43. This is a day of festivity, a season of joy and a time of procession. Here are our friends, here the pleasures and here the variety of our entertainments. Thus do men of vacant minds amuse themselves with weaving the web of their desires, until they become extinct.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Vanity of the world.
Ráma said:—O sage! this seemingly pleasing but actually unpleasant world, has nothing in it that is productive of such a thing as can afford tranquility to the soul.
2. After the playful boyhood is over, the mind wastes itself in the society of women like the deer fallen in a cavern, then the body bends down under old age, and the man has only to grieve (for his folly).
3. As the body is stricken with the frost of old age, its beauty flies afar from it like the bloom of the fading lotus, and then the fountain of man’s worldliness is at once dried up.
4. As the body gets towards its decline, so much doth death rejoice in it. The body grows lean with grey hairs upon the head, just as a creeper fades away with the flowers upon it.
5. All living creatures are borne away by the stream of avarice, which upsets the tree of contentment growing on the bank and flows on for ever in this world.
6. Human body is like a vessel covered with skin; and glides over the ocean of the world (without its helmsman of reason). It is tossed about by sensual pleasures, and goes down under the water by the pressure of its whale-like passions.