37. People are still deluded in their minds in wishing to attain the state of their superiors; but they fall down still lower like beasts (goats) from the top of a hill, in wishing to lay hold on the fruits of a verdant creeper out of their reach.
38. Young men spending their wealth in personal gratifications, are as useless as plants growing in the bowels of a deep and inaccessible cavern, which spread their fruits and flowers, leaves and branches and their shades to the use of nobody.
39. Men are found to resemble the black antelopes (in their wanderings): some of them roving about the sweet, soft and beautiful sceneries of the country, and others roaming in sterile tracts and parts of boundless forests. (i.e. Some living in the society of men, and others as recluses from it).
40. The daily and diversified acts of nature are all pernicious in their nature; they appear pleasant and ravishing to the heart for a time, but are attainded with pain in the end, and fill the mind of the wise with dismay.
41. Man is addicted to greediness, and is prone to a variety of wicked shifts and plots; a good man is not now to be seen even in a dream, and there is no act which is free from difficulty. I know not how to pass this state of human life.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Mutability of the world.
Ráma said:—
Whatever we see of all moveable or immovable things in this world, they are all as evanescent as things viewed in a dream.
2. The hollow desert that appears as the dried bed of a sea to-day, will be found to-morrow to be a running flood by the accumulation of rain-water in it.
3. What is to-day a mountain reaching the sky and with extensive forests on it, is in course of time levelled to the ground, and is afterwards dug into pit.