32. The living emancipate may sometimes be associated by his relatives and estates, his acts and duties, his knowledge and wisdom, and all his exertions like other men’s, or he may forsake them all at once.
33. These beings are either reborn a hundred times in some age or never at all (as in the case of divine incarnations), and depending on the inscrutable will (Máyá) of God.
34. There souls undergo the like changes by repetition, as a bushel of grain, which is collected to be sown repeatedly, and to be reaped again and again (in the same or some other field).
35. As the sea heaves its incessant surges of different shapes, so are all beings born incessantly in various forms in the vast ocean of time.
36. The wise man who is liberated in his life time, lives with his internal belief (of God) in a state of tranquility, without any doubt in his mind, and quite content with the ambrosia of equanimity.
CHAPTER IV.
Praise of Acts and Exertions.
Vasishtha said:—
I know gentle Ráma that, liberation of the soul, whether in its embodied or disembodied state is both alike, as the sea-water and its waves are the same liquid substance.
2. The liberation whether of embodied or disembodied spirits, consists in their detachment from the objects of sense: hence the soul unattached to sensual gratification, is (said to be) liberated, having no idea of sensible objects.
3. And though we see before us the living liberated sage (Vyása) as an embodied person, yet we have no doubt of the detachment of his inward soul from the (mortal coil of his) body.