15. Ráma said:—For want of such reminiscence, I think that, obedience to the dictates of the infallible Sástras, which have been promulgated by the sages, and based on the authority of the Vedas, is the surest way for the salvation of mankind.
16. And I reckon those men as holy and perfect, who are possest of the virtues of the great, and have magnanimity and equanimity of their souls, and have received the light of the unknowable Brahma in them. (Such men are exempt from the pain of transmigration).
17. I reckon two things as the two eyes of the ignorant, for their discernment of the path of salvation. The one is their good conduct, and the other their knowledge of the Sástras, which follows the former.
18. Because one who is righteous in his conduct only, without joining his righteousness with his knowledge also, is never taken into account; and is slighted by all to be plunged into insignificance and misery. (The unlearned virtuous, is as despicable as the learned vicious).
19. Again Sir;—it is the joint assent of men and the Veda, that acts and their actors come one after the other; and not as you said of their rising simultaneously from their divine origin. (That is to say; that the morals established by the wise, and the virtues inculcated by the holy scriptures, are the guides of good acts and their observers, which are not the spontaneous growth of our nature or intention).
20. It is the act which makes the actor, and the actor who does the work. Thus they follow one another on the analogy of the seed and the tree which produce one another. This mutuality of both is seen in the practice of men and ordinances of the Veda.
21. Acts are the causes of animal births, as the seed gives birth to the sprouts of plants; and again works proceed from living beings as the sprouts produce the seeds. (Thus both are causes and effects of one another by turns, and never grown together).
22. The desire that prompts a person to his particular pursuit in his prison house of this world, the same yields him the like fruits and no other. (Men get what they have in their hearts and nothing besides).
23. Such being the case, how was it sir, that you said of the production of animals from the seed of Brahma, without the causality of their prior acts, which you say to be simultaneous with the birth of animal beings.
24. On one hand you have set at naught the law of antecedence and sequence of birth and action to one another, by your position of their simultaneity.