54. Now Ráma! reign over this unrivalled sovereignty, by the direction of your sovran Sire, and manage well everything under your own inspection. This kingdom is fraught with every blessing, and the rulers are all loyal to their king. Therefore you must neither leave out to do what is your duty, nor be elated with your happy lot of royalty.
CHAPTER VI.
LECTURE ON THE DISCHARGE OF DUTY.
Argument. Effect of Acts, Transmigration of souls and their Liberation in Life time.
Vasishtha continued:—In my opinion, a man is liberated who does his works from a sense of his duty, and without any desire of his own or sense of his own agency in it. (Here subjection to allotted duty, is said to be his freedom; but that to one’s own desire or free choice, is called to be his bondage and slavery).
2. Who so having obtained a human form, is engaged in acts out of his own choice and with a sense of his own agency, he is subjected to his ascension and descension to heaven and hell by turns (according to the merit or demerit of his acts, while there is no such thing in the doing of his duty).
3. Some persons who are inclined to unduteous (or illegal) acts, by neglecting the performance of their destined (or legal) duties, are doomed to descend to deeper hells, and to fall into greater fears and torments from their former states.
4. Some men who are fast bound to the chain of their desires, and have to feel the consequences of their acts, are made to descend to the state of vegetables from their brutal life, or to rise from it to animal life again.
5. Some who are blessed with the knowledge of the Spirit, from their investigation of abstruse philosophy, rise to the state of moniety (Kaivalya); by breaking through the fetters of desire. (Kaivalya is the supreme bliss of God in his solity, to which the divine sage aspires to be united. Or it is the complete unity with oneself irrespective of all connections).
6. There are some men, who after ascending gradually in the scale of their creation in former births, have obtained their liberation in the present life of rájas-sátwika or active goodness.
7. Such men being born again on earth, assume their bright qualities like the crescent moon, and are united with all prosperity, like the Kurchi plant which is covered with blossoms in its flowering time of the rainy season. (The good effects of former acts, follow a man in his next birth).