69. Living beings are hourly seen to be moving about, and led away by their insatiate desires from place to place; as restless infants are rocked and carried by their cunning nurses.
70. Bound by the rope of desire, to the decayed trees of their infirm bodies, men are seen to drag their lives of labour, in search of their livings in this valley of misery.
71. Men though grown old and decrepit and loaded with misery, and though they are shattered in their bodies at the last stage of their life; are still dragged about by the inborn desires of their hearts, to be cast into hell pits (both while alive and after their death).
72. Válmíki said:—As the sage had said thus far, the sun sank down and bade the day to observe its evening rites. The assembly broke with mutual salutations, and all of them proceeded to their evening ablutions, until they met again after dispersion of the gloom of night, by the rising rays of the orient sun.
CHAPTER LXXII.
A Lecture on the Nature of Liberation.
Argument. The subjection of the material body to sorrow and misery.
Vasishtha continued:—You are not born with the birth of your body, nor are you dead with its death. You are the immaculate spirit in your soul, and your body is nobody to you.
2. The analogy of the plum on a plate, and of vacuum in the pot, which is adduced to prove the loss of the one upon loss of the other, is a false paralogy; since neither the plum nor the vacuum is lost, by the breaking of the plate or pot. (So the soul is not lost at the dissolution of its containing body).
3. Whoever having a body, thinks that he will perish with his perishable frame, and is sorry for it; is verily blinded in his mind, and is to be pitied for his mental blindness. (So said the Grecian philosopher, “it is no wonder that the mortal should die, and the fragile would be broken”).
4. As there is no sympathy between the reins of a horse, and the riding chariot; so there is no relation between the organs of the body and the intellect. (This is in refutation of the argument, that the motion of a part affects the whole, as the shaking of the leaves and branches of a tree shaketh the trunk also; whereas the motion of body, makes no effect on the intellect).