5. Thus you have heard me relate to you many things, relating to true knowledge; it now depends on your own understanding to do as you may like to choose for yourself. (Either to betake yourself to spiritual knowledge or the practice of pránáyáma or either as the gloss explains it, either to esoteric contemplation yoga or exoteric adoration upasana).
6. Ráma replied:—you sir, that are the luminous sun of spiritual light on earth, have dispelled the thick gloom of unspiritual knowledge from my mind at once (by transcendental light of your holy lectures).
7. I am fully awake to and joyous in my divine knowledge, and have entered into my state of spirituality; I have known the knowable, and am seated in my divine state like yourself.
8. O the wondrous memoir of Bhusunda that you have narrated! It fills me with admiration, and is fraught with the best instruction. (Lit. it is instructive of the highest wisdom).
9. In the account that you have given of Bhusunda, you have said that the body is the abode of the soul, and is composed of flesh and blood, and of the inner bones and outer skin (as its materials and plaster).
10. Please tell me sir, who made this fabric and how it came to be formed; how it is made to last, and who abides therein.
11. Vasishtha answered: Listen now Ráma, to what I will relate to you for the instruction of the supreme knowledge, as also for removal of the evils which have taken root instead of true knowledge.
12. This dwelling of the body, Ráma! which has the bones for its posts, and the blood and flesh for its mortar, and the nine holes for so many windows, is built by no one: (but is formed of itself).
13. It is a mere reflection, and reflects itself so to our vision; as the appearance of two moons in the sky by illusion, is both real as well as unreal. (This vedantic doctrine is opposed to the popular faith of the creatorship of God).
14. It may be right to speak of two moons from their double appearance to our sight, but in reality there is but one moon and the other its reflection. (So are all phenomenal bodies but reflections of the noumenal).