18. The ignorant that are actuated by their desires and live upon their hopes, meet with their objects as the reward of their action; but the knowing and speculative theorist, having neither any desire in his mind nor action of his body, meets with no reward of either.
19. An action without its object goes to naught and for nothing, as the fruit bearing plants become fruitless and die away without being properly watered in their time. (There it is doubtful whether the comparison of watering refers to the desire or action. The gloss refers it to the action without which no desire is successful).
20. As the effect of a certain season on plants &c., is displaced by that of the succeeding one; so the fruit of an action, is frustrated by its want of its desire (of the object).
21. As it is the nature of kusa-grass never to fructify, though they bear the flowers in time; so my son, no action can produce any fruit without the desire of the main object (as its final cause). (Here Chúdálá addresses her husband as her son).
22. As the boy possest the idea of a ghost in his mind, sees the apparition of a devil before him; and as a sick man having hypochondria of his malady, is soon attacked by it (so everyone meets with what he has in his mind).
23. As the kusa-grass presents the fair flowers to view, without ever bearing their fruits; so does the speculative theorist meditate on the beauty of his theory, without producing its results by its practice.
24. Sikhidhwaja said:—But it is said that all human desire is vain, and its accompanying egoism is a fallacy; and that they are the creatures of our ignorance, like our error of a sea in the burning sands of a desert.
25. So it is to the gnostic theist, whose ignorance is altogether removed by his knowledge of all things as the Divine spirit; such a man of course has no desire rising in his mind, as there is no appearance of the sea in the sands before the eyes of the wise.
26. It is by forsaking his desires, that a person is freed from his bonds of his disease and death; and his internal soul arriving to the perfection of the Deity, is exempted from future birth.
27. But know the human mind to be fraught with desires, from which the learned few are only exempt; it is by their transcendental knowledge of the knowable one, that the Divinely wise alone are exempted from their regeneration in this mortal world.