21. Ráma asked:—How can living animals be born from other sources (as dirt &c.), if they are but the creatures of our dream as you said before? So please to tell me, whether they have really their birth; or be anything otherwise.
22. Vasishtha replied:—Know Ráma, all living beings from the great Brahmá to the animalcule and vegetable below, have two kinds of birth; the one is that they are all full of Brahma, and the other that they are the creatures of our errors.
23. The false but rooted knowledge of the previous existence of the world, and of all creatures besides, leads to the belief of the regeneration of beings from the reminiscence of the past; and this called the erroneous conceptions of births in the visible world.
24. The other is the viewing of the representation of Brahma, in all things appearing to exist in this non-existent and unreal world; and this called the pantheistic view of the world, and not as a production either by birth or creation of it.
25. Thus the gnat being produced by its delusive knowledge of the world, and its continuance in the same state of blunder; did not allow it to see the one Brahma in all, but led to different views and attempts, as you shall hear just now.
26. It passed half a day of its lifetime in whistling its faint voice, among the humming gnats in the bushes of reeds and long grass; and drank merrily their juice and dews, and sported and flew all about.
27. The next day it kept fluttering over a pool of mud and mire, in company with its female copartner.
28. Being then tired with its swinging, it rested on a blade of grass in some place, where it was trodden over by the foot of a deer, which killed him on the spot, as it was by the fall of a rock upon him.
29. Now as it died by looking <at> the face of a deer, it was reborn in the shape and with the senses of the same (from its reminiscence of them).
30. The deer grazing in the forest, was killed by arrow of an archer; and as he saw the countenance of the huntsman in his dying moment, he came to be born next in the same form.