6. The sage said:—This very question, O my good fellow, had also arisen at first under my scrutiny; how these shadows of things beyond us, rise like the bodies of clouds in our sleeping hours in the sphere of our minds.
7. I then applied to my meditation, and practiced the closeness of my attention for my introspection into this matter; and steadily sat in my padmásana posture of folded legs, and intensely intent upon investigation of this incident.
8. Sitting in this manner, I stretched my thought all about and afar; and then retracted them, into the recess of my mind; as the rising sun stretches out his beams in the morning, and afterwards draws them back into its disc in the evening.
9. I sent forth my breathings in quest of knowledge, and then called to myself; and thus continued in exhaling and inhaling my breaths, as flowers let out and contract their fragrance by turns.
10. My breath being accompanied with my mind, was reposed in the air before me; and then it was with the air inhaled by the pupil sitting before me, and intromitted into his nostrils.
11. Thus my breath being mixed with his, was admitted into his heart; as a snake is drawn in by the breath of a bear, sitting with his wide open mouth at the entrance of his hole.
12. Thus I entered into his heart, by means of my vehicle of my breath; and was put into difficulty of being confined therein, by my folly of following my breath in its passage into his breast.
13. I passed there amidst the arteries and aorta, and was led through all the conduits and blood-vessels into all the nerves and veins, both large and small and inside and outside the body.
14. I was at last confined in the cage of the ribs on both sides of the body, and had the fleshy masses of the liver and spleen presented before me. This was the painful habitation of my living soul, and these were as potfuls of meat set before it.
15. My intestines kept coiling within me with a hissing sound, and were surrounded by a flood of red hot blood continually flowing and boiling, like the waves of the ocean heated under the hot sunshine.