In plain words
We must not ruin our lives over fame and ill fame. For our own joy, to keep our home standing, to keep our home clean, we must not give in to pride at all, not in the least, when we tie up our waists and get down to work. We must be ready to show forth, to spread or to teach our own nature, rich in good qualities.
Honour and dishonour are words without meaning. A little story. In a village there lived two men. One of them, wherever he travelled, would set out mounted on a horse. The other, whatever village he set out for, would go keeping a pillow with him. One day the two of them had to go to the same village. Then the one who set out with the pillow went on foot. Behind him the other man set out on horseback for the same village. Midway along the road came a hamlet. The people of that hamlet, so the story goes, reasoned that since the pillow in the hand of this man carrying it looked like a record bag, he was the peon, and the one riding the horse was the tahsildar: so, the story goes, they thought. In the old days there were no cars, buses or motorcycles, so collectors and tahsildars travelled only on horseback. That is why the people of that village thought this way. Next, after they reached the village they had to reach, the man who had gone with the pillow set his pillow against a pillar in a rest house and sat there in grand style. The one who had gone on the horse came along searching, wondering where to tie the horse. The villagers thought, ‘The one searching for a place to tie this horse is the peon; the one sitting against his pillow may well be the tahsildar.’ Such are the world's honour and dishonour. The one they had taken for a peon, they took for the tahsildar. The one they had taken in one village for the tahsildar officer, in another village they took for a peon. These are merely honours conjured up by what meets the eye; this man lost no honour by that, and this man gained no honour by this talk. An emperor may dream in sleep that he has become a beggar.