In plain words
Taking Medicine Is Only So That We Need Take No More Medicine
Birth and death, death for this birth and birth for this death: when we inquire whether that is all this means, or whether it has some inner meaning besides, and when every human being puts just these questions, one who is born dies, and one who dies is born. When the question is asked, ‘Why be born? Why die?’, dying is for the sake of being born, and being born is for the sake of dying. Every human being stands ready to give such an answer. But this answer is not right. If you ask anyone, ‘Sir! Why are you taking medicine?’, it is the most natural thing in the world for him to say it is to cure the illness. But that is not the right answer. “Taking medicine is so that from now on we need take no more medicine”: that alone is the right answer. If you are asked, ‘Why were you born?’, the right answer is to say, ‘I was born so that I need not be born again.’ Rather than wasting this wheel of time in births and deaths alone, saying that dying is for being born and being born is for dying, the duty of a human being is to recognise the real and fruitful form of Satya. Yet without a body at all, no work of any kind can be done in this world. The gross body is certainly needed in the world. Yet the duty of an ordinary human being is to take it as an instrument and, through it, to set it toward the goal that has to be reached.
This Human Birth Is the Fruit of Merit from Many Births
As much as this body is a cause of bondage, it is just as much a cause of Mokṣa too. “Manayeva manuṣyānāṃ kāraṇaṃ bandhamokṣayoḥ,” they say. No: the body, too, is a cause of bondage and Mokṣa. Without the body itself, the principle of the mind cannot be recognised. Prāṇa, the mind, Buddhi, citta: all these senses alike come to be manifest in this world only through the body. So, for setting such a sacred body on a fruitful path, dedicating our life to the search for Satya, and carrying out the karmas of duty for a life bound up with the karma of daily routine: jantūnāṃ narajanma durlabhaṃ.