In plain words
Very few indeed are the cittas in which whatever is said goes straight in and takes root. Having travelled so far, having let so much time go to waste, if we sit in the gathering and cannot recognise what matters came up there and what matters were said, we turn into people who have wasted our time, our body and our money. A Paurāṇika went on telling a Purāṇa for seven days, under the name of a saptāha. But at that saptāha gathering a woman whose husband had lately died, thinking, ‘By passing the time with this Purāṇa my grief may ease a little’, would come before everyone else and sit in the front row. But while this paṇḍit sat on a seat reading a Rāmāyaṇa, all the time he read, that woman kept shedding tears. For seven days, never missing the time, she stayed there from the beginning until the end, without getting up. This paṇḍit thought to himself in many ways that she had great Bhakti, that she was becoming absorbed in this Bhakti; and after the pūrṇāhuti on the day the saptāha closed, he began a speech and ended his talk saying, ‘The person who came to my saptāha on time all these seven days is a great devotee; she has listened to this Purāṇa absorbed in it, so first of all I am giving her tīrtha.’ Raising her from among all those people and giving her tīrtha, this paṇḍit — ‘Mother! Is my Purāṇa good! With what an eager heart you have been listening! You alone listened with your whole heart. Is my Purāṇa good?’ So he asked, and when he came to give her the tīrtha, she spoke: ‘Sir! Whether it was a Purāṇa you told or the Rāmāyaṇa you told, I don't know a single thing,’ she said. “But every day you listened with tears streaming from your eyes and a one-pointed citta, didn't you?” When he said this: ‘That isn't it, sir. You tied your book with a black thread. That black thread reminded me of my husband's waist-cord, and I wept,’ she said. So the people who join a gathering and, thinking of other things like this, with merely one kind of feeling, take in nothing at all of what is going on, are the very great majority in the world.