In plain words
Man is free of Ajñāna. But we think Ajñāna is natural. To think so is itself a great Ajñāna. Ajñāna is not natural to you; it is unnatural. Were it not so, there would be no way at all to say ‘Jantunāṃ narajanma durlabhaṃ.’ From ancient times, for man's progress and for his rise to a higher state, they established the fourfold puruṣārthas, Dharma, artha, kāma and Mokṣa. These were for the protection of the land. They were for the path that leads humanness to divinity. First of all there stands Dharma. We must try to recognise Dharma. But the young people of today forget the head and the tail, Dharma and Mokṣa. They hold on to the trunk in the middle and suffer. The first is Dharma; the last is Mokṣa. Forgetting these two, we live holding on only to the middle part. We think artha and kāma alone are what matters. Unless this artha and kāma are filled with Dharma, they bring great dangers. When Dharma does not stay where it is but leaves its place, joins artha and turns that artha into dharmārtha; when these two, Dharma and artha, together enter where kāma is, and we enjoy a kāma filled with Dharma; when all three are filled with Dharma, Mokṣa takes us for its own. So we must fill artha with Dharma. We must fill our desires with Dharma. Dharma must lie within everything. Only when we take up such a path do we become ones who have made our puruṣārthas fruitful. Today, even at the time of marriage, they say ‘Dharmeca, artheca, kāmeca nāticarāmi,’ but they forget Mokṣa. So we must keep Dharma and Mokṣa above all before us as our aim. Keeping this aim in view, the ancients reached the goal of their lives. Men today need no goal. Roaming as they please, they come to an end somewhere or other. This is not man's duty. ‘To go back where it was born is the nature of every living creature’: to reach the place we came from must be our aim.