In plain words
From every birth, from many generations, we have gone on committing these faults. So the dirt of these faults, from generation to generation, from age to age, has gone on being painted picture upon picture, without change. When there is dirt on this mirror, our svarūpa does not show clearly at all. For this reason man cannot himself see his own svarūpa. He cannot recognise it. He cannot see his true svarūpa in this mirror called the Manas. So we must make the right effort to clean away the dirt that has gathered on this mirror. But how are we to do this? What is the means of doing it? By following which path can it become pure? It can be purified through what a man eats and how he lives. Past is past. What has gone by has gone by. But at least in the present we must follow a sacred path and set about the effort of purifying it.
Young students must eat food that is pure and free of fault. Under no circumstances must we take food that carries a fault. Bhikṣa dehārthaṃ. Vastraṃ śītalārthaṃ. The food we are given is for the protection of the body. But food that brings some ailment to the body is not proper food. This is why, in the Bhagavad Gītā, they said that purity of the vessel, purity of the cooking and purity of the food are most necessary. How have the foods we eat today come to us? We must ask whether they were earned unjustly or earned justly. The root cause of man falling prey today to ill health or to unrest is food earned unjustly. We are not taking our food in a way that is orderly, just and in keeping with Dharma. For a passing satisfaction, worldly and physical, we do not inquire, we do not weigh things with discrimination, and we follow many crooked paths; that alone is how we gather this unjustly earned food. So first of all, for this cleansing of mala, we must gather pure food. But ordinary people have very little of the discrimination that tells what is unjust and what is just. We do not know whether the vessel is pure or not. Whether the food is pure, we know even less. The purity of the cooking, what feelings the cook has, of that we know nothing at all.