In plain words
As we walk along a road, someone on that same road is weeping bitterly. Yet a man passing to and fro stops and asks him the cause of his grief. What is the inner meaning of everyone questioning the grieving man in this way? Sorrow is not man's svabhāva! He is suffering a sorrow that is not his svabhāva. What people wish is to know the cause of it. Everyone who sees him going through what is not his svabhāva asks in wonder. In that same bazaar another man is laughing happily. He is very cheerful. Not one person looks at him and asks, "Why are you not crying?" This man: Ānanda and cheerfulness are his svabhāva. What is natural causes no wonder at all. Only what is unnatural causes wonder. So man fails to recognise that Ānanda and happiness are his svabhāva.
This body, the senses, Manas and Buddhi came into being so as to receive this Ānanda and happiness. But, unfortunately, faults have crept into this body, the senses, Manas and Buddhi, and so man is forgetting his own svabhāva and svarūpa. Man is sinking in grief. The body is covered with the dirt of attachment and hatred. The senses are covered with the dirt of pleasures and riches. This Manas is covered by both. That is, it is covered by these four: attachment and hatred, pleasures and riches. That is precisely why man cannot know his own svarūpa. He believes that these physical, worldly pleasures and riches, these joys and delights, are his support and his svarūpa. These are mere passing clouds. Not one of these clouds stays for ever. But happiness and Ānanda are eternal.
The ancients recognised the truth that this attachment and hatred, these pleasures and riches, grow through the food man eats, and they found a fine royal road for this. Before eating they would purify the food with certain sprinklings. 'Annaṃ brahma raso viṣṇuḥ bhoktā devo maheśvaraḥ': this food we eat is the equal of Brahmā. Rasa, which they call essence, that is, the water we drink and the essence of the things we eat, they called the form of Viṣṇu.