In plain words
Unsteady is life in the world, unsteady are youth and wealth; unsteady are wife, sons and the rest; Dharma and good name, these two, stand steady.
What did he bring with him, what will he take away, when he was born, and again when he dies? Where does wealth go, and where does he himself go? You tell me yourselves, sirs, as your heart finds it right.
Students!
Asthiraṃ jīvanaṃ loke: this world in which we live is not steady; asthiraṃ yavvanaṃ dhanaṃ. Youth is only a thing that comes midway and goes midway. It has no such thing as a beginning or an end. To be puffed up over such youth is not the nature of the educated. As for wealth, this too is not steady. It is only like the passing clouds. Never will it lift us up. Then wife, children and the rest: they too only come midway and part midway. Before marriage, who the wife is and who the husband is, no one knows. They come midway, and midway itself parting befalls them, one from the other. A child too is just the same. Before birth, who is the mother, who is the child? Only after birth do such ties and kinships come about. All these are unsteady. Dharma kīrti dvayaṃ sthiram. What is steady? Dharma and good name: these two alone are the steady things for man.
This whole world, made of what is seen, the whole universe of the moving and the unmoving, its objects too, all go on merging in the stream of time. Yaddṛśyaṃ tannaśyam. Whatever we see, in only a little while it passes out of our sight. This whole world made of what is seen, which these eyes of skin perceive, is merging in the womb of time. Both the seeing eye and the seen universe are unsteady. These eyes of skin are not for men alone. Beasts, birds and animals, worms and insects: all have these eyes.