In plain words
They have no death. So she: ‘I am thinking of building a temple. Will you help me with it?’ she asked. When she thought of building the temple, that owner was born. Cennabasappa: ‘I will help; I will give land. You build the temple,’ he said. To build a temple, with this hand and that hand all joining together, we can build the temple. They tried to build it. Before building the temple, get the land written over to you,’ said Vīrabhadrappa. Cennabasappa, though, keeps saying, ‘Give the money first, and I'll give the land.’ ‘Take the land,’ says this one; ‘Bring the money,’ says that one: in this way each scrambled for his own selfish ends. Angered by this, Cennabasappa and Vīrabhadrappa came to a quarrel. Those were old vāsanās. They did not know. Those vāsanās were welling up from within. These two did not know. As the force of the old vāsanās came up like this, the two of them kept quarrelling there too. In the end both died. Then Vīrabhadrappa was born as a cobra. Cennabasappa was born as a frog. Here too the two of them are still quarrelling. So births change, yet karmas do not change. So in those with selfishness and self-interest, however high a place they reach, their small-mindedness still does not go away. So, if you want to put small-mindedness far from you, you must make friends with good people.
Births change, yet for some, petty dispositions alone remain
Sometimes, even when you join good people, the vṛttis of your citta and your foul dispositions too are not the kind that go all at once. The glass we drink water from every day, if we wash it then and there, becomes clean. We can wipe it off in a minute. But look at all the old vessels thrown into the storeroom: even if you scrub them for a week, those vessels do not come clean. Why? Old vāsanā. That grime has clung to them for many years. Because the vāsanās of who knows how many births are in man, even if he is born in a noble birth, only petty dispositions remain, and noble dispositions do not come.