In plain words
One must grow broad feelings and broad thoughts
One must rejoice to see the goodness, the honour, the virtues and the ideals of others. One must grow broad feelings and broad thoughts. One must take care not to let the arch-demoness envy come near. That demoness will destroy one's all. She brings ill health. The envious man cannot digest his food. He cannot sleep. Moment by moment, like one with consumption, she wastes his bodily and mental powers. We may make due effort to win good honour, name and fame, marks and cleverness as others do. That is not wrong. But the thought, let others perish and let me alone rise, is utterly savage and does harm. This is the poisonous worm of students. Praising oneself and slandering others belong to that same kind. However low or base one is, trying to present one's own faults as good, and searching out nothing but faults in others without a thought for their goodness: these too belong to the brood of the root worm. One must not speak in a way that belittles others. When one likes them, whatever others do seems good. When one's liking itself changes and turns against them, one thinks even the good others have done is bad: such things take shape as marks of treachery to oneself. The ‘Sumati Śatakam’ too describes this as follows. “In the days of affection no faults can ever arise; once that affection has soured, it is faults alone that appear, truly, O Sumati.” Once affection, that is, friendship, has soured, people look for nothing but faults. Such things do not befit a ‘sumati’, that is, one with ‘a good mind’. The student must be sumati, not durmati. A cartload of firewood can be reduced to ashes by one small spark. A potful of milk is spoiled and made useless by one small drop of poison. In the same way, however many virtues a man or a student has, a single spark of envy and hatred, a single drop of that poison, burns his honour to ashes. It destroys the Buddhi. So in the field of life students must move with great care. They must not let vices like Ahaṅkāra, envy, anger and selfishness come near. These vices very quickly catch young people in their net. They hide the purity within them so that not even a trace of it is seen. They make one forget oneself. They stir up passion, take away the discrimination between good and bad, and make one say whatever comes to the tongue and do whatever comes to hand.