Verse 5

⁵Master, there are those who breathe in through the hollows of their ears the scent of the cup of your lotus feet, carried on the wind of what is heard. Your feet held by their highest devotion, you never go out from the lotus of the heart of your own people. ⁶Fear on account of wealth and body and friends, grief, craving, humiliation, wide greed, and that false hold called mine which is the root of all distress: these last just so long as a man has not chosen your foot, where there is no fear. ⁷Those whose wits fate has struck down, whose senses are turned away from your company that stills every ill: poor things, their minds overrun by greed, they go on doing what is not good, always, for a shred of a scrap of pleasure.

⁸These creatures are ground down again and again by hunger and thirst and the three humours, by cold and heat and wind and rain, and by one another; by the fire of wanting, Unfallen, and by anger, which is so hard to carry. Wide-strider, my mind sinks as I look at them.