Verse 17

¹²He has taken bodies of many kinds out of a wish to guard the world, and his lotus feet move over the earth. To those feet, where fear comes from no quarter, I who have drawn near go for refuge; by him a lot like this, fitting for one untrue, has been shown me. ¹³He who stands here as though bound by acts, his self covered over, leaning on a maya made of the elements and the senses and the mind, and who is nonetheless pure, unchanging, awareness with no break in it: to him, settled in this burning heart, I bow. ¹⁴He is set apart from this body made of the five elements and yet hidden in it, as I am, I whose self is the senses and the strands and their objects and awareness. That seer, whose greatness the body does not hinder, the Person beyond nature and the person in it, I salute.

¹⁵Walking by his maya on this road of the round of birth, bound fast by the many strands and acts, and worn out of his memory by the labour of it, by what means could this one ever choose that world again, apart from the grace of the great? ¹⁶Which god is it who has laid down this knowledge that reaches through the three times, a portion of whom goes along in things unmoving and moving? Him let us serve, we who are following the road of the living one's acts, that the three burnings may be quieted. ¹⁷The embodied one, in the hollow of another body, fallen into a well of blood and dung and urine, his body sorely scorched by the fire of the belly, wanting to get out of here, counting over his own months: Bhagavan, when will he be let out, poor in wits as he is?