Verse 12

¹²You whose navel bears the lotus, those who have joined the company of people greedy for the scent of your lotus feet no longer remember, Lord, this dear mortal body, nor what comes with it, sons and friends and house and wealth and wives. ¹³Unborn one, this is your grossest form, filled out with beasts and mountains and birds and creeping things, with gods and Daityas and men, marked as real and unreal, many, beginning with the great principle. Highest one, I know nothing past it, where words do not go. ¹⁴At the end of an age the Person takes all this into his belly and lies down, seeing by his own light, with the Endless for his couch; and in the womb of the golden world-lotus risen from the sea of his navel the shining one appears. To that Bhagavan I bow.

¹⁵You are the self, always free, wholly clean, wholly awake, unmoved, the first Person, the Bhagavan, lord of the three. By your own unbroken seeing you watch how the mind stands; you are the seer, the lord of the offering in its keeping, and you stay apart. ¹⁶In him, without pause and each in its turn, powers of many kinds fall in and run against one another, knowledge and the rest. To that Brahman, out of whom the world comes, one, endless, first, nothing but bliss, never altering, I go for refuge. ¹⁷Bhagavan, your lotus foot is the true blessing, and so is the blessing of one who serves you, in whom what men want takes form. Master, do you, the Bhagavan, guard us poor creatures so, as a cow guards her calf, so anxious are you to be kind?