Verse 16

¹¹The revered one said: Hear this, dear one; I am telling you the truth. You should not find fault with the god who cannot be measured. We, and Bhava, and your father, and this great sage: we all carry out what he appoints, and we have no say in it. ¹²No one who wears a body could undo what he has done: not by austerity, not by knowing, not by the power of yoga, not by cleverness, not by wealth or dharma, not by another's help and not by his own. ¹³For coming to be and for perishing, for doing work, for grief and bewilderment and fear always, for ease and for pain, people take on a joining to a body, dear one, as the unmanifest appoints it.

¹⁴We are all well harnessed, my child, to the rope that is his word, by the tethers of the strands and of works, which are very hard to get past; and we all carry the tribute to the Lord, as four-footed beasts strung through the nose carry it for a two-footed one. ¹⁵What the Lord has sent us, dear one, whether pain or ease, we take on ourselves out of our clinging to the strands and to works; we stand in this and that, in whatever he has yoked us to, like blind men led by one who can see. ¹⁶Even one who is free would keep his body so long, tasting what has already begun, empty of the sense that it is his, as a man who has woken keeps what he went through in the dream. But he does not lay hold of the strands for another body.