Verse 31

²⁸So he taught his sons, though they had been taught already, in order to teach the world. The Bhagavan of great power and highest friendship, who went by the name of Rsabha, was teaching the way of the highest swans, the way of the great sages who are quiet by nature and have ceased from works, which is marked by devotion and knowledge and detachment. He anointed Bharata, eldest of his hundred sons, greatest among the Lord's own and given over to the Bhagavan's people, for the guarding of the earth. Then, in his own house, keeping nothing but the body that was left him, like a madman, clothed in the sky and with his hair loose, having laid the offering fire in himself, he walked out of Brahmavarta.

²⁹In the dress of a cast-off man, like one dull or blind or dumb or deaf, a ghoul, a madman, he had taken a vow of silence, and stayed silent even when people spoke to him. ³⁰Along his road, here and there, in cities and villages and mines, in farmsteads and gardens and market towns, in camps and cattle stations and herdsmen's settlements, among caravans, on hills, in woods, at hermitages and elsewhere, the worst sort of men who go about the earth set upon him as flies set upon a forest elephant. They threatened him and struck him, pissed on him and spat on him, threw stones and dung and dust at him, fouled the air about him and abused him. He took no account of it. This thing marked out as a body has no real standing, though it is spoken of as real; and standing in his own greatness, in the form of one who knows both, having laid on himself no self-regard of I or of mine, with his mind unbroken, he wandered the earth alone.

³¹His hands and feet and chest, his broad arms, shoulders, neck and face and every other limb were set most delicately; his face was beautiful by nature, with a smile that was its own; his eyes were long and lovely and cool, their pupils reddish, like fresh lotus petals; his cheeks and ears and throat and nose were as fine as the rest; and by the great festival of that face with its hidden smile he set the flower-bow working in the minds of the women of the towns. But with the heavy load of his curling matted tawny hair hanging down thick with dust, and his own body neglected and filthy, he looked like a man taken by a spirit.