Verse 7

¹Bharata, great among the Lord's own, was appointed by the Bhagavan to guard the face of the earth; and holding to that charge he married Pancajani, the daughter of Visvarupa. ²On her he begot five sons wholly like himself, as the first of the elements begets the subtle elements: Sumati, Rastrabhrt, Sudarsana, Avarana and Dhumraketu. ³This region, whose name was Ajanabha, they have called Bharata from him onward. ⁴That lord of the earth knew much. He kept to his own duty and guarded his people, who each kept to their own work, with the same wide tenderness his father and his grandfather had shown. ⁵And he worshipped the Bhagavan, whose form is the sacrifice and the rite, with offerings great and small brought in trust: the fire offering, the new-moon and full-moon rites, the four-month rites, the animal and the soma offerings, in their standard and their altered forms, at every pressing, by the rule of the four priests.

⁶While the several sacrifices went forward with all their attendant acts performed, he held the unseen fruit of those acts, the thing called dharma, to belong to the Bhagavan Vasudeva alone: the highest Brahman, the Person of the sacrifice, the god beyond the gods, who is himself the doer, since it is he who settles what the mantras mean, and the marks of all the gods are theirs. His stains were rubbed away by his own skill; and when the priests were taking up the offerings, he, the sacrificer, thought of those gods who have their share in the sacrifice as limbs of the Person. ⁷So, with his being made clean by the cleanness of his work, a devotion of the highest kind was born in him, and its rush grew day by day: devotion to the Bhagavan Vasudeva, Brahman, whose body is the open space within the heart, known by the form of the great Person, marked by the Srivatsa, the Kaustubha, the forest garland, the wheel, the conch, the mace and the rest, who shines out in the self in that Person's form as it is drawn in the hearts of his own people.