Verse 26

²⁶So his heart was crowded with longings that could not be met. Through his own begun work, wearing the look of a fawn, he was thrown out of the practice of yoga, and out of the worship of the Bhagavan as well. How else could a man who had already let go the sons born of his own heart, so hard to let go, become attached to a fawn, a creature of another birth, when attachment is plainly the opposite of the highest good? And so, while the royal sage Bharata's undertaking of yoga stood broken by this hindrance, and while he took no thought for himself in his fondness for feeding and guarding and pleasing and petting the little deer, time, which none can get past, came upon him with terrible speed, as a snake comes to a mouse hole.

²⁷Even then, looking at the deer that stood at his side and grieved like a son, his mind settled on the deer and nothing else, he left this world along with the deer, giving up his body; and he took a deer's body, but the memory of his birth did not die in him after death as it does in others. ²⁸There too he remembered, by the strength of his effort at worshipping the Bhagavan, what had made him a deer, and burning with regret he said: ²⁹How bitter this is. I have fallen from the road of those who hold themselves in hand. I had let go every tie, taken shelter in a lonely holy forest, held myself in hand; my mind was set on the Bhagavan Vasudeva, the self within all selves, and was wholly gathered there by hearing of him and thinking of him and praising him aloud and worshipping him and remembering him, with not one watch of the day left empty. And then, unknowing as I am, it slipped away after a doe's son.

³⁰With that turning from the world hidden in him, he left the doe who was his mother and came back from Kalanjara to the field of the Bhagavan, Salagrama, the hermitage of Pulastya and Pulaha, dear to the company of sages whose nature is quiet. ³¹There too he waited for his time, badly shaken by what attachment had done, keeping his own company, living on dry leaves and grass and creepers, counting on nothing but the end of what had made him a deer; and he gave up that deer's body in the water of the ford.