Verse 6

¹Now a certain fine brahmin, first among the Angirases, who had calm and restraint and austerity, recitation and study, giving, contentment, endurance, modesty, learning, freedom from spite, knowledge of the self and gladness, had nine sons of one mother, like himself in learning, character, conduct, looks and generosity; and by his younger wife a boy and a girl. ²The boy of that pair, they say, was Bharata, greatest among the Lord's own and first among royal sages, who had left the deer's body and come to be a brahmin in his last body. ³There too, badly shaken by the company of his own people, holding in his mind the pair of lotus feet of the Bhagavan, the hearing and remembering of which and the telling of whose qualities break the bondage of works, and fearing that he might be checked again, he remembered by the Bhagavan's grace the whole line of his former births, and showed himself to the world in the shape of a madman, a dullard, a blind man, a deaf one.

⁴To this son the brahmin, his mind bound by a father's love, gave the rites as the teaching lays them down, up to the coming home from study; and once the thread was given he taught him over again the washing and the sipping of water and the other rules of practice, though the boy had no wish for them, holding that a son must be taught by his father. ⁵And in his father's presence the boy would do these things as if wrongly. Meaning to teach him the metres, the father had him take the three-footed Savitri with its utterances and the syllable at its head; and though he went over it through the months of summer and spring, it went in only in a shape that did not hold together.

⁶So with his heart full of fondness for his own son, holding wrongly that a son must be instructed, he taught him the works of a student, washing and study and vows and rules and the service of the teacher and of the fire and the rest, though the boy was not set on them; and while his own wish was still unreached, time, which is never careless, carried him off, careless, in his own house.