Verse 11

⁷Then the younger wife, the brahmin's true wife, left the boy and girl born of her body with the elder wife, and herself went to her husband's world by following him in death. ⁸When the father was dead, the brothers, who did not know what he was, whose minds stopped at the threefold learning and did not reach the higher learning, gave up pressing their brother with teaching, saying his mind was dull. ⁹And when the common two-footed cattle called him mad and dull and deaf, he answered them in keeping with what they said. Set to work, he did it at another's wish, whether he was pressed to it or paid for it; and whatever came to him by asking or by chance, little or much, good food or bad, he ate it, but never for the pleasure of his senses. He had come into his own self, the gladness of a pure experience that stands of itself and whose causes have ceased for good, and he did not take himself to be the body, out of which the pairs, pleasure and pain, arise.

¹⁰In cold and heat and wind and rain he went about with his body uncovered like a bull, fleshy, his limbs knit tight; sleeping on bare ground, never rubbed with oil or bathed, he was so covered with dust that the light of Brahman in him did not show, like a great jewel under dirt; his waist wrapped in a poor rag, his thread black with grime, he was called by name a twice-born and a disgrace to the brahmins, and those who did not know him thought nothing of him. ¹¹When he worked for his food as wages from others, and even his own brothers set him to work in the fields, he did that too. But he did not know even ground from uneven, or less from more. Broken grain, oil cake, chaff, spoiled beans, the burnt scrapings of the pot and the leavings, he ate all of it as though it were nectar.