Verse 7

⁷Then, when his palanquin again went crooked, Rahugana said in fury: What is this, fellow? Dead while you live, you make light of me and go past your master's order. I will give your carelessness a treatment, as the rod-bearer treats people, and then you will come back to your own nature. ⁸So he spoke, and much of it was ill strung together; he took himself for a god among men and held himself learned, and with a pride threaded through by passion and darkness he had made nothing of every dwelling dear to the Bhagavan; his mind was not much schooled in the ways of the masters of yoga. To him that revered brahmin, who had become Brahman and was in himself a friend to all that lives, said this, smiling as it were, with no pride left in him.

⁹What you have said, hero, is plain and no mockery. If a load were there, it would be the bearer's and so mine; if a road were there to be gone over, it would be the goer's. Stout is said of a heap; it is not a word of those who know. ¹⁰Fatness and thinness, sicknesses and worries, hunger, thirst, fear, quarrel, wanting, old age, sleep, pleasure, anger, the I, pride and griefs: these belong to one born with a body, and they are not mine. ¹¹Being dead while alive holds by rule, king, of whatever is altered and has a beginning and an end. Where the standing of servant and master is fixed, praiseworthy one, there we speak of a fitting together of order and duty.

¹²We look and find not the smallest opening for a thought of difference, nothing beyond the way people deal with each other. Who is the ruler there, and what is to be ruled? Even so, king, what shall we do for you? ¹³Hero, I have come to my own standing, like a madman, a drunkard, a dullard. What is treatment worth here? How much is got by your teaching? To instruct one who is stiff and careless is to grind flour already ground.