Verse 1

¹Set down by the unborn one on a road that is hard to get past, seeing works parcelled out into passion and darkness and clarity, this caravan, bent on gain, wanders on; it goes into the forest of becoming and finds no ease. ²In that forest, lord of men, these six robbers plunder the caravan by force, its leader being a bad one; and there jackals get into a careless traveller and carry him off, as wolves carry off a lamb. ³In a thicket of many creepers and grasses and bushes, harried by mosquitoes with hard bites, at one moment he sees a city of the gandharvas, and here and there the swift snatch of a whirled firebrand.

⁴Taking his dwelling and his water and his wealth to be himself, he runs this way and that in the forest; and sometimes, grey with the dust a whirlwind has thrown up, his eyes full of grit, he cannot tell one direction from another. ⁵The noise of crickets he cannot see is a spike in his ear; the voices of owls hurt him inwardly; worn out by hunger, he shelters under trees that give nothing, and sometimes runs after waters that are only light. ⁶Sometimes he makes for rivers with no water in them; with nothing to eat, he begs of the others. Coming upon a forest fire, he is scorched; and somewhere his breath is taken by yaksas and he is sick of it all.