Verse 1

¹This world of living things, made up of those who take the body for the self, has fallen upon a road as hard to travel as a mountain pass. It came there by the band of six senses, the doorway to a beginningless experience of the round of birth, of partings and meetings and the rest, through the strings of bodies fashioned out of good and bad dealings sorted by the strands, clarity and the others. Driven by the maya that answers to the Lord, the Bhagavan Visnu, like a caravan of merchants bent on gain, tasting the works its own body has done, it has gone into the forest of the round of birth, as inauspicious a place as a burning ground; and to this day, for all its many fruitless struggles, it has not found the track of the bees at the lotus feet of Hari and of the teacher, which alone would put out that burning.

²In that forest these six, whose names are the senses, are robbers by their trade. A man's wealth, whatever of it serves dharma and was gathered with much hardship, is his provision for the world beyond; and that dharma whose mark is the direct worship of the supreme Person is what they call it. That wealth of dharma they plunder from him, through seeing, touching, hearing, tasting, smelling, through wanting and deciding and the enjoyment of house and village; from a man whose leader is bad and who has not mastered himself, as robbers plunder a caravan. ³And there the people of his house, wife and children and the rest, are wolves and jackals in name and in act. What the miser guards unwillingly, like a lamb, they carry off while he looks on.

⁴A field ploughed year after year, with the seed in it unburnt, is a thicket of bushes and grass and creepers again by sowing time. Just so the householder's stage is a field of works in which works never die down; this dwelling is a basket of desires. ⁵Gone there, his outer breath hemmed in by gnats and mosquitoes and men no better, by locusts, birds, thieves, rats and the rest, sometimes turning about on this road with a mind stained by ignorance and desire and works, he sees falsely: he looks at the world of men, which holds nothing, as at a city of the gandharvas, and takes it for solid.