Verse 27

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The python of sleep and the blind well· Verses 20–27

And that same man, taken again by the python of sleep and sunk in blind darkness, lies as in an empty wood, knowing nothing else, like a corpse thrown aside. Sometimes bad men, snakes that bite, break the tusk of his pride, and he gets no moment of sleep; his heart aches, his understanding wears away, and he falls as a blind man falls into a blind well. And sometimes, hunting for drops of the honey of desire, when he seizes another man's wife or another man's goods he is struck down by the king or by the owners and falls into a hell that has no far shore. And so, on either count, they say that action here is the sowing ground of the round of birth for the self.

If he is loosed from that bond, Devadatta cuts it away from him, and Visnumitra from Devadatta; so nothing comes to rest. And sometimes, having no power to fend off the ten conditions, cold and wind and many more, from the gods, from the elements, from himself, he sits low with a worry that has no end to it. Sometimes, dealing with others, he takes some money from them, even so much as a cowrie shell, and by that cheating over money he comes to be hated. On this road these are the afflictions: pleasure and pain, liking and dislike, fear, self-regard, carelessness, madness, grief, delusion, greed, spite, envy, insult, hunger, thirst, trouble of mind and of body, birth, old age, death and the rest.