Verse 34

²⁸Sometimes, by the maya of the god, he is held in the vine-arms of a woman, his discernment and his understanding spilled out of him, his heart busy with the building of a house for her pleasure, his heart carried off by the talk and the looks and the doings of the sons and daughters and wife who shelter under her; and not having mastered himself he throws himself into a blind darkness that has no far shore. ²⁹Sometimes his heart is terrified by the wheel of the Lord, the Bhagavan Visnu, which is marked out by time from the atom up to the ending of the two halves of the age, as time turns and carries everything off at speed, from Brahma down to a tuft of grass, unblinking while they all look on. And then, paying no regard to that very Lord, whose own weapon is the wheel of time, the Bhagavan himself, the Person of sacrifice, he calls upon the gods of false doctrines by their passwords, gods who are mostly herons and vultures and cranes and crows, put outside the practice of good people.

³⁰When those cheats, who have cheated themselves, have cheated him thoroughly, he comes to live among a family of brahmins and their observances, the initiation and the rest. Then, having no taste for that, though it is nothing but the worship of the Bhagavan, the Person of sacrifice, by doing the works the revealed and remembered texts set out, he goes over to a family of the servant class, unclean in the conduct scripture requires, whose mating and whose keeping of a household are like those of the monkey kind. ³¹There too, with nothing to hold him back, wandering as he pleases, his mind grown very small, taken up with looking into one another's faces and the like, with common work and nothing else, he forgets that time has a limit.

³²Sometimes he takes his pleasure among houses and the things of this life as a monkey does among trees, fond of his children and his wife, with coupling for his holiday. ³³So, held back on the road, out of fear of the elephant that is death, in a darkness like a mountain cave. ³⁴Sometimes, having no power to fend off the many sorrows that come from the gods, from the elements and from himself, cold and wind and the rest, he sits low, worn down by objects of sense that have no end to them.