Verse 24

¹⁷The revered one said: Om. Homage to the Bhagavan, the great Person, in whom every quality is reckoned up, the endless, the unmanifest. Homage. ¹⁸I worship your lotus feet, worth worshipping and a shelter, the highest resort of all good fortune, more than enough for those devoted to you, bringing into being the beings you have thought of; I worship you who take away the round of becoming and are yourself the being of it, the Lord. ¹⁹His sight, looking on, is not stained even a little by the workings of mind that belong to maya and the strands. The rush of our anger is not mastered as it is in the Lord; who then, wanting to master himself, would not think much of him?

²⁰To those who see wrongly he appears, by maya, like a man drunk, his eyes coppery with honey-wine; and the wives of the serpents could not bring themselves for shame to do him honour, their senses overcome by the touch of his feet. ²¹The sages call him the standing, the birth and the drawing in of this world, and call him free of those three, the Endless. He does not notice the circle of the earth resting somewhere on the thousand seats of his heads, any more than a mustard seed. ²²From him came first the great principle, the body of the strands, the seat of understanding, the revered unborn one. Sprung from that, I by my own threefold light bring forth what changes, what is dark, and what belongs to the senses.

²³We stand in the power of that great self like birds tied on a string: the great principle, and I, and the changing, the dark and the sensory. By his grace all of us make this world. ²⁴This world, bewildered by the pouring out of the strands, never readily knows the way of crossing the maya he has made, jointed as it is with works. Homage to you, whose self is dissolution and rising.