Verse 27

¹⁹And that mastery of a home in the hollow is not the plain fruit of the gift of the earth. That gift was put into the hands of the Bhagavan Vasudeva, the supreme Self, who is the life and the self of the whole gathering of the living, purest of fords and a worthy receiver, and it was made with the highest faith, with a mind held steady in the deepest respect; and such a gift is, plainly, a door to release. ²⁰For a man helpless in a sneeze, a fall, a stumble, who once calls out his name, shakes off the bond of works straight away; and those who long for release come by that same undoing quite otherwise. ²¹To those devoted to him, to all who possess themselves, he is the giver of the self, in the self, as the self itself.

²²Surely the Bhagavan did not show him grace, in that he spread out for him again a mastery and enjoyment made of maya, which robs a man of the remembering of himself. ²³When the Bhagavan, finding no other way, had taken the three worlds from him under cover of asking, leaving him nothing but his own body, and he was bound fast in Varuna's cords and thrown into a mountain cave, he said this: ²⁴Truly this revered Indra is not shrewd about what matters. He has Brhaspati for his counsellor, chosen for advice and for nothing else, and he passed him by and himself, through the younger brother of Indra, asked for himself and for his own good things, and not for service to him. What is this realm of three worlds, which turns over with the change of a Manu, against time, whose years run too deep to sound?

²⁵It was service under him and nothing else that our grandfather chose, not his own father's estate, though a place safe from every fear was being given him, since nothing is higher than the Bhagavan; and this when the Bhagavan had just taken his father away. ²⁶And who like us, with our stains unwashed and the Bhagavan's grace withheld, could hope to set out on the road that great man walked? ²⁷His doings will be told at length further on. At his door the Bhagavan himself, Narayana, teacher of the whole world, stands with the mace in his hand, his heart pitying his own people. It was he who with the toe of his foot flung the ten-necked one, out on his conquest of the quarters, a hundred million yojanas away.