Verse 42

⁴²To him bowed down like that, devoted, a lord of creatures who wanted offspring, the one who knows the thought of every being, Janardana, said this. ⁴³Bhagavan said: Son of the Pracetas, greatly favoured, you are brought to perfection by your austerity, in that through a trust that has me for its object you have come to the highest feeling in me. ⁴⁴I am pleased with you, lord of the people, for this austerity of yours that makes the world grow. This is my own wish for beings, that their unfoldings should be many. ⁴⁵Brahma, Bhava, you, the Manus, the lords of the gods: these are my own unfoldings, and the cause of the thriving of beings.

⁴⁶Austerity is my heart, brahmin; knowledge is my body; action is my shape; the rites that have come to be are my limbs; dharma is my self, and the gods are my breaths. ⁴⁷I alone was, in the beginning, and there was nothing else at all, within or without: pure knowing, unmanifest, as though asleep on every side. ⁴⁸In me, whose qualities are endless, endless, when there came to be through the strands a body made of the strands, from that came the first one, the unborn, the self-born.