Verse 1

¹The two of them spoke to the king, who had fallen beside the dead child and was like a dead man himself, overcome with grief, and they woke him with true words. ²Who is this to you, lord of kings, the one you are grieving over? And in this making of things, what were you to him before, what are you now, and what after? ³As grains of sand are carried apart and carried together by the force of a stream, so are embodied beings joined and parted by time. ⁴As among grains some grains come to be and some do not, so among beings do beings, driven on by the Lord's maya. ⁵We, and you, and all these that move and do not move and share this one time — what we were before birth and after death, we are no other than that now, sir.

⁶With beings the lord of beings makes beings, and keeps them, and kills them — with beings he has made himself and that are not their own masters. He needs nothing by it: he is like a child. ⁷By a body, king, the one in the body comes, and body is born from body as seed from seed; but the one in the body lasts on, as a thing lasts. ⁸This dividing off of body from the one in the body was made long ago by a failure of discernment, as the dividing of a kind from a single thing is imagined in the thing itself.