Verse 39

³⁹Money, a wife, cattle, sons and the rest, houses, land, elephants, treasure, prosperity: all these that desire wants are unsteady, and a man's life snaps in a moment. How much can they give him that he loves? ⁴⁰So too with these worlds that sacrifices make: they wear away, one stands higher than another, and they are not clean. So worship the highest, in whom no fault has been seen or heard, with a devotion that is single, and gain your own self. ⁴¹A man here who is taken for wise does works again and again for some end, and from them he gets the opposite of it; and that fruit does not fail. ⁴²The man of works here plans for happiness and for release from pain. By his striving he always gets pain instead, while the one who does not strive is wrapped in happiness.

⁴³The body for whose sake a man here wants what can be wanted, and works to want it, is a body that belongs to others; it breaks, it goes away and it comes again. ⁴⁴How much more, then, the things standing further off: children, wife, house, wealth and the rest, kingdom, treasury, elephants, ministers, servants, kinsmen, all the places where a man lays down his mine. ⁴⁵What are these to the self: paltry, perishing along with the body, harms that wear the look of goods, to one who is the great ocean of unending bliss?