Verse 52

⁴⁹Once, as he sat there, that teacher of the many-versed saw the undoing of himself by himself, which had come up out of that meeting with fishes. ⁵⁰Ah, look at this ruin of mine, an ascetic under a vow to live well: in the water, from getting mixed up with a creature of the water, what I had held to for so long, Brahman, has been made to fall away. ⁵¹One who wants release should give up the company of those whose vow is coupling, and should not let the outward senses go out at all. Wandering alone in a quiet place, he should join his thought to the Endless, the Lord; and if there must be company, let it be the good who are under that same vow.

⁵²I was one ascetic; then in the water, from company with a fish, I was fifty, and then a family of five thousand. I come to no end of the wishes that either state brings, my understanding carried off by the strands of maya, my sense of what is worth having set on the things of sense.