Verse 5

¹Whatever works Hari has done here, or does, or will do, and the births he took at his own will to do them by: tell those to us. ²Anyone who sets out to go through the endless qualities of the Endless is a child in his understanding. A man might somehow count the grains of dust of the earth, given time; he could never count the qualities of him in whom all power has its home. ³When with five elements of his own making he had built the vast city, and entered it with a portion of himself, Narayana, the first of gods, took the name of the Person. ⁴The three worlds set together are his body; from his senses come both kinds of senses in those who wear bodies; his knowing is his own; from his breathing come strength and vigour and effort; and by clarity and the rest he is the first maker of the world's standing and dissolving and rising.

⁵At the start he was, by passion, him of the hundred vows, for the making of this; Visnu for its keeping, the lord of the rite, the embankment of the twice-born's dharma; Rudra, by darkness, for its undoing. That Person is the first, and so rising, standing and dissolving go on always among his creatures.