Verse 25

²⁵My body is my teacher too, and a cause of aversion and discernment in me. It carries its own being and its own end and always turns out in pain. With it I think over what is real, and knowing all the while that it belongs to others, I go about unattached. ²⁶Wanting to please them, it stretches itself out and feeds wife, children, money, cattle, servants, house and the circle of kin. Having shut up its hoard with hard labour for its own end, the body makes its seed and then falls away, in the manner of a tree. ²⁷The tongue drags him one way, thirst another when it comes, the sex another, the skin and the belly and the ear from somewhere else, the nose another way, the darting eye, and the power to act somewhere else again. Like a house full of wives, they tear at the master of the house.

²⁸The god made the many cities by maya, his own power: trees, creeping things and beasts, birds, gadflies and fish. Satisfied in his heart by none of them, he made man, whose mind can look upon Brahman, and he was glad. ²⁹A steady man, having got at the end of many births this human birth, so hard to come by, which gives what is worth having and yet does not last, should strive at once for the highest good before he falls; for death is at his heels all the while, and things to be had are on every side.