Verse 20

¹⁶He does not praise and does not blame those who act or speak, well or badly. The sage who sees evenly keeps clear of both the merit and the fault. ¹⁷He should do nothing, say nothing, and turn nothing over in his mind, good or bad. Taking his pleasure in the self, and living in this way, let the sage go about like a dull thing. ¹⁸If a man is deep in the Brahman that is the word but not deep in the highest, his labour has labour for its only fruit, like a man tending a cow that gives no milk. ¹⁹A cow whose milk has dried, an unfaithful wife, a body in another's power, worthless children, money put into no worthy hand, and, dear one, speech with no me in it: a man guards these and has sorrow upon sorrow.

²⁰Speech in which there is nothing of my cleansing work, the holding and the making and the stopping of this world's breath, and nothing of the births I have taken as I wished in my play: such barren speech a steady man should not carry.