Argument.—Vasishtha exposes the evils of selfish views parÁg-drishti, and exalts the merit of elevated views pratyag-drishti.

VASISHTHA continued:—RÁma! knowing your mind, understanding, egoism and all your senses, to be insensible of themselves, and deriving their sensibility from the intellect; say how can your living soul and the vital breaths, have any sensation of their own.

2. It is the one great soul, that infuses its power to those different organs; as the one bright sun dispenses his light, to all the various objects in their diverse colours.

3. As the pangs of the poisonous thirst after worldly enjoyments, come to an end; so the insensibility of ignorance, flies away like darkness at the end of the night.

4. It is the incantation of spiritual knowledge only, that is able to heal the pain of baneful avarice; as it is in the power of autumn only, to dispel the clouds of the rainy-season.

5. It is the dissipation of ignorance, which washes the mind of its attendant desires; as it is the disappearance of the rainy weather, which scatters the clouds in the sky.

6. The mind being weakened to unmindfulness, loses the chain of its desires from it; as a necklace of pearls being loosened from its broken string, tosses the precious gems all about the ground.

7. RÁma! they that are unmindful of the sÁstras, and mind to undermine them; resemble the worms and insects, that mine the ground wherein they remain.

8. The fickle eye-sight of the idle and curious gazer on all things, becomes motionless after their ignorant curiosity is over and has ceased to stir; as the shaking lotus of the lake becomes steady, after the gusts of wind have passed away and stopped.

9. You have got rid, O RÁma! of your thought of all entities and non-entities, and found your steadiness in the ever-steady unity of God; as the restless winds mix at last with the calm vacuum (after their blowing and breathing over the solid earth, and in the hollow sky).

10. I ween you have been awakened to sense, by these series of my sermons to you; as kings are awakened from their nightly sleep, by the sound of their eulogists and the music of timbrels.

11. Seeing that common people of low understandings, are impressed by the preachings of their parish parsons; I have every reason to believe that my sermons must make their impression, upon the good understanding of RÁma.

12. As you are in the habit of considering well, the good counsel of others in your mind; so I doubt not, that my counsel will penetrate your mind, as the cool rain-water enters into the parched ground of the earth.

13. Knowing me as your family priest, and my family as the spiritual guides of Raghus race for ever; you must receive with regard my good advices to you, and set my words as a neck-chain to your heart.