Tell me further the diseases of the mind, for you are all-wise and richly endowed with compassion.’ ‘Listen, my friend, with the greatest reverence and devotion while I briefly expound these rules of moral philosophy.

There is no form as good as the form of a man, a form every living creature, moving or motionless, most fervently desires. It is the ladder that takes the soul either to hell or to heaven or to final liberation, and is the bestower of the blessings of wisdom, dispassion and devotion.

Those who have attained to this body and yet worship not Hari but wallow in the very basest of sensual lusts throw away the philosopher’s stone which they had in their hands to grasp instead bits of common glass.

There is no misery in the world so terrible as poverty and no blessing to equal the communion with the saints. To be charitable to others in thought and word and deed. O king of birds, is the innate disposition of the good:

The good endure pain in the interest of others, but evil wretches do so to give others pain. Tender-hearted saints, like the birch tree, submit to the direst distress (even allow their bark to be torn off) for the good of their neighbours;

But the wicked, like the hemp, have their skin flayed off and perish in agony in order to be able to bind others with ropes. Listen, O enemy of serpents; like snakes and rats, the wicked do harm to others, even though they have no purpose of their own to serve.

Having destroyed their neighbours’ property, they perish themselves, like the hail which melts away to nothing after ruining the crops. The rising of the wicked, like that of the notorious and contemptible planet Ketu, is a source of calamity to the world.