cannot be united.  So one resolved to seek escape cannot abide possessed of kingly dignity!  And if you say a man may be a king, and at the same time prepare deliverance for himself, there is no certainty in this! to seek certain escape is not to risk it thus; it is through this uncertain frame of mind that once a man gone forth is led to go back home again; but I, my mind is not uncertain; severing the baited hook of relationship, with straightforward purpose, I have left my home.  Then tell me, why should I return again?”

The great minister, inwardly reflecting, thought, “The mind of the royal prince, my master, is full of wisdom, and agreeable to virtue, what he says is reasonable and fitly framed.”  Then he addressed the prince and said:  “According to what your highness states, he who seeks religion must seek it rightly; but this is not the fitting time for you; your royal father, old and of declining years, thinking of you his son, adds grief to grief; you say indeed, ’I find my joy in rescue.  To go back would be apostasy.’  But yet your joy denotes unwisdom, and argues want of deep reflection; you do not see, because you seek the fruit, how vain to give up present duty.  There are some who say, There is ‘hereafter’; others there are who say, ‘Nothing hereafter.’  So whilst this question hangs in suspense, why should a man give up his present pleasure?  If perchance there is ‘hereafter,’ we ought to bear patiently what it brings; if you say, ‘Hereafter is not,’ then there is not either salvation!  If you say, ‘Hereafter is,’ you would not say, ’Salvation causes it.’  As earth is hard, or fire is hot, or water moist, or wind is mobile, ‘Hereafter’ is just so.  It has its own distinct nature.  So when we speak of pure and impure, each comes from its own distinctive nature.  If you should say, ‘By some contrivance this can be removed,’ such an opinion argues folly.  Every root within the moral world has its own nature predetermined; loving remembrance and forgetfulness, these have their nature fixed and positive; so likewise age, disease, and death, these sorrows, who can escape by strategy?  If you say, ’Water can put out fire,’ or ‘Fire can cause water to boil and pass away,’ then this proves only that distinctive natures may be mutually destructive; but nature in harmony produces living things; so man when first conceived within the womb, his hands, his feet, and all his separate members, his spirit and his understanding, of themselves are perfected; but who is he who does it?  Who is he that points the prickly thorn?  This too is nature, self-controlling.  And take again the different kinds of beasts, these are what they are, without desire on their part; and so, again, the heaven-born beings, whom the self-existent (Isvara) rules, and all the world of his creation; these have no self-possessed power of expedients; for if they had a means of causing birth, there would be also means for controlling death, and then what need of self-contrivance, or seeking