intelligence in the infancy of human beings and the
deterioration and destruction of the body, marking
the little attachment creatures have to the quality
of Sattwa in consequence of their being overwhelmed
by wrath and stupefaction, beholding also only one
among thousands of human beings resolved to struggle
after the acquisition of Emancipation, understanding
the difficulty of attaining to Emancipation according
to what is stated in the scriptures, seeing the marked
solicitude that creatures manifest for all unattained
objects and their comparative indifference to all
objects that have been attained marking the wickedness
that results from all objects of the senses O king
and the repulsive bodies, O son of Kunti, of persons
reft of life, and the residence, always fraught with
grief, of human beings, O Bharata, in houses (in the
midst of spouses and children), knowing the end of
those terrible and fallen men who become guilty of
slaying Brahmanas, and of those wicked Brahmanas that
are addicted to the drinking of alcoholic stimulants,
and the equally sad end of those that become criminally
attached to the spouses of their preceptors, and of
those men, O Yudhishthira, that do not properly reverence
their mothers, as also of those that have no reverence
and worship to offer to the deities, understanding
also, with the help of that knowledge (which their
philosophy imparts), the end that of all perpetrators
of wicked acts, and the diverse ends that overtake
those who have taken birth among the intermediate
orders, ascertaining the diverse declarations of the
Vedas, the courses of seasons, the fading of years,
of months, of fortnights, and of days, beholding directly
the waxing and the waning of the Moon, seeing the
rising and the ebbing of the seas, and the diminution
of wealth and its increase once more, and the separation
of united objects, the lapse of Yugas, the destruction
of mountains, the drying up of rivers, the deterioration
of (the purity of) the several orders and the end
also of that deterioration occurring repeatedly, beholding
the birth, decrepitude, death, and sorrows of creatures,
knowing truly the faults attaching to the body and
the sorrows to which human beings are subject, and
the vicissitudes to which the bodies of creatures are
subject, and understanding all the faults that attach
to their own souls, and also all the inauspicious
faults that attach to their own bodies (the followers
of the Sankhya philosophy succeed in attaining to
Emancipation).
“Yudhishthira said, ’O thou of immeasurable energy, what are those faults that thou seest attaching to one’s body? It behoveth thee to ex-pound this doubt to me fully and truly’?