end or goes into hell.  That Reciter who is not endued with wisdom and who is foolish, becomes stupefied or deluded; and in consequence of such delusion has to go to hell where he is obliged to indulge in regrets.[631] If a person of even firm heart, resolving to complete the discipline, betakes himself to recitation, but fails to attain to completion in consequence of his having freed himself from attachments by a violent stretch without genuine conviction of their inutility or harmful character, he also has to go to hell[632].

“Yudhishthira said, ’When the Reciter attains to the essence of that which exists in its own nature (without being anything like created or born objects), which is Supreme, which is indescribable and inconceivable, and which dwells in the syllable om forming the subject of both recitation and meditation (indeed, when Reciters to a state of Brahma), why is it that they have again to take birth in embodied forms?’

“Bhishma, said, ’In consequence of the absence of true knowledge and wisdom, Reciters obtain diverse descriptions of hell.  The discipline followed by Reciters is certainly very superior.  These, however, that I have spoken of, are the faults that appertain to it.’”

SECTION CXCVIII

“Yudhishthira said, ’Tell me what description of hell is obtained by a Reciter?  I feel, O king, a curiosity to know this.  It behoveth thee to discourse on the subject.’

“Bhishma said, ’Thou hast sprung from a portion of the god of righteousness.  Thou art by nature observant of righteousness.  Listen, O sinless one, with undivided attention, to these words resting on righteousness as their basis.  Those regions that are owned by the high-souled gods, that are of diverse aspects and colours, of diverse descriptions and productive of diverse fruits, and that are of great excellence, those ears again that:  move at the will of the riders, those beautiful mansions and hells, those various pleasure-gardens embellished with golden lotuses, those regions that belong to the four Regents and Sukra and Vrihaspati and the Maruts and Viswedevas and Sadhyas and the Aswins, and the Rudras and the Adityas and the Vasus, and other denizens of heaven, are, O sire, spoken of as hells, when compared with the region of the Supreme Soul.  The region last spoken of is without any fear (of change for the worse), uncreate (and therefore, in its true nature), without pain of any kind (such as ignorance and delusion), without any agreeable or disagreeable element, beyond the reach of the three attributes (of Sattwa, Rajas, and Tamas), freed from the eight incidents, (viz., the five primal elements, the senses, the:  mind, and the intellect), without the three (distinctions between the knower, the known, and act of knowing); freed also from the four attributes (seeing, hearing, thinking, and knowing),[633] without the fourfold causes (of knowledge), without joy and delight and sorrow