33. Our parents also had numberless offspring in their past lives, and the branches of human generation are as numerous, as the innumerable fruits and flowers on trees. 34. The numbers of our friends and relatives in our repeated lives in this world, have been as great, as the innumerable fruits and flowers of a large tree, in all its passed seasons. 35. If we are to lament over the loss of our parents and children, that are dead and gone; then why not lament also for those, that we have lost and left behind in all our past lives? 36. It is all but a delusion, O my fortunate boy, that is presented before us in this illusive world; while in truth, O my sensible child, we have nobody, whom we may call to be our real friends or positive enemies in this world. 37. There is no loss of any body or thing in their true sense in the world; but they appear to exist and disappear, like the appearance of water in the dry desert. 38. The royal dignity that thou seest here, adorned with the stately umbrella and flapping fans; is but a dream lasting for a few days. 39. Consider these phenomena in their true light, and thou wilt find my boy, that none of these nor ourselves nor any one of us, are to last for ever: shun therefore thy error of the passing world from thy mind for ever. 40. That these are dead and gone, and these are existent before us, are but errors of our minds, and creatures of our false notions and fond desires, and without any reality in them. 41. Our notions and desires, paint and present these various changes before our sight; as the solar rays represent the water in the mirage. So our fancies working in the field of our ignorance, produce the erroneous conceptions, which roll on like currents in the eventful ocean of the world, with the waves of favorable and unfavorable events to us. CHAPTER XX. REMONSTRATION OF PÁVANA. Argument. Punya’s relation of his various transmigrations and their woes to Pávana. Punya said:—Who is our father and who our mother, and who are our friends and relatives, except our notion of them as such; and these again are as the dust raised by the gusts of our airy fancy? 2. The conceptions of friends and foes, of our sons and relations are the products of our affection and hatred to them; and these being the effects of our ignorance, are soon made to disappear into airy nothing, upon enlightenment of the understanding. 3. The thought of one as a friend, makes him a friend, and thinking one as an enemy makes him an enemy; the knowledge of a thing as honey and of another as poison, is owing to our opinion of it. 4. There being but one universal soul equally pervading the whole, there can be no reason of the conception of one as a friend and of another as an enemy. 5. Think my boy in thy mind what thou art, and what is that thing which makes thy identity, when thy body is but a composition of bones, ribs, flesh and blood, and not thyself.