8. Hear me to relate to you the best lesson of indifference (_i.e._ the unattachment to the world and life), which the lotus-eyed lord (Krishna) taught to Arjuna, and whereby that sagely prince became liberated in life time. (Here is an anachronism of antedating Krishnárjuna prior to Ráma). 9. Thus Arjuna the son of Pandu will happily pass his life, and which I hope you will imitate, if you want to pass your days without any grief or sorrow. 10. Ráma said:--Tell me sir, when will this Arjuna the son of Pandu, come to be born on earth, and who is this Hari of his, that is to deliver this lesson of indifference to the world to him? 11. Vasishtha replied:--There is only the entity of one soul, to whom this appellation is applied by fiction only. He remains in himself from time without beginning and end, as the sky is situated in a vacuum. 12. We behold in him the phantasmagoria of this extended world, as we see the different ornaments in gold, and the waves and billows in the sea. (Identity of the cause and effect of the producer and produced). 13. The fourteen kinds of created beings display themselves in him; and in him is the network of this universe, wherein all these worlds are suspended, as birds hanging in the net in which they are caught. 14. In him reside the deities Indra and Yama and the sun and moon, who are renowned and hallowed in the scriptures; and in him abide the five elemental creation, and they that have become the regents (of heaven and earth). 15. That the one thing is virtue and therefore expedient, and the other is vice and therefore improper, are both placed in him as his ordinances (or eternal laws); and depending on the free agency (sankalpa) of men, to accept or reject the one or the other for good or evil. (Hence there is no positive virtue or vice, nor God the author of good and evil; but it is the obedience or disobedience to his fixed laws, that amounts to the one or other). 16. It is obedience to the Divine ordinance, that the gods are still employed in their fixed charges with their steady minds. 17. The lord Yama is accustomed to make his penance, at the end of every four yugas (or kalpa age), on account of his greatness in destruction of the creatures of God. (Yama the Indian Pluto and god of death.) 18. Sometimes he sat penitent for eight years, and all others for a dozen of years, often times he made his penance for five or seven years, and many times for full sixteen years. 19. On a certain occasion as Yama sat observant of his austerity, and indifferent to his duty, death ceased to hunt after living beings in all the worlds. 20. Hence the multitude of living beings filled the surface of the earth, and made ground pathless and impassable by others. They multiplied like the filth born gnats in the rainy weather, that obstruct the passage of elephants.