The sage continued:--The wise man shines in the assembly of the learned, as the sun illumines the assemblage of lotuses, in his investigation of the duties of religion and ceremonial acts, leading to the welfare of men in both worlds. 2. The heavenly felicity which is attained by the learned and wise by means of their spiritual knowledge, is as an ocean of bliss; before which the prosperity of god Indra even, appears to dwindle away as rotten straws amidst the billows. 3. I find no such felicity or prosperity, in the three regions of this earth or heaven above or in the pátála below, which is greater or comparable with the blissfulness of learning and wisdom. 4. The learned have as clear a sight of the true state of all things, as the moon-light gives a clear view of the sphere of stars in the cloudless sky. 5. The visible world, soon vanishes from sight, and turns to the invisible Brahma, by the sapience of the wise; as a rosary of cord, appearing at first as a snake, is soon found to be a line upon its inspection. 6. That Brahmá--the god is ever situated in his Brahma-hood or godhead is a truth evident by itself; and that it is his nature that gives rise to the terms creation, destruction, body and others. (Gloss: that the words creation &c., appertain to his very nature, and are not distinct from him). 7. He to whom the existence of the world is _nil_ and naught, has no care or concern for acts and duties, which are no more than blank letters to him. 8. It is possible to believe in the production of the material world, from the prior existence of its material cause; but in want of such there can be no world, nor can there be a cause of it, when it is itself null and void. 9. It is only the reflection of Brahma, that takes the names of the earth and all other things; wherefore it is not necessary for these mere reflexions to have any cause at all. (The substance of God, being the cause of the shadow). 10. As the men seen in a dream, have no real cause except the imagination of the dreamer; such are the persons seen in our waking dreams, but mere reflexions of our imaginations, and not the production of their parents. 11. As there is not the causality of the prior acts, for the appearance of persons in human forms in our dream; so neither is there any actual cause for people seen in waking dream, to assume the garb of humanity upon them. 12. Both prior acts as well as desires, are equally false in their causality, of framing living beings in different shapes in their repeated births, just as they are no causes of producing the persons seen in our dreams. 13. Men appear as dreams and their impressions, in the course of their births and deaths; and they are conscious of this state or that as they think themselves either as the one or the other (_i.e._ we seem to be or not, as we think ourselves to be).