1. In this Bhagavata is described again and again the worshipful Sri Hari, the soul and substance of all that exists – Sri Hari from whose creative will Brahma originated and form whose destructive urge Rudra arose.
2. Oh King! Abandon the feeling that you are going to die – a feeling that befits only animals. For, the real ‘you’ are not, like the body, a previously non-existent thing now come into being.
3. The real ‘you’ did not descend like a son from a father, or like a tree from a seed, generated by a being that is itself originated. You are, on the other hand, like the fire, which, though seen in association with wood, is not its product and is entirely different from it.
4. In the dream, one can experience one’s own decapitation. Physical death in the waking state is on par with it. The Atman, which is not one with the body, but only its witness, is not affected by death. It is un-originated and deathless.
5. When a pot is destroyed, the sky enclosed by it becomes one with the universal, un-particularized sky. So also, when the body perishes through jnana, the Jiva becomes one with the Brahman.
6. It is mind that creates all the adjuncts limiting the Atman like the bodies - subtle and physical, qualities and karma. And Maya, the Lord’s power, is what brings this mind into being, and because of the mind, man has this entanglement in the cycle of birth and death.
7. A light is a light as long as there is mutual relationship through contact between oil, its receptacle, the wick and the flame. The trans-migratory existence of the Jiva is a situation arising from the combination of several factors. Being a modification of sattva, rajas and tamas, the constituents of Prakrti, samsara is a state of constant flux.
8. In this process of birth and death of the embodied being, the Atman is never born, and never dies too. Birth and death apply only to the body, the adjunct of the Atman in embodiment. The Atman on the other hand is the self-conscious Witness – beyond what is gross or subtle, the support of everything like the akasa, changeless, endless and incomparable.
9. Oh noble one! In this way, through discriminative intelligence and constant contemplation on the Lord, grasp the truth of the Atman amidst Its adjuncts of body-mind complex.
10. If this truth of the Atman is grasped, the serpent Takshaka will not consume you under the prompting of the sage’s son. The causes that bring about death will not even touch you, who are one with the Lord and verily the Death of death itself.
11-12. When ‘I am the Brahman, the Transcendent Effulgence’, ‘The Brahman, the Terminal State, am I’ – are your firm convictions, who constantly practise this communion of the individual self with the universal undivided Self in a non-dual attitude, of what consequence is the Takshaka lolling his tongue and belching poison? For, everything – this Takshaka, his poison, your body, the whole manifested world, etc - will have no existence for you apart from the Brahman.
13. Oh dear one! Whatever you have wanted to know about the working of Sri Hari - the Supreme Brahman, I have imparted to you, established in the Self. Is there any more question remaining to be answered?
