Medicines and herbs and all the diverse sciences are acquired
by means of penance alone, for all acquisition has penance for its root.
Whatever is difficult of acquisition, difficult to learn, difficult to
vanquish, difficult to pass through, are all achievable by penance, for
penance is irresistible. One that drinks alcoholic liquors, one that
slays a Brahmana, one that steals, one that destroys a foetus, one that
violates one's preceptor's bed, becomes cleansed of such sin by penance
well performed. Human beings, Pitris, deities, (sacrificial) animals,
beasts and birds, and all other creatures mobile and immobile, by always
devoting themselves to penances, become crowned with success by penance
alone. In like manner, the deities, endued with great powers of illusion,
have attained to Heaven. Those who without idleness perform acts with
expectations, being full of egoism, approach the presence of Prajapati.
Those high-souled ones, however, who are devoid of mineness and freed
from egoism through the pure contemplation of Yoga, attain to the great
and highest regions. Those who best understand the self, having attained
to Yoga contemplation and having their minds always cheerful, enter into
the unmanifest accumulation of happiness. Those persons who are freed
from the idea of mineness as also from egoism and who are reborn after
having attained to the fullness of Yoga contemplation, enter (when they
depart from such life) into the highest region reserved for the great,
viz.
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