Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/47

Rh the pestle lies motionless, and the burning charcoal is extinguished; when people have eaten, and when dishes are removed. If he fail to obtain food he should not be sorrowful; if he succeed in obtaining it he should not be glad. He should only care to obtain a sufficiency to support life, and he should not be anxious about his utensils.”

As to the character of his thoughts: “A Sannyasi should reflect on the transmigrations of men, which are caused by their sinful deeds; on their downfall into a region of darkness, and their torments in the mansions of Yama, (the God of the dead;) on their separation from those whom they love, and their union with those whom they hate; on their strength being overpowered by old age, and their bodies racked with disease; on their agonizing departure from this corporeal frame, and their formation again in the womb; on the misery attached to embodied spirits from a violation of their duties, and the imperishable bliss which attaches to embodied spirits who have abundantly performed every duty.

“The body is a mansion, with bones for its rafters and beams, with nerves and tendons for cords, with muscles and blood for mortar, with skin for its outward covering, and filled with no sweet perfumes, but loaded with refuse. It is a mansion infested by age and by sorrow, the seat of diseases, harassed by pains, haunted with the quality of darkness, and incapable of standing long. Such a mansion of the vital soul should always be quitted with cheerfulness by its occupier.”—Institutes of Hindoo Law, VI, 76, 77.

When you look around and inquire for these self-denying recluses, with their sublime superiority to the things of earth and the wants and wishes of the human heart, you will not find them; certainly not among the Brahmins. Few of these have ever adopted in reality a life so like that of the Yogee, or Self-torturer. All testimony goes to show that Menu's ordinances for the third and fourth stages of the Brahmin's life have lain in his law-book with not one Brahmin in ten thousand even commencing to make them a reality of human experience. It was too much for humanity, and could only be embraced by some fanatic of a Fakir, who would