The Vishnu Purana: Book VI: Chapter V | Internet Sacred Text Archive

CHAP. V.

The third kind of dissolution, or final liberation from existence. Evils of worldly life. Sufferings in infancy, manhood, old age. Pains of hell. Imperfect felicity of heaven. Exemption from birth desirable by the wise. The nature of spirit or god. Meaning of the terms Bhagavat and Vásudeva.

THE wise man having investigated the three kinds of worldly pain, or mental and bodily affliction and the like 1, and having acquired true wisdom, and detachment from human objects, obtains final dissolution. The first of the three pains, or Ádhyátmika, is of two kinds, bodily and mental. Bodily pain is of many kinds, as you shall hear. Affections of the head, catarrh, fever, cholic, fistula, spleen, hemorrhoids, intumescence, sickness, ophthalmia, dysentery, leprosy, and many other diseases, constitute bodily affliction. Mental sufferings are love, anger, fear, hate, covetousness, stupefaction, despair, sorrow, malice, disdain, jealousy, envy, and many other passions which are engendered in the mind. These and various other afflictions, mental or corporeal, are comprised, under the class of worldly sufferings, which is called Ádhyátmika (natural and inseparable). That pain to which, excellent Brahman, the term Ádhibhautika (natural, but incidental) is applied, is every kind of evil which is inflicted (from without) upon men by beasts, birds, men, goblins, snakes, fiends, or reptiles; and the pain that is termed Ádhidaivika (or superhuman) is the work of cold, heat, wind, rain, lightning, and other (atmospherical phenomena). Affliction, Maitreya, is multiplied in thousands of shapes in the progress of conception, birth, decay, disease, death, and hell. The tender (and subtile) animal exists in the embryo, surrounded by abundant filth, floating in water, and distorted in its back, neck, and bones; enduring severe pain even in the course of its developement, as disordered by the acid, acrid, bitter, pungent, and saline articles of its mother's food; incapable of extending or contracting

its limbs; reposing amidst the slime of ordure and urine; every way incommoded; unable to breathe; endowed with consciousness, and calling to memory many hundred previous births. Thus exists the embryo in profound affliction, bound to the world by its former works.