The person who’s to their body-cave
Clouded by many moods, and in delusion sunk,
Hard it is for that one, far from detachment,
To abandon sensual pleasures in the world.Bound the worldly pleasures of the past,
And hard to liberate are they in future time,
From others they’re not free, not liberated—
They’re attached to past and the future too.Those who are niggardly, who hank after pleasures,
infatuated they are, all their things—losses all!
But subjected to pain they lament their losses—
For how can all this be taken away, they wail?Therefore should a person train,
Seeing the roughness of the world,
To take not to a wicked way,
For the wise say, life is short!I see here trembling, fearful in the world,
These people gone under the sway of craving for births—
Base people floundering in the jaws of death,
Not free from craving for repeated birth.Look at them trembling with their egotistic selfishness,
Like fish in a stream fast drying-up,
Seeing it so, fare unselfish in this life,
And cease worrying on different states of being.No longer longing towards either extreme
Having understood touch, together with letting go,
One should do what others will praise and not blame,
A wise one is not stained by what is seen and heard.The sage has known perception and crossed the flood,
So with nothing tainted, nothing wrapped around,
They fare on in diligence with the arrow drawn,
Neither longing for this world nor for another.
snp.4.2 Suttanipata
The Eight on the Body as a Cave
- Translator: Laurence Khantipalo Mills
Eight on the Cave
Trapped in a cave, thickly overspread,sunk in delusion they stay.
A person like this is far from seclusion,
for sensual pleasures in the world are not easy to give up.
The chains of desire, the bonds of life’s pleasures
are hard to escape, for one cannot free another.
Looking to the past or the future,
they pray for these pleasures or former ones.
Greedy, fixated, infatuated by sensual pleasures,
they are incorrigible, habitually immoral.
When led to suffering they lament,
“What will become of us when we pass away from here?”
That’s why a person should train in this life:
should you know that anything in the world is wrong,
don’t act wrongly on account of that;
for the wise say this life is short.
I see the world’s population floundering,
given to craving for future lives.
Base men wail in the jaws of death,
not rid of craving for life after life.
See them flounder over belongings,
like fish in puddles of a dried-up stream.
Seeing this, live unselfishly,
forming no attachment to future lives.
Rid of desire for both ends,
having completely understood contact, free of greed,
doing nothing for which they’d blame themselves,
the wise don’t cling to the seen and the heard.
Having completely understood perception and having crossed the flood,
the sage, not clinging to possessions,
with dart plucked out, living diligently,
does not long for this world or the next.