Verses 530–539

530. Water sinks into the earth; a sprout turns into earth (observe phrase); the plant is both husband and son to the earth-(This has occurred elsewhere). The earth is mother and wife of all men.

531. If thou give food to one who has failed (lost his opportunity), having failed (or lost luck) he will be ruined even by that food. When fortune is gone, food itself is death. (Simple construction, untranslatable in English).

532. If a poor wretch void of means and subsistence dies, no one who has means will go near him; will not men who have means go to those have subsistence.

533. Will not the life of the poor end? Will not they roam from place to place? They who will not look towards him who has no support, these are themselves destitute. (puns)

534. Wealth suits well the acts that we participate in it. Power is a tie on us. (The power is led on to great oppression). Wealth and power each do us harm. (loose version)

535. Shall those who while they have wealth labour and toil and in the feast days (on happy days) bestow on others what they ask, shall these be called hardmen?

536. Those who are not able to know the everlasting, and who are ignorant of wisdom who know not the truth, murderers, have no fate (course), but this, in the fire of hell and in paining hunger shall they...

537. Those ignorant souls that know not that this can be done (avuta) and this not (cāmi) ignorant of the truth, daily through impurity produce offspring; unable to know the spirit they continue to die and born anew in this world.

538. Bodies are transient, virtue is eternal, all the virtue we perform is alone the thing that cannot be ruined. These brutes of men though they see and hear cannot understand.

539. A village void of farmers is a sorrow to the curnam. The hatred of the curnam is a grief to the farmer. The farmer and the curnam are to each other like the buckets (pots) on a yoke.