Madhu Kanda. Adhyaya 1, Brahmana 3. The contest of the vital breath
New to these pages?
Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
Their evil carried to the ends
This deity, striking away the evil, the death, of those deities, carried it to where the quarters end. There it deposited their evils. Therefore one should not approach a foreign people, nor go to the frontier, lest one meet with evil, with death.
This vital breath struck off the death and evil of the organ-deities and carried it away to the far end of the directions, and there it set down their evils. For this reason a person should not go among an alien people or to the distant borderlands, lest he run into that evil, that death, which was laid down there.