gain the whole
of Mithila were burnt and reduced to ashes, nothing of mine will be
burnt!' As a person on the hill-top looketh down upon men on the plain
below, so he that has got up on the top of the mansion of knowledge,
seeth people grieving for things that do not call for grief. He, however,
that is of foolish understanding, does not see this. He who, casting his
eyes on visible things, really seeth them, is said to have eyes and
understanding. The faculty called understanding is so called because of
the knowledge and comprehension it gives of unknown and incomprehensible
things. He who is acquainted with the words of persons that are learned,
that are of cleansed souls, and that have attained to a state of Brahma,
succeeds in obtaining great honours. When one seeth creatures of infinite
diversity to be all one and the same and to be but diversified emanations
from the same essence, one is then said to have attained Brahma.[52]
Those who reach this high state of culture attain to that supreme and
blissful end, and not they who are without knowledge, or they who are of
little and narrow souls, or they who are bereft of understanding, or they
who are without penances. Indeed, everything rests on the (cultivated)
understanding!"'"

SECTION XVIII

"Vaisampayana said, 'When Yudhishthira, after saying these words, became
silent, Arjuna, afflicted by that speech of the king, and burning with
sorrow and grief, once more addressed his eldest brother, saying, "People
recite this old history, O Bharata, about the discourse between the ruler
of the Videhas and his queen. That history has reference to the words
which the grief-stricken spouse of the ruler of the Videhas had said to
her lord when the latter, abandoning his kingdom, had resolved to lead a
life of mendicancy. Casting off wealth and children and wives and
precious possessions of various kinds and the established path for
acquiring religious merit and fire itself,[53] King Janaka shaved his
head (and assumed the garb of a mendicant). His dear spouse beheld him
deprived of wealth, installed in the observance of the vow of mendicancy,
resolved to abstain from inflicting any kind of injury on others, free
from vanity of every kind, and prepared to subsist upon a handful of
barley fallen off from the stalk and to be got by picking the grains from
crevices in the field. Approaching her lord at a time when no one was
with him, the queen, endued with great strength of