Him because of His compassionateness, how is it that you loudly proclaim, the Lord is the cause of this Universe ?
'Moreover, friend, believing, as you do, that everything is done by the Lord[1],
34. 'What hope have you of propitiating the Lord by praise, supplication, and the like? For the Selfborn Being works those actions of yours himself.
35. 'If, however, you say, the sacrifice is performed by yourself, still you cannot disavow that He is the author of it. He who is self-acting out of the fulness of His power, is the author of a deed, no other.
36, 37. 'Again, if the Lord is the performer of all sins, however many there are committed, what virtue of His have you in view that you should foster devotion to Him? On the other hand, if it is not He who commits them, since He abhors wickedness, it is not right to say that everything is created by the Lord.
38, 39. 'Further, the sovereignty of the Lord must rest either on the lawful order of things (Dharma) or on something else. If on the former, then the Lord cannot have existed before the Dharma. If effected by some external cause, it should rather be called “bondage;" for if a state of dependency should not bear that name, what state may not be called “sovereignty?”
'Nevertheless, if in spite of this reasoning, attached to the doctrine of Devotion[2] and without having well reflected on its probability or improbability,
40. 'You persist in holding the Supreme Being and Lord for the sole cause of the whole universe, does it, then, become you to impute to me the murder of that chief of monkeys, which has been decided by the Supreme Being ?'
- ↑ The Bodhisattva is much helped here by the double sense implied by the words sarvam îsvarakritam, meaning 'all is created by the Lord’ as well as 'everything is done by the Lord.'
- ↑ The belief in a Supreme Being, Lord (Îsvara), is in itself of course also a belief in the strong effectiveness of devotion (bhakti).
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