इष्टापूर्तं मन्यमाना वरिष्ठं
नान्यच्छ्रेयो वेदयन्ते प्रमूढाः ।
नाकस्य पृष्ठे ते सुकृतेऽनुभूत्वेमं
लोकं हीनतरं वा विशन्ति ॥ १०॥
iṣṭāpūrtaṃ manyamānā variṣṭhaṃ
nānyacchreyo vedayante pramūḍhāḥ .
nākasya pṛṣṭhe te sukṛte’nubhūtvemaṃ
lokaṃ hīnataraṃ vā viśanti .. 10..
Ignorant fools, regarding sacrifices and humanitarian works as the highest, do not know any higher good. Having enjoyed their reward on the heights of heaven, gained by good works, they enter again this world or a lower one.
Commentary:
Many of these verses sound like the verses of the Bhagavadgita, in the Ninth Chapter, where it is said that after enjoying the glories of heaven you come back due to the exhaustion of the merits accumulated by good deeds. Ishta and purta are two types of good deeds that people do in this world. Sacrifices along the lines of the Vedic injunctions are called ishta. Other philanthropic deeds such as distributing wealth, planting trees, giving charity, constructing rest houses, all these are called purta. These are the two types of charity that one can think of. One is heavenly; the other is earthly. But people may imagine that this is the be-all and end-all of all things. Just because you please the divinities in heaven, such as Indra, etc., and the people in this world, it does not mean you have pleased the realities of life. They are quite different things.
Nānyac chreyo vedayante pramūḍhāḥ: Very ignorant people imagine not that this is futile in the end. Having reached the peak of the blissful experience of heavenly worlds on account of the consequences of their good deeds, they come back to this world, or they may go to even worse worlds—lokaṁ hīnataraṁ vā viśanti. The karmas of an individual work in inscrutable ways. When a person like a king has the facility to perform yajnas like the Ashvamedha, it only means that some aspect of his prarabdha karma which is conducive to his progress in the world has manifested itself, subjugating certain other aspects of his karmas which are there in store as sanchita karma, which also have to germinate one day or the other. So when, due to the pressure exerted by the onrush of the good karmas which have led him to this body of a king and permit him to perform sacrifices of this kind, enabling him to go to the heavenly world, are exhausted when they get used up, what happens? The force exerted by these good karmas constituting this present prarabdha will vanish completely like mist before the sun. Then suddenly he falls. He will fall into a condition which would be the area of action of another set of prarabdha which is waiting to be experienced and to come forward in due course of time. That remnant of prarabdha which would be the cause of his future birth may not be equivalent to that earlier one which made him king. It may be another thing altogether. He may be born as a poor man. He may be born on this very Earth, or he may have such prarabdha which may have been suppressed earlier on account of the overwhelming power of the other prarabdhas, which may bring him down to a lower level, lower than even the human species.
So it is very, very unsafe to rely on certain temporary experiences through which you are passing in this world. You may be a king, of course, but you shall not be a king always, because kings can be beggars the next day. It does not take much time for them to fall, and all the kings have fallen. Empires are broken. Therefore, nothing can be relied upon in this world finally, so beware. Not only will you be born into this world as a human being, but the caution is that you may be born as something even worse on account of some other karmas that may be embedded in your sanchita storehouse, of which you have no knowledge just now.
Therefore, no action can break the chain of birth and death caused by action itself. Action cannot destroy actions. There must be some super-active force that has to be employed for the purpose of breaking down the chain of metempsychosis, the series of births and deaths. A prisoner cannot release another prisoner. The prisoner has to become free first. People who are bound by karmas, and are involved in the experience of the fruits of karmas, cannot destroy further fruits of karma of a similar nature. That karma cannot destroy karma is repeatedly hammered on our ears by Acharya Sankara, the meaning of which very few people can understand. Only those can be regarded as really blessed who restrain themselves and do not go for the imagined joys of the temporal, heavenly world, and who internally restrain themselves by tapas and intense concentration of the mind.