Whatever creature is born is resolved once more into the five
constituent elements upon the exhaustion of his merits and demerits; and
urged again by the merits and demerits won in that life enters into
another body resulting from his acts.[1318] His abodes always resulting
from Avidya, desire, and acts, he migrates from body to body, abandoning
one after another repeatedly, urged on by Time, like a person abandoning
house after house in succession. They that are wise, and endued with
certainty of knowledge, do not give way to grief upon beholding this
(migration). Only they that are foolish, erroneously supposing
relationships (where relationship in reality there is none) indulge in
grief at sight of such changes of abode. This Jiva is no one's relation;
there is none again that may be said to belong to him. He is always
alone, and he himself creates his own body and his own happiness and
misery. This Jiva is never born, nor doth he ever die. Freed from the
bond of body, he succeeds sometimes in attaining to the highest end.
Deprived of body, because freed through the exhaustion of acts from
bodies that are the results of merits and demerits, Jiva at last attains
to Brahma. For the exhaustion of both merits and demerits, Knowledge has
been ordained as the cause in the Sankhya school. Upon the exhaustion of
merit and demerit, when Jiva attains to the status of Brahma,[1319] (they
that are learned in the scriptures) behold (with the eye of the
scriptures) the attainment of Jiva to the highest end.
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