done which we have fallen off from the position we had?  Time is the one creator and destroyer.  Nothing else is cause (in the universe for the production of any effect).  Decline, fall, sovereignty, happiness, misery, birth and death,—­a learned person by encountering any of these neither rejoices nor indulges in sorrow.  Thou, O Indra, knowest us.  We also, O Vasava, know thee.  Why then dost thou brag in this fashion before me, forgetting, O shameless one, that it is Time that hath made thee what thou art?  Thou didst thyself witness what my prowess was in those days.  The energy and might I used to display in all my battles, furnish sufficient evidence.  The Adityas, the Rudras, the Sadhyas, the Vasus, and the Maruts, O lord of Sachi, were all vanquished by me.  Thou knowest it well thyself, O Sakra, that in the great encounter between the gods and the Asuras, the assembled deities were quickly routed by me by the fury of my attack.  Mountains with their forests and the denizens that lived in those forests, were repeatedly hurled by us.  Many were the mountain summits with craggy edges that I broke on thy head.  What, however, can I do now?  Time is incapable of being resisted.  If it were not so, do not think that I would not have ventured to kill thee with that thunderbolt of thine with even a blow of my fist.  The present, however, is not the hour with me for the display of prowess.  The hour that hath come is such that I should adopt tranquillity now and tolerate everything.  It is for this reason, O Sakra, that I put up with all this insolence of thine.  Know, however, that I am less able to bear insolence than even thou.  Thou braggest before one who, upon his time having matured, is surrounded on all sides by Time’s conflagration and bound strongly in Time’s cords.  Yonder stands that dark individual who is incapable of being resisted by the world.  Of fierce form, he stands there, having bound me like an inferior animal bound with cords.  Gain and loss, happiness and misery, lust and wrath, birth and death, captivity and release,—­these all one encounters in Time’s course.  I am not the actor.  Thou art not the actor.  He is the actor who, indeed, is omnipotent.  That Time ripens me (for throwing me down) like a fruit that has appeared on a tree.  There are certain acts by doing which one person obtains happiness in Time’s course.  By doing those very acts another obtains misery in the course of Time.  Versed as I am with the virtues of Time, it behoves me not to indulge in grief when it is Time that has assailed me.  It is for this reason, O Sakra, that I do not grieve.  Grief cannot do us any good.  The grief of one that indulges in grief never dispels one’s calamity.  On the other hand, grief destroys one’s power.  It is for this that I do not indulge in grief.’

“Thus addressed by the chief of the Daityas, he of a hundred sacrifices, viz., the puissant and thousand-eyed chastiser of Paka, restrained his wrath and said these words.’