Indra said to him:
"Pratardana, let me give you a boon to choose." And Pratardana answered:
"Do you yourself choose that boon for me which you deem most beneficial
for a man." Indra said to him: "No one who chooses, chooses for another;
choose thyself." Then Pratardana replied: "Then that boon to choose is
no boon for me."
Then, however, Indra did not swerve from the truth, for Indra is truth.
Indra said to him: "Know me only; that is what I deem most beneficial
for man, that he should know me. I slew the three-headed son of
Tvashtri; I delivered the Arunmukhas, the devotees, to the wolves;
breaking many treaties, I killed the people of Prahlada in heaven, the
people of Puloma in the sky, the people of Kalakanga on earth. And not
one hair of me was harmed there. And he who knows me thus, by no deed of
his is his life harmed: not by the murder of his mother, not by the
murder of his father, not by theft, not by the killing of a Brahman. If
he is going to commit a sin, the bloom does not depart from his face. I
am prana, meditate on me as the conscious self, as life, as immortality.
Life is prana, prana is life. Immortality is prana, prana is
immortality. As long as prana dwells in this body, so long surely there
is life. By prana he obtains immortality in the other world, by
knowledge true conception. He who meditates on me as life and
immortality, gains his full life in this world, and obtains in the
Svarga world immortality and indestructibility.
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