The Divine Sovereign means that you endure sundry cruel punishments in hell, and I, dwelling in the Hall of the Azure Firmament, fear you will blame me for not warning you sooner.
You long to escape but cannot flee; you long to go but cannot move. It is too late to amend your ways, and your regret is futile.
Once trapped in hellish suffering, you cannot slip away nor move from your place. When matters have come to this pass, amendment is impossible, and regret is of no avail.
Having endured every manner of agony, you are dispatched to be reborn as beasts. Clad in fur or bearing horns, you dwell among birds and brute creatures.
After suffering all forms of torture in hell, souls are sent forth to take animal birth: some grow fur, some sprout horns, consigned to live alongside fowls and wild beasts.
Still you perish beneath the blade, boiled in cauldrons or consumed by fire. When shall your karmic debt conclude, that you may regain a human body?
“Still” means once more. Even as beasts, you are slain by knives, boiled in pots or burned by flames. Not until your karmic account is settled may you be reborn in human form.
To forfeit the human body is a calamity spanning ten thousand kalpas. Far better to cultivate goodness and amass virtue, rising aloft to the celestial realms.
Should one know one’s faults yet refuse reform and lose the precious human incarnation, one shall endure hardship through ten thousand cosmic eons, unable swiftly to regain a human body. How much wiser to nurture goodness and build virtue, so as to ascend to the heavens among the clouds.
Let the wreck of the preceding cart be a warning to the cart that follows: this is the true elixir of ageless longevity.