Markandeyapurana 38.9

38.9

dhanadhānyamahāpatro naikakālapravardhitaḥ /
puṇyāpuṇyāgrapuṣpaśca sukhaduḥ khamahāphalaḥ //

“With the thought ‘it is I’ the germ has sprung up; with the thought ‘it is mine,’ the germ has grown shoulder-high: and home and lands are its topmost boughs; children and wife and other relations are its young shoots; wealth and com are its great leaves; it has developed not once only; and merit and demerit are its outmost flowers; pleasure and pain are its full-grown fruit. There it fills the path of final emancipation; it oozes out at the commingling of fools; it is rich with festoons of bees which are the desire to be doing; knowledge of what ought to be done is the full-grown tree. Those who, wearied with the road of worldly existence, betake themselves to its shade are dominated by error, knowledge and happiness; where is their superiority? But those, who hew down the tree of selfishness with the axe of learning, which is sharpened on the whet-stone of association with the good, travel along that path. Reaching the cod, dustless, thornless grove of religious knowledge, the wise, ceasing from action, attain supreme emancipation from existence.