Vishnupurana 6.5.p2

6.5.p2

When the child is about to be born, its face is besmeared by excrement, urine, blood, mucus, and semen; its attachment; to the uterus is ruptured by the Prajāpati wind: it is turned head downwards and violently expelled from the womb by the powerful and painful winds of parturition; and the infant, losing; for a time all sensation when brought in contact with the external air, is immediately deprived of its intellectual knowledge. Then born the child is tortured in every limb, as if pierced with thorns or cut to pieces with a saw, and falls from its fetid lodgement as from a sore, like a crawling thing upon the earth. Unable to feel itself, unable to turn itself, it is dependent on the will of others for being bathed and nourished. Laid upon a dirty bed, it is bitten by insects and mosquitoes and has not power to drive them away. Many are the pangs attending birth and many are those which succeed to birth; and many are the afflictions that are inflicted by elemental and superhuman powers in the state of childhood covered by the gloom of ignorance; and internally bewildered man knows not whence he is, who he is, whither he goeth nor what is his nature; by what bonds he is bound; what is cause and what is not cause; what is to be done and what is to be left undone; what is to be said and what is to be kept silent, what is righteousness and what is iniquity; in what it consists or how; what is right, what is wrong; what is virtue, what is vice. Thus man, like a brute beast addicted only to animal gratification, suffers the pain that ignorance brings about. Ignorance, darkness, inactivity influence those devoid of knowledge so that pious works are neglected; but hell is the consequence of neglect of religious acts, according to the great sages, and the ignorant therefore suffer affliction both in this world and in the next.