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DÂDISTÂN-İ DÎNÎK.
194
him who is unworthy, or him whose worthiness is not appointed to avert a lesser benefit and the ruining of a worthy adoption. 3. Nearer details (khurdako) of the family guardianship which is proper and which is not proper for an adopted son's duty, of the child of good religion with whose business it is connected, and of the fathers for whom a family guardian is to be appointed, are in the recital of five chapters (fragardo) of the Hûspârûm Nask1, and in the abstracts (giriftakŏthâ) of the good ideas in various scriptures (naskô) in which many decisions are together.
CHAPTER LXII.
1. As to the sixty-first question and reply, that which you ask is thus: How stand the shares in the inheritance (mirâ to) of property among those of the good religion, and how is it necessary for them to stand therein?
2. The reply is this, that in the possession of wealth the wealth reaches higher or lower, just like water when it goes in a stream on a declivity, but when the passage shall be closed at the bottom it goes back on the running water (pûy-âvo), and then it does not go to its after-course2.
1 The seventeenth book of the complete Mazda-worshipping literature, whose sixty-four sections are described in detail in the Dînkard (see Sls. X, 21). The five chapters here mentioned were evidently in that one of the last fourteen sections which is said to have consisted of six chapters on the ownership of property and disputes about it, on one's own family, acquiring wife and children, adoption, &c.
This metaphor seems to mean that property,
like water, always
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