Sacred Texts  Zoroastrianism  Index  Previous  Next 
Buy this Book at Amazon.com

Pahlavi Texts, Part II (SBE18), E.W. West, tr. [1882], at sacred-texts.com


CHAPTER LXI.

1. As to the sixtieth question and reply, that which you ask is thus: What is the propriety and impropriety, the merit and demerit, of family guardianship?

2. The reply is this, that the merit is the appointment and recognition of him who accomplishes more worthily the greater benefit; the demerit is as to 

p. 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 (khûrdakŏ) 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 (fragardŏ) of the Hûspârûm Nask 1, and in the abstracts (giriftakŏîhâ) of the good ideas in various scriptures (naskô) in which many decisions are together.


Footnotes

194:1 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.


Next: Chapter LXII