Just as a storm throws down a weak tree, so does Mara overpower the man who lives for the pursuit of pleasures, who is uncontrolled in his senses, immoderate in eating, indolent, and dispassionate.

Mara is the Pali name for the force that pulls the mind away from clarity — sometimes translated as "the tempter," sometimes as "death itself." The verse compares the unguarded mind to a weak tree, and Mara to the storm that follows. The four diagnostic markers — pleasure-seeking, sensory indiscipline, immoderate eating, indolence — are the soil conditions in which the weak tree grows. The remedy, in the verse to come, is not heroic. It is simply attending to those four soil conditions.