human and divine, and so are you. Go now and wander
for the gain of many, for the welfare of many, out of compassion for the
world, for the good, for the gain and for the welfare of gods and men.
Let not two of you go the same way. Preach the doctrine which is
glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle and glorious in the
end, in the spirit and in the letter; proclaim a consummate, perfect and
pure life of holiness." The monks then went forth and returned bringing
candidates to be formally ordained by the Buddha. But seeing that these
journeys caused fatigue and trouble, he authorized the ordained monks to
confer ordination without reference to himself. He then returned to
Uruvela, where he had dwelt before attaining Buddhahood, and converted a
thousand Jatilas, that is to say Brahmans living the life of hermits,
which involved the abandonment of household life but not of sacrifices.
The admission of these hermits to the order is probably historical and
explains the presence among the Buddha's disciples of a tendency towards
self-mortification of which he himself did not wholly approve. The
Mahavagga[334] contains a series of short legends about these
occurrences, one of them in two versions. The narratives are miraculous
but have an ancient tone and probably represent the type of popular
story current about the Buddha shortly after or even during his life.
One of them is a not uncommon subject in Buddhist art. It relates how
the chamber in which a Brahman called Kassapa kept his sacred fire was
haunted by a fire-breathing magical serpent. The Buddha however spent
the night in this chamber and after a contest in which both emitted
flames succeeded in conquering the beast. After converting the Jatilas
he preached to them the celebrated Fire Sermon, said to have been
delivered on the eminence now called Brahma Yoen[335] near Gaya and
possibly inspired by the spectacle of grass fires which at some seasons
may be seen creeping over every hill-side in an Indian night,
"Everything, Monks, is burning and how is it burning? The eye is
burning: what the eye sees is burning: thoughts based on the eye are
burning: the contact of the eye (with visible things) is burning and the
sensation produced by that contact, whether pleasant, painful or
indifferent is also burning. With what fire is it burning? It is burning
with the fire of lust, the fire of anger, with the fire of ignorance; it
is burning with the sorrows of birth, deca