is our great teacher! we are the honored one’s disciples.”  Thus having magnified his work and finished all he purposed doing, drawing the world as universal witness, the assembly was convinced that he, the world-honored, was truly the “Omniscient!” Buddha, perceiving that the whole assembly was ready as a vessel to receive the law, spoke thus to Bimbisara Raga:  “Listen now and understand:  The mind, the thoughts, and all the senses are subject to the law of life and death.  This fault of birth and death, once understood, then there is clear and plain perception.  Obtaining this clear perception, then there is born knowledge of self; knowing oneself and with this knowledge laws of birth and death, then there is no grasping and no sense-perception.  Knowing oneself, and understanding how the senses act, then there is no room for ‘I’ (soul) or ground for framing it; then all the accumulated mass of sorrow, sorrows born from life and death, being recognized as attributes of body, and as this body is not ‘I,’ nor offers ground for ‘I,’ then comes the great superlative, the source of peace unending.  This thought of ‘self’ gives rise to all these sorrows, binding as with cords the world, but having found there is no ‘I’ that can be bound, then all these bonds are severed.  There are no bonds indeed—­they disappear—­and seeing this there is deliverance.  The world holds to this thought of ‘I,’ and so, from this, comes false apprehension.  Of those who maintain the truth of it, some say the ‘I’ endures, some say it perishes; taking the two extremes of birth and death, their error is most grievous!  For if they say the ‘I’ is perishable, the fruit they strive for, too, will perish; and at some time there will be no hereafter:  this is indeed a meritless deliverance.  But if they say the ‘I’ is not to perish, then in the midst of all this life and death there is but one identity as space, which is not born and does not die.  If this is what they call the ‘I,’ then are all things living, one—­for all have this unchanging self—­not perfected by any deeds, but self-perfect.  If so, if such a self it is that acts, let there be no self-mortifying conduct, the self is lord and master; what need to do that which is done?  For if this ‘I’ is lasting and imperishable, then reason would teach it never can be changed.  But now we see the marks of joy and sorrow, what room for constancy then is here?  Knowing that birth brings this deliverance then I put away all thought of sin’s defilement; the whole world, everything, endures! what then becomes of this idea of rescue?  We cannot even talk of putting self away, truth is the same as falsehood; it is not ‘I’ that do a thing, and who, forsooth, is he that talks of ‘I’?  But if it is not ‘I’ that do the thing, then there is no ‘I’ that does it, and in the absence of these both, there is no ‘I’ at all, in very truth.  No doer and no knower, no lord, yet notwithstanding this, there ever lasts this birth and death, like morn and night ever recurring.