The Buddha then addressed his followers and said—­“Monks, I am delivered from all fetters, 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, decay, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair.”

The Buddha now went on with his converts to Rajagaha.  He stopped in a bamboo grove outside the town and here the king, Bimbisara, waited on him and with every sign of respect asked him to take food in his palace.  It was on this occasion that we first hear of him accepting an invitation to dinner[336], which he did frequently during the rest of his career.  After the repast the king presented a pleasure garden just outside the town “to the fraternity of monks with the Buddha at their head.”  At that time another celebrated teacher named Sanjaya was stopping at Rajagaha with a train of two hundred and fifty disciples.  Two of them, Sariputta and Moggallana, joined the Buddha’s order and took with them the whole body of their companions.