Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 21.djvu/181

Rh however, I can go whither my mind prompts me; formerly I was ignorant, of little understanding, in fact, a blind man.

Such, Kâsyapa, is the parable I have invented to make thee understand my meaning. The moral to be drawn from it is as follows. The word 'blind-born,' Kâsyapa, is a designation for the creatures staying in the whirl of the world with its six states; the creatures who do not know the true law and are heaping up the thick darkness of evil passions. Those are blind from ignorance, and in consequence of it they build up conceptions ; in consequence of the latter name-and-form, and so forth, up to the genesis of this whole huge mass of evils.

So the creatures blind from ignorance remain in the whirl of life, but the Tathâgata, who is out of the triple world, feels compassion, prompted by which, like a father for his dear and only son, he appears in the triple world and sees with his eye of wisdom that the creatures are revolving in the circle of the mundane whirl, and are toiling without finding the right means to escape from the rotation. And