Thus on greeting the Buddha: “Seashell? milk? moon? jasmine? crystal? snowflake? linen cloth? pale cloud? oh whiteness! oh roar of laughter! a row of sunshades rise to the clouds! his adorable parasols light up the world; three tens of gods, wondrous birds, Blessed, cantors of paradise take pleasure in it.²⁷² Bow down to adore him ceaselessly, the Buddha, kinsman of the Sun!” When the Buddha persuaded the five monks, his first followers, that he was the awakened one, he immediately compared himself with “a wild deer who lives in the forest and roams its slopes; confidently it walks, stands or lies down, confidently it rests: it is out of the trapper’s reach.”²⁷³ The first image of release given to the Buddha is that of the victim who has escaped from the sacrifice, of the prey escaped from the hunter.

The passage from the Vedic world to the Buddha is a passage from hunger to thirst: for the ṛṣis (seers) “in the beginning everything was cloaked by death, as hunger is death”; for the Buddha, in his discourse at Benares, all that has to be avoided is “thirst.”²⁷⁴ Hunger belongs to the metaphysics of sacrifice, it is the hub around which it revolves; thirst belongs to the metaphysics of the forest, which has escaped the sacrifice but discovers that this is not enough to escape desire. The Buddha discovers that desire is not necessarily linked to killing—or rather, that the killing continues even in the most inoffensive act. His discovery continues, and almost impiously reveals, what the Brahmin turned saṃnyāsin (renouncer) had already revealed. Having withdrawn into the forest, far from the sacrificial post, the saṃnyāsin had discovered it is not enough to free oneself from sacrificial action: every instant of life is an act, and behind each act there is a desire, in the same way that behind the sacrifice there is the desire for the fruit of the sacrifice. Now, with the Buddha, the karman (action) is no longer primarily a sacrificial act, but a bare action of whatever kind. The idea that all resounds in Universal Interdependence, the Vedic string of identifications—this is that, which is that, which is this—is suddenly silent. Now the names of various interwoven threads appear unimportant, fortuitous, short-lived. All that matters is their single constant characteristic—of being constricting woven threads. This is pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination): the all-enveloping net of the sacrifice, but no longer resonant with harmonics. When touched, it emits a hollow sound, it no longer signals the sympathy between its parts, but only its own immense existence. For the ṛṣis, the interdependence of everything was won, was constructed, with the sacrifice; for the Buddha, interdependence has existed forever and is insignificant: why celebrate it, why help still to weave it, if all that’s required is to meticulously unpick it, thread by thread, with the same precision as the Vedic seers in the opposite action, in order to slip through the mesh of the net?