The Buddha spent the winter with the Uruvela community and worked a number of impressive miracles. He tamed a highly dangerous cobra, a popular symbol of the divine, which the brahmins housed in their sacred fire chamber. He entertained gods, who visited his hermitage at night and lit the whole wood with unearthly radiance. He split logs miraculously for the fire ceremonies, ascended to the heavens and brought back a celestial flower, and showed the Kassapa who was leader of the Uruvela group that he could read his mind. Both the Pali texts and the later biographies contain stories of such signs and wonders performed by the Buddha, which is, at first glance, surprising. The practice of yoga was thought to give a skilled yogin powers (iddhi), which showed the dominion of a trained mind over matter, but yogins generally warned against the exercise of iddhi, because it was all too easy for a spiritual man to degenerate into a mere magician.The Buddha himself was highly critical of such exhibitionism, and forbade his disciples to exercise iddhi in public. But the monks who composed the Pali texts would have believed that such feats were possible, and they probably used these tales as a polemic. In their preaching, the Theravadin monks who composed these texts may have found it useful to relate that the Buddha had these impressive powers. Further, when disputing with brahmins and officials of Vedic religion, it was helpful to be able to relate that the Buddha had taken on the old gods (like the sacred cobra in the fire chamber) and soundly defeated them; even though he was a mere ksatriya, he had more power than did brahmins. Later the texts tell us that the Buddha challenged the whole caste system: “It is not simply birth that makes a person a brahmin or an outcaste,” he insisted, “but our actions (kamma).” Religious status depended on moral behavior, not upon the accident of heredity. As always, the Buddha, like the other great Axial sages, argued that faith must be informed by ethics, without which ritual was useless.

It was morality, not the exercise of the Buddha’s miraculous powers, which finally convinced Kassapa. Here again, the texts may also have been suggesting that a showy display of iddhi could be counterproductive: it certainly did not convince a skeptic. After each miracle, Kassapa merely said to himself: “This great monk is impressive and powerful, but he is not an Arahant like me.” Eventually, the Buddha shocked him out of his pride and complacency. “Kassapa,” he said, “you are not an Arahant, and if you continue like this, you will never achieve enlightenment.” Such rampant egotism was quite incompatible with the spiritual life. The rebuke hit home. As a famous ascetic, Kassapa would have known all about the dangers of such self-esteem. He prostrated himself on the ground and begged for admission to the Sangha. He was followed by both his brothers and all their thousand disciples. There were now a host of new novices, who shaved off their matted locks, threw away their sacred utensils, and became “stream-enterers.” Then they all gathered together at Gaya to hear the Buddha’s third great sermon.

“Bhikkhus,” the Buddha began, “everything is burning.” The senses and everything that they feed upon in the external world, the body, the mind and the emotions were all ablaze. What caused this conflagration? The three fires of greed, hatred and delusion. As long as people fed these flames, they would continue to burn and could never reach the coolness of Nibbana. The five khandha (the “heaps” or “constituents” of the personality) were thus tacitly compared to “bundles” of firewood. There was a pun also in the word upadana (“clinging”), whose root meaning is “fuel.” It was our grasping desire for the things of this world which kept us ablaze and impeded our enlightenment. As always, this greed and craving was coupled with the hatred which is responsible for so much of the evil and violence in the world. As long as the third fire of ignorance continued to rage, a person could not realize the Four Noble Truths, which were essential for release from the smoldering cycle of “birth, old age and death, with sorrow, mourning, pain, grief and despair.” A bhikkhu must, therefore, become dispassionate. The art of mindfulness would teach him to become detached from his five khandha and douse the flames. Then he would experience the liberation and peace of Nibbana.

The Fire Sermon was a brilliant critique of the Vedic system. Its sacred symbol, fire, was an image of everything the Buddha felt to be wrong with life: it represented the hearth and home from which all earnest seekers must “Go Forth,” and was an eloquent emblem of the restless, destructive but transient forces that make up human consciousness. The three fires of greed, hatred and ignorance were an ironic counterpart to the three holy fires of the Vedas: by tending these in the mistaken belief that they formed a priestly elite, the brahmins were simply fueling their own egotism. The sermon was also an illustration of the Buddha’s skill in adapting his Dhamma to his audience, so that he could truly speak to their condition. After the former fire-worshippers had listened to the Buddha’s sermon, which spoke so powerfully to their religious consciousness, they all achieved Nibbana and became Arahants.

In late December, the Buddha set out for Rajagaha, the capital of Magadha, accompanied by these thousand new bhikkhus. Their arrival caused a stir. People in the cities were hungry for new spirituality, and as soon as King Bimbisara heard that a man who claimed to be a Buddha was encamped outside the city in the Sapling Grove, he went to visit him with a huge entourage of brahmin householders. They were all astonished to find that Kassapa, the former head of the Uruvela community, was now the Buddha’s disciple, and were greatly impressed when Kassapa explained to them the reasons why he had abandoned fire-worship. When they heard the Buddha preach, all the householders-the Pali text tells us that there were 120,000 of them-became lay followers, and last of all, King Bimbisara prostrated himself before the Buddha and begged to be received as a lay disciple too. Ever since he was a boy, the king had hoped to listen to a Buddha preaching a Dhamma that he could understand. Now his wish had been granted. It was the start of a long partnership between the Buddha and the king, who invited him to dinner that night.

During the meal, the king gave the Sangha a gift that would have a decisive influence on the development of the Buddhist Order. He donated a pleasure-park (arama) known as the Bamboo Grove of Veluvana, just outside Rajagaha, as a home for the Sangha of Bhikkhus. The monks could live there in a quiet, peaceful place that was at the same time accessible to the city and to the people who would need to consult them. The Grove was neither “too far from the town, nor too near… accessible to the people, but peaceful, and secluded.” The Buddha accepted the gift, which was a perfect solution. The “seclusion” of his monks was to be a psychological one, not a total physical segregation from the world. The Order existed for the people, not simply for the monks’ personal sanctification. The bhikkhus would need a degree of quiet for meditation, where they could develop the dispassion and internal solitude that led to Nibbana, but if they were to live entirely for others, as the Dhamma demanded, lay folk must be able to visit them and learn how to assuage their own suffering. The gift of the Bamboo Grove set a precedent, and wealthy donors often gave the Sangha similar parks in the suburbs, which became the regional headquarters of the wandering bhikkhus.

The Buddha remained in the new arama for two months, and it was during this time that his two most important disciples joined the Sangha. Sariputta and Moggallana had both been born to brahmin families in small villages outside Rajagaha. They renounced the world on the same day, and joined the sangha of the Skeptics, led by Sanjaya. But neither attained full enlightenment, and they made a pact that whichever of them achieved Nibbana first would tell the other immediately. At the time of the Buddha’s visit the two friends were living in Rajagaha, and one day Sariputta saw Assaji (one of the original five bhikkhus) begging for alms. He was at once struck by the serenity and poise of the monk and was convinced that this man had found a spiritual solution, so he hailed him in the traditional way, asking Assaji which teacher and dhamma he followed. Pleading that he was a mere beginner in the holy life, Assaji gave only a brief summary of the Dhamma, but that was enough. Sariputta became a “stream-enterer” on the spot, and hurried to tell Moggallana the news. His friend also became a “stream-enterer,” and they went together to the Bamboo Grove to ask the Buddha for admission to the Sangha, taking, to Sanjaya’s chagrin, 250 of his disciples with them. When the Buddha saw Sariputta and Moggallana approaching, he instinctively knew how gifted they were. “These will be my chief disciples,” he told the bhikkhus. “They will do great things for the Sangha.” And so it proved. The two friends became the inspiration for the two main schools of Buddhism that developed some 200 to 300 years after the Buddha’s death. The more austere and monastically inclined Theravada regard Sariputta as a second founder. He was of an analytical cast of mind and could express the Dhamma in a way that was easy to memorize. But his piety was too dry for the more populist Mahayana school, whose version of Buddhism is more democratic and emphasizes the importance of compassion. The Mahayana has taken Moggallana as their mentor; he was known for his iddhi, would ascend mystically to the heavens and, through his yogic powers, had an uncanny ability to read people’s minds. The fact that the Buddha praised both Sariputta and Moggallana shows that both schools are regarded as authentic, and indeed they have coexisted more peacefully than, for example, Catholics and Protestants have in the Christian world.