The Subtlety of Dhamma and the Buddha's Vocation : หน้า 193/263

Dhamma in even greater subtlety. The Buddha was later to preach in the Sim­sapa forest that there were more leaves in the forest than he held in the palm of his hand. The 84,000 units of Dhamma which the Buddha was to reveal to us are but the leaves in the Buddha’s hand, but the leaves of the forest (the phenomena into which the Lord Buddha gained insight through his enlightenment) were still left for Him to consider subsequent to His Enlightenment. Eventually, he came to consider the reason for his having renounced the world from the time of leaving the palace up to his Enlightenment. He remembered that the realization of his own suffering had caused him to leave the palace. He saw the suffering of Yasodharā of his son Rāhula. He realized that to stay in the palace would be to suffer from the fetters of suffering without end. He had made a vow to himself that if he could find an end to suffering then he would lead the other beings of the world also to an end of suffering. He realized that this had been his vocation ever since the first lifetime when he had started to look for Buddhahood, floating in the endless watery oblivion of the ocean with his drowning mother upon his shoulders. He realized that it had come to time for him to proclaim Dhamma to the world — it was something he had aimed to do since the beginning twenty asankhaya kappas ago. On the day of his Enlightenment, he had fulfilled his vocation to the extent of achieving Enlightenment himself, but now it remained for him to fulfil the second part of his resolve and teach to the others of the world. He considered who would be able to appreciate the Dhamma he had uncovered. The Dhamma was so subtle that it would be a rare person who would appreciate it. Even the Buddha himself, with all the marks of a great man and 191