binocular wrote:Sam Vara wrote:Maybe this is just a made-up story designed to illustrate the possibilities of extreme renunciation.
Well, I am torn as to whether such behavior is indeed a mark of renunciation, or just plain old indifference and callousness.
Yes, I take your point. The sutta is of course a human artifact which post-dates its alleged subject by many years. It might be that those who wrote it down for the first time, and then preserved it, were similarly torn. Or were misinterpreting, mistranslating, or conflating two different stories; or making light of what rightly concerns us today, because they were themselves renunciates from a very different culture.