Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c10.60

c10.60

“An ordained monk may not boast of any superhuman perfection, as much as to say: ‘I like to dwell in an empty house.’ The monk, who with evil intent and from covetousness falsely and untruly boasts of a superhuman perfection,† be it a condition of abstraction, or of rapture, or of concentration, or of elevation, or of the path of deliverance, or of the fruit of deliverance, he is no longer a monk; he is no disciple of the son of the Sakya house. As a palm-tree, the top of which has been destroyed, cannot again grow, so also a monk—and so on.”