"Imagine, Ananda, a cesspool, of a man’s depth, brimful of dung and a man fallen in, head and all—though a man appear, ready to help, to do the friendly, to set him in safety, to lift him out; yet were he to go all round that cesspool, he would not see even the prick-end of a horse-hair of that man unsmeared with dung by which to grasp and lift him out. And it is even so with Devadatta, Ananda, when I saw not a bright spot in him—not even the prick-end of a horse-hair in size—then I declared: ‘Gone wayward, hell-bound for a kalpa, unpardonable is Devadatta.’"