Evocative description of the Buddha

Quoted from an Aeon article :

An important text in the collection is the Muni Sutta (‘Discourse on the Silent Sage’), almost certainly known to the Indian emperor Aśoka (who reigned c268-232 BCE) as the Muni-gāthā (‘Verses on the Silent Sage’), and so in its extant form dating to the 4th century BCE, not very long after Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign (c326 BCE). In this text, the Buddha describes the sage as a radical outsider:

Danger is born from intimacy, dust arises from the home. Without home, without acquaintance: just this is the vision of a sage.

Avoiding the enveloping ‘dust’ of society, the sage remains aloof from worldly values, ‘not trembling amid blame or praise, like a lion not shaking at sounds … like a lotus not smeared by water’. Focusing his attention instead on the quest to cultivate deep states of meditation in the forest, the sage is likened to a swiftly flying swan, whereas a householder is imagined as a blue-crested peacock, beautiful but slow.