Just as a man who, when carried away by a mountain torrent, clings to grasses and reeds growing on the bank, which, however, break and he is destroyed, so does the man, who clings to various wrong beliefs such as that the body is self come by his undoing. S.iii.137.
It is as impossible to persuade a monk, devoted to detachment, to return to the lower life, as it would be to make the eastward flowing Ganges to flow westward. S.v.53; cp. iv. 191; v.136, 300.