“There is, brahmin, a sense in which you could rightly say that I am gutless. I say that a gutless person is someone who has given up future wombs and regeneration into a new state of existence. They’ve cut them off at the root, made them like a palm stump, obliterated them, so that they’re unable to arise in the future. The Realized One has given up future wombs and regeneration into a new state of existence. He has cut them off at the root, made them like a palm stump, obliterated them, so that they’re unable to arise in the future. In this sense you could rightly say that I am gutless. But that’s not what you’re talking about.

Suppose, brahmin, there was a chicken with eight or ten or twelve eggs. And she properly sat on them to keep them warm and incubated. Now, the chick that is first to break out of the eggshell with its claws and beak and hatch safely: should that be called the eldest or the youngest?”

“Worthy Gotama, that should be called the eldest. For it is the eldest among them.”

“In the same way, in this population lost in ignorance, swaddled in their shells, I alone have broken open the egg of ignorance and realized the supreme perfect awakening. So, brahmin, I am the eldest and the first in the world.