Bizarrely enough, it was this line from the Digha Nikaya that (eventually) converted me to Buddhism.
I thought, “You know, if I were to take a time machine back to ancient India, and try to describe to them the formation of the Earth’s crust and atmosphere, I wouldn’t have been able to think of a metaphor as apt as that!” And then I got to the part about the evolution of first asexual and then sexual organisms and I thought, “okay, this text is a bit muddy, but dang is the Buddha hitting the major points of evolution or what?”
And then a sliver of doubt opened up in my dogmatic scientism: wait. This was spoken 2500 years ago… What if the Buddha really did … know stuff? What if he really was omniscient, all those years ago? What would that mean?
Exploring that possibility has been the journey of (many) a lifetime — one I’m happily still on 