About this passageFrom the chapter on transmigration without discoverable beginning. The rhetorical form is a comparison of quantities, which the tradition uses elsewhere with bones and with mothers' milk. The list of losses at the end is not abstract: mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, relatives, wealth, health. The stated purpose of the comparison is disenchantment.
"Mendicants, this transmigration has no known beginning. No first point is found of sentient beings roaming and transmigrating, shrouded by ignorance and fettered by craving.
What do you think? Which is more: the flow of tears you've shed while roaming and transmigrating for such a very long time — weeping and wailing from being coupled with the unloved and separated from the loved — or the water in the four oceans?"
"As we understand the Buddha's teaching, the flow of tears we've shed while roaming and transmigrating is more than the water in the four oceans."
"Good, good, mendicants! For a long time you've undergone the death of a mother, of a father, of a brother, of a sister, of a son, of a daughter, loss of relatives, loss of wealth, or loss through illness. From being coupled with the unloved and separated from the loved, the flow of tears you've shed is indeed more than the water in the four oceans."
In plainer words
This going round and round has no findable start. So — which is more: all the tears you have cried through all of it, from being stuck with what you hated and torn from what you loved, or all the water in the four oceans? The tears, the monks said. Yes, the Buddha said. The tears. You have lost a mother. A father. A brother, a sister, a son, a daughter. Your people. Your money. Your health. And every time, you cried. That, he says, is reason enough to stop being enchanted by any of it.
A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.