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   Burning burning burning burning
         O Lord Thou pluckest me out
   O Lord Thou plucdest
   Burning (李俊清，2007: 119)
                       
The line “Burning burning burning burning” again alludes to Buddha’s Fire Sermon. In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the process of purification. To burn is to clean up, to destroy all that is bad in this wasteland, and out of the death or the elimination of the old evil things, there can possibly be the arising of the new born thing, like the nirvana of a phoenix.
     As for line 309 and line 310, Eliot refers to the Confession of St. Augustine: "I entangle my steps with these outward beauties, but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out!" (Southam, 1990: 132) The outward beauties are never truths, and that's why the Lord attempts a salvation. Though this lord is obviously not Buddha, the Christian god, Eliot remarks on his purposeful use of Buddha and the Christian saint, saying that these two are "representatives of eastern and western asceticism" (Eliot, 1963: 84). Both of them are against the frantic abuse of human's animal instinct, and both of them make use of fire to burn away all the evils so as to save human beings.
 2.4.2 Water
"Water" is also a controlling image in The Waste Land. Its symbolic meaning plays a part even more important than “Fire”. Due to the lack of water, the waste land is dry and arid. Each part of the poem deals with water, such as rain, river, sea. The word of "water" appears in the poem 18 times, but the waste land is in great demand of water.
 Water, especially in the form of rain, is always considered a power to bring forth life. A land will never be a waste land if there is water. It is also recorded in the Golden Bough that water, as a regenerative force, always serves an important function in the rituals held by the primitive people for the revival of their dead fertility god. However, in the poem The Waste Land, there is only the sigh for no water, and the vehement cry for water. But sometimes, when there is water, its force is not recognized or even ignored, for people still can’t perceive through the broken images of the wasteland.
     In The Waste Land, the modern world is compared to a dry and sterile land with no water. “…where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water” (李俊清，2007: 107). In such a wasteland, even it is already April and the precious spring rain falls down attempting to bring back life, the only thing the rain manages to give birth to is lilacs－the very symbol of lust. Besides, the dull roots refuse to germinate, for they still miss the winter time when they could remain undisturbed covered by the forgetful snow.
 
         April is the cruelest month, breeding
   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
   Memory and desire, stirring
   Dull roots with spring rain
   Winter kept us warm, covering
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