It is said, according to one legend, that on the day of Sakya's birth were born also the daughter of a neighbouring king, Yasodara (who, when the pair had reached their seventeenth year, became his wife), and Ananda, who after the prince became accepted as a Buddha, accompanied him as pupil and friend. If the story be true, the three friends, bound on a mission from the worlds of spirits to sume a human form and to be born in the earth," must have started with a wonderful sympathy of impulse to time their simultaneous arrival here so exactly.

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Sakya-muni, it is said, early distinguished himself by his qualities both intellectual and personal. This statement is probable enough, for an Englishman (the late R. C. Childers), writing nearly twentyfive centuries after the time of the influence of the Buddha, says that "to those who are familiar with the Pali sacred books, nothing is more striking than the intense personality of Gautama."

The Scythians gave to their kings the title of "universal ruler," and were probably known as the lion among nations, if it is of them that the words were said, "The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of nations has moved his camp." (Jerem. iv. 6.) The legend of Gautama's birth is that the flower (Ficus glomerata) appeared which is fabled to manifest itself whenever one of the order of universal monarchs is born; and that he himself uttered with his "lion voice," "My births are now at an end; I await the unchangable body. I have come and gone for the salvation of all men, but now there is an end; henceforth, there shall be no more birth."

The child grew up to learn all the wisdom of the age, and the chivalric skill and grace of a prince of good family.

Indulged in every delight, the boy nevertheless grew weary of the pomp and pleasures of his father's court.

It appears from the Laws of Manu that it was not unusual in the earliest times of Brahmanism for such as sought a superior life to turn hermits and to live secluded in the forest, engaged in the study of the Vedas, in abstinence, meditation, and prayer. The young prince's preceptors foretold that he would become a recluse. He himself appears to have entertained a larger idea than that of mere seclusion, and to have awakened to the belief that he was to stand forth among his fellowmen in the capacity of a saviour.

To the king it came as a great grief when his son, in the flower of his youth and the splendid worldly promise of his fine faculties of body and mind and his princely accomplishments, began to shew signs of that rare unworldliness that marks the spiritual man.

The youth was no doubt for a long time going through deep experiences, and preparing for the transition that was to withdraw him once and for ever from the career of one of his rank, to a life shared in its externals at least by the mendicant and the anchorite.

He was married and had one child, a son named Rohula. Everything external betokened the likelihood of the usual settling down from the fleeting enthusiasms of youth to the shorter views of average mature life. But the spirit moved him too strenuously for this, and the evils of the world, which the most of us accept as a matter of course, pressed upon the keen sensibilities of the prophetic nature, and forced the youth's heart and brain into some attempt at a solution of the problem of mortal life.

The received account of his own

personal final conversion from the gay routine of a prince's life to the arduous career of a seeker after truth, is no doubt picturesque and artistically composed romance founded on facts.

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Mounted in his chariot, drawn by four white steeds, Prince Sakya was on his way to his pleasure grounds, when his mind. became drawn into serious thought by the appearance of a decrepit old man, grey-haired and toothless, y-haired and toothless, tottering feebly along by the aid of a staff. The reflections aroused by this sight were none other than mournful, since man's subjection to decay is evidenced no less in the palace than in the highway, though it may be more nakedly manifest in humble life, where there are no artifices for hiding the ravages of time.

Four months later, Sakya's impressions were deepened by encountering, while on a similar excursion to his pleasure gardens, a poor squalid wretch smitten with the horrible disease of leprosy. He returned again to the palace, only to brood over the fact that man is not only subject to a natural decay of old age, but to loathsome disease as well.

Four months more elapsed, and Sakya met on the same route a corpse being conveyed along by its bearers. He returned with the conviction so heightened that it became as a new and startling revelation; that man, no matter his station, is subject to decay, to disease, and to inevitable death. So came to his mind the sense of the vanity of what is existent, however well disguised by wealth and luxury and the conventional habits of life and modes of regarding it.

Again a period of four months, and he met a calm and cheerful recluse of a pleasant countenance, healthy, well and simply clad in

the robe of those dedicated to religion, of few wants and no devouring anxieties or ambitions.

Here, in an air full of mortality and sorrow, in a state in which pleasures are fleeting, and nothing truly permanent or stable, was a man who seemed to have given up all, and to live in a world from which care was removed.

He pondered the matter. There could be nothing permanent but truth, the absolute eternal law that regulated existence. Let me but discover that, he felt, and I shall know the way of lasting peace for mankind, and become their deliverer.

He decided to go out from his life and never to return to it, until he should have attained to the sight of this divine law of life. So he quitted the palace and his native city, left behind him his wife and child, and, in spite of the opposition of his father, his wife, and his friends, exchanged the position of a prince for that of a mendicant friar. Some would think this an inhuman way of beginning wisdom; but it was done for humanity, and, if he had not made such a complete change in his own life, the enervating influences of the palace (for it was not only father, wife, and child that he was leaving) might have insensibly overpowered the efforts of the young man whose course eventually affected the religious beliefs of half the human race.

So Sakya went forth on his wanderings in search of absolute truth. On his journey he cut off his long hair with the tiara of royalty still attached to it, and donned the three simple garments of the friar, with the begging pot, razor, sewing needle, and bathing cloth, which comprised the appointments of the homeless ascetic.

He was pursuing the orthodox plan of retirement and purification.

Far away from home he begged, in the conventional manner, for alms and food, and retiring with the broken scraps that had been cast into his begging pot, he seated himself in a retired place, and, facing the east, ate without loathing (for his purpose and passion were strong) his first mendicant meal, so different from the repasts to which he had been accustomed.

He resorted for instruction, as was natural, to the Brahman priests, and hearkened to the exposition of their doctrines, but found little satisfaction therein; for to him, in his ardent state, they probably seemed cold and abstract.

As there are traditional records of Buddhas antecedent to Sakya, fragments of whose speech is incorporated with orthodox Buddhist scriptures, we may suppose it possible that the works of these earlier prophets were accessible to the new seeker after wisdom, and that what he may have studied meant more to him than it did to those of the learned class of the Brahmans who were without his enthusiasm.

As he pursued his pilgrimage he acquired from certain Brahmans instruction in the faculty of silent abstraction and contemplation of the Supreme Being, but could not obtain from them the peace and certainty he sought-that deep interior tranquillity which, as it is said, was at that time already called Nirvana.

after dieting himself on a scanty allowance of seeds, and so reducing his body to a skeleton, he concluded that physical prostration, or any but a rational treatment of the body, was attended with debility of the will and no elevation of the mind; and, as the path of perfection evidently did not lie that way, he rejected the system of mortification of the flesh.

The years of privation had no doubt brought this fruit, that they had tested his earnestness and enabled him to vanquish any tendency to luxury or selfishness that his nurture in a palace might have implanted in him.

But being satisfied that Buddhahood was not to be reached through depravation of the body, but through enlightenment of the mind, he resumed his ordinary pilgrimages as a friar, and his simple but sufficient fare. On proper diet and a less unnatural mode of life he regained both his bodily strength and mental vigour, but was deserted by the disciples who had been attracted by the amazing extreme of austerity which he had reached.

He now passed some time alone in his hermitage, or under divers trees, thinking out the problems which had disturbed him, and absorbed in deep meditation. Temptations assailed him, but his principles enabled him to withstand them, even the cowardly terrors of the Demon of Death.

Somehow his philosophy came to him, with the solid conviction for which he had longed. He was enabled to penetrate into the first principles of things, as it seemed, and so to lay the foundation of a practicable plan of life.

"Having attained this inward certainty of vision, he decided to teach the world his truth. He knew well what it would

sult, neglect, and scorn. But he thought of three classes of men: those who were already on the way to the truth, and did not need him; those who were already fixed in error, and whom he could not help; and the poor doubters, uncertain of their way. It was to help these last that the Buddha went forth to preach."

In himself he felt freed from the limitations of corporeal existence, but for the sake of promoting the emancipation of others, he did not pass away into his higher state, but directed his steps to the Deer Park at Sarnath, where he unfolded his principles, and first to those to whom he had been an offence by his departure from his course of consummate austerity. As they had followed him for his transcendent mortification of the flesh, so it is to be presumed that they were now attracted by the supremacy of his wisdom. In three months' kindly instruction he succeeded in converting them.

After this he preached in many places, in forests and groves, in palaces, by rivers, in gardens, in cities. He visited Benares, and finally settled in the Jetavana at Sravasti, where a monastery was built for him. His followers rapidly increased; he taught, by conversation only and precept, to the end of his life, which reached the span of eighty years.

Disciples had clustered round in great numbers in these latter years, and wherever the preacher went there followed him a crowd. A general proclamation of the powerlessness of the world of sense to satisfy the soul, a simple code of deeply-founded morality, a continuous appeal to the law of kindness to all living things, an entire disregard of caste and contempt for social distinctions as trivialities in the face of the great danger of continuance in wearisome

transmigrations and ever unsatisfied unrest, these doctrines, proclaimed without ceremony, were intelligible to all. Women were enrolled as disciples, and no man was refused because he was a pariah of the lowest caste. "The Brahman is born of a woman, so is the outcast My law is a law of grace for all. My doctrine is like the sky. There is room for all without exception-men, women, boys, girls, poor and rich." This was a renovation of a truth proclaimed long before. "The man who has learned to recognise all beings in the supreme spirit and the supreme spirit in all beings, can henceforth look upon no creature with contempt: (IsaUpanishad).

It matters little whether the new teacher obtained hints of his philosophy from Brahman or Jain. His true legacy was the infusion of a new earnestness into religion, so that one of the epithets that has become attached to him, or to any true follower of his, is, "He that hath life."

His doctrines all led in one direction-conduct. Knowing how much happier we are ourselves in our earnest and unselfish moments than when we are drifting down the heavy stream of ennui, or seeking for a new pleasure with an over-pleasured, enfeebled, and yet feverish taste, we need not wonder at the influence gained by a man who had power to really rouse his hearers out of apathy and formality into vitality, or even into a wholesome fear, and could succeed in stimulating them out of indulgence into conviction that in the abandonment of selfish pursuits lay the certain way of peace; while, on the other hand, the poorest person by becoming a stoic may win an individual consciousness of power. Buddha did not expect anxieties to be laid down