to acquire a profound knowledge of spiritual truths; and, in fine, to follow the teaching of the Buddha. Renounce the world, and you will—sooner or later, according to your degree of merit—be freed from the curse of existence; this seems to sum up, in brief, the gospel proclaimed with all the fervor of a great discovery by the new teacher. After about forty-five years of public life devoted to mankind, he died at the age of eighty, at Kusinagara, deeply mourned by a few faithful disciples who had clustered around him, and no doubt regretted by many who had found repose and comfort in his doctrines, and had been strengthened by his example. The names of his principal disciples become almost as familiar to a reader of Buddhist books as those of Peter, James, and John, to a Christian. Maudgalyayana and Sariputtra, the eminent evangelists, and Ananda, the beloved disciple, the close friend and servant of the Buddha, are among the most prominent of this little group. With them rested propagation of the faith, and the vast results, which in two centuries followed their exertions, prove that they were not remiss. The stories of the thousands who embraced the proffered salvation in the life-time of the Buddha are pious fancies. It was the apostles and Fathers of the Church who, while developing his doctrines and largely adding to their complexity and number, almost succeeded in rendering his religion the dominant creed of India.
Such is, in my opinion, the sum total of our positive knowledge with regard to the life lived, and the truths taught, by this great figure in human history. The two points to which I have adverted—namely, the formation of a society apart from the world in which caste was nothing, and the hope held out of annihilation by the practice of virtues and asceticism—are too fundamental and too ancient to be derived from any but the founder. After all, ecclesiastical biographers, while they adorn their heroes with fictitious trappings, do not invent them altogether. A man from whose tuition great results have flowed, cannot be a small man; something of those results must needs be due to the impulse he has given. And if the Buddha must have taught something, must have inaugurated some reform, what is he more likely to have taught, than the way to the annihilation of pain? what reform more likely to
