292 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM. vol.59. 



his last life on earth he had gone through hundreds of rebirths in all 

 forms of existence; or that for ages he had lived in Tushita, the heaven 

 of the happy gods, and in the fullness of time was born in a super- 

 natural way, having entered the body of his mother Maya in the 

 guise of a white six-tusked elephant; that he was prompted to re- 

 nounce the world and his career of a prince through the sight of sick- 

 ness, old age, and death; that he was tempted by the fiend Mara who 

 tried to divert him from his mission of a savior, and other similar 

 myths. The siniplo facts of his career, so far as they can be freed from 

 the later legendary accretions, may be said to be about as follows: 

 Siddhartha, who was of a reflective and contemplative turn of mind 

 and deeply impressed with the vanity and misery of life, retired from 

 the world at the age of 29, after 10 years of married life and the 

 birth of a son. This is called the "great renunciation." For six- 

 years he led the life of a wandering ascetic sage (muni), devoting 

 himself to the study of the various systems of philosophy and the- 

 ology of the times, and to severe ascetic practices, without finding in 

 either a solution of the riddle of existence. In his thirty-fifth year 

 he passed through a second mental crisis. While sitting in medita- 

 tion under the famous Bo-tree (a species of Ficus religiosa, pipala) 

 at Bodhi Gaya, south of the present Patna, he attained to the state 

 of a Buddha — that is, of an "enlightened one," or "awakened one" — 

 having found the cause of the evils of existence and the way of de- 

 liverance from them. 



For 45 years Buddha went about from place to place in the valley 

 of the Ganges, proclaiming his good tidings and gathering around 

 him a small band of faithful followers, the earliest members of his 

 afterwards famous order, and finally died at the age of 80, in the 

 midst of his disciples, at Kusinagara, the modern Kasia, in the 

 district of Gorakhpur, his body being cremated, and the relics dis- 

 tributed among the clans of the adjoining districts. 



BUDDHA'S DOCTRINES (THE DnARMA). 



The substance of the teaching of Buddha is expressed in the "four 

 excellent truths": (1) Existence is inseparable from sorrow. Birth 

 is sorrow, age is sorrow, sickness is sorrow, death is sorrow, clinging 

 to earthly things is sorrow. (2) The causes of sorrow are our pas- 

 sions and desires which result in new birth with its consequent old 

 age, sickness, death, and other miseries. For the present life of the 

 individual is not the first one. Innumerable births have preceded 

 it in previous ages. The attachment to life and its pleasures pro- 

 duces a new being, and the moral character of the thoughts and 

 actions of the former existences fixes the condition of the new being. 

 This is called the law of cause and effect, or Karma. The term 

 properly means "doing," or "action," and comprises the doctrine 

 of the everlasting effect of an act. It is the aggregate result of all 



