BUDDHISM. 
241 
themselves into a separate society after his death. He 
told them that such a measure would undoubtedly 
expose them to fierce persecution, and recommended 
them when the hour of distress and danger arrived, to 
seek a refuge in the mountains north of India. He 
advised them also to prepare images of his person, the 
sight of which would serve to fortify their faith. 
Statues were accordingly executed, representing the 
Buddha at different periods of his life. The most 
celebrated of these exhibits him sitting with his 
right hand on his knee, his left holding a string of 
beads, and his hair which had not been cut during his 
residence in the wilderness, clustered in curls over his 
brow. 
Soon after this he obtained nirwana without suf- 
fering the pains of death. The Buddhists show the 
print of his foot on several mountains. He impressed 
it just before his ascent into heaven ; and a repre- 
sentation of this foot-print is usually found in every 
Buddhist temple. 
It is very difficult to separate truth from falsehood 
in this story of Sakia; we cannot even determine 
whether it was his design to found a sect, or whether 
he merely recommended the ascetic philosophy, the 
doctrines of which carried to the extreme by his fol- 
lowers, necessarily formed a new religion. Like most 
men who have given a new direction to the religious 
ideas of his contemporaries, he was less an inventor 
than a collector of dogmas ; developing more plainly 
and forcibly what many before him had often thought 
and what some had obscurely expressed. When in 
a later age his followers came to write the life of one 
Y 
