CHAPTER II.

LIFE OF BUDDHA FROM HIS APPEARANCE AS A TEACHER AT BENARES TO THE CONVERSION OF RAHULA.

The four truths--Godinia and his four companions--The first monastic community--The first lay brother--Conversion of five hundred fire worshippers in the kingdom of Magadha--Buddha at Rajagriha--At Shravasti, in Jeta's garden--Appoints punishments for crimes of monks--Goes to see his father after twelve years' absence--Story of his son Rahula.

IT was exactly thirty-five days after his arriving at perfect wisdom that Buddha opened his public life at Benares, by discoursing to Godinia and others on the four truths. "You should know," he said to his auditors, "the fact of misery (DUK'A), and the need of becoming separated from the accumulation of entanglements caused by the passions (SAMUDAYA). These two truths belong to the world from which you are now exhorted to take your departure. You should also experience the extinction of these miseries and entanglements (NIRODA), and the path of reformation (MARGA). These two truths belong to the monastic life on which you should now enter."

Having these subjects to discourse on, Buddha went forth to appeal to the youth of India, the hermits, the followers of the Zoroastrian fire-worship, the Brahman who studied the Vedas, and to men of every class.

The wheel of doctrine revolved thrice. There was first didactic statement, then exhortation, and lastly appeal to evidence and personal experience. The image is that of grinding. The chaff and refuse are forced from the

good flour by repeated revolutions of the wheel. The statement of facts, the urgent appeal, and the proof are repeated in the inculcation of each of the "four truths." The wheel of Buddhist preaching was thus made to perform twelve revolutions.

Having once launched the subject under these four heads, it was natural that the Hindoo minds of the time, fond as they were of dialectical hair-splitting, should ramify them into numberless subdivisions. They talked of the eighty-one states of misery, the eighty-eight varieties of deception, the thirty-seven methods of reformation, &c.