for the means of deliverance. He left him, followed by five of his fellow-students, and for six years retired into solitude, near a village named Uruvilva, subjecting himself to the most severe penances, previous to his appearing in the world as a teacher. At the end of this period, however, he arrived at the conviction that asceticism, far from giving peace of mind and preparing the way to salvation, was a snare and a stumbling-block in the way of truth. He gave up his exercises, and was at once deserted as an apostate by his five disciples. Left to himself, he now began to elaborate his own system. He had learned that neither the doctrines nor the austerities of the Brahmans were of any avail for accomplishing the deliverance of man, and for freeing him from the fear of old age, disease, and death. After long meditations and ecstatic visions, he at last imagined that he had arrived at that true knowledge which discloses the cause, and thereby destroys the fear, of all the changes inherent in life. It was from the moment when he arrived at this knowledge that he claimed the name of Buddha the enlightened. Buddha hesitated for a time whether he should keep his knowledge to himself or communicate it to the world. Compassion for the sufferings of man prevailed, and the young prince became the founder of a religion which, after more than 2000 years, is still professed by 455,000,000 of human beings.

"The further history of the new teacher is very simple. He proceeded to Benares, which at all times has been the principal seat of learning in India, and the first converts he made were the five fellow-students who had left him when he threw off the yoke of the Brahmanical observances. Many others followed, but as the Lalita-Vistara ' breaks off at Buddha's arrival at Benares, we have no further consecutive account of the

rapid progress of his doctrine. From what we can gather from scattered notices in the Buddhist canon, he was invited by the King of Magadha, Bimbisara, to his capital, Rajagriha. Many of his lectures are represented as having been delivered at the monastery of Kalavataka, with which the king or some rich merchant had presented him; others on the Vulture Peak, one of the five hills which surround the ancient capital.