BUDA-PESTH (506), a twin city, the capital of Hungary, on the Danube; Buda (Ger.  Ofen) on the right bank and Pesth on the left, the two cities being connected by a suspension bridge, the former on a rocky elevation and the latter on level ground; a great commercial centre.

BUDASTIS, an ancient town in Lower Egypt, where festivals in honour of Bacchus used to be held every year.

BUDDHA, GAUTAMA, or SAKYA-MUNI, the founder of Buddhism about the 5th century B.C., born a Hindu, of an intensely contemplative nature, the son of a king, who did everything in his power to tempt him from a religious life, from which, however, in his contemplation of the vanity of existence, nothing could detain him; retired into solitude at the age of 30, as Sakyamuni, i. e. solitary of the Sakyas, his tribe; consulted religious books, could get no good out of them, till, by-and-by, he abstracted himself more and more from everything external, when at the end of ten years, as he sat brooding under the Bo-tree alone with the universe, soul with soul, the light of truth rose full-orbed upon him, and he called himself henceforth and gave himself out as Buddha, i. e. the Enlightened; now he said to himself, “I know it all,” as Mahomet in his way did after him, and became a preacher to others of what had proved salvation to himself, which he continued to do for 40 years, leaving behind him disciples, who went forth without sword, like Christ’s, to preach what they, like Christ’s, believed was a gospel to every creature.

BUDDHISM, the religion of Buddha, a religion which, eschewing all speculation about God and the universe, set itself solely to the work of salvation, the end of which was the merging of the individual in the unity of being, and the “way” to which was the mortification of all private passion and desire which mortification, when finished, was the Buddhist Nirvana.  This is the primary doctrine of the Buddhist faith, which erelong became a formality, as all faiths of the kind, or of this high order, ever tend to do.  Buddha is not answerable for this, but his followers, who in three successive councils resolved it into a system of formulae, which Buddha, knowing belike how the letter killeth and only the spirit giveth life, never attempted to do.  Buddha wrote none himself, but in some 300 years after his death his teachings assumed a canonical form, under the name of Tripitaka, or triple basket, as it is called.  Buddhism from the first was a proselytising religion; it at one time overran the whole of India, and though it is now in small favour there, it is, in such form as it has assumed, often a highly beggarly one, understood to be the religion of 340 millions of the human race.

BUDE-LIGHT, a very brilliant light produced by introducing oxygen into the centre of an Argand burner, so called from the place of the inventor’s abode.

BUDWEIS (28), a Bohemian trading town on the Moldau, 133 m.  NW. of Vienna.