age, sickness, and death presented to him as he drove abroad.  Despite his father’s tears and protests Siddh[=a]rtha, or as one may call him now by his patronymic, the man Gautama, left his home and family, gave up all possessions, and devoted himself to self-mortification and Yoga discipline of concentration of thought, following in this the model set by all previous ascetics.  He says himself, according to tradition, that it was a practical pessimism which drove him to take this step.  He was not pleased with life, and the pleasures of society had no charm for him.  When he saw the old man, the sick man, the dead man, he became disgusted to think that he too would be subject to age, sickness, and death:  “I felt disgust at old age; all pleasure then forsook me.”  In becoming an ascetic Gautama simply endeavored to discover some means by which he might avoid a recurrence of life, of which the disagreeable side in his estimation outweighed the joy.  He too had already answered negatively the question Is life worth living?

We must pause here to point out that this oldest and simplest account of Gautama’s resolve shows two things.  It makes clear that Gautama at first had no plan for the universal salvation of his race.  He was alert to ‘save his own soul,’ nothing more.  We shall show presently that this is confirmed by subsequent events in his career.  The next point is that this narration in itself is a complete refutation of the opinion of those scholars who believe that the doctrine of karma and reincarnation arose first in Buddhism, and that the Upanishads that preach this doctrine are not of the pre-Buddhistic period.  The last part of this statement of opinion is, of course, not touched by the story of Gautama’s renunciation, but the first assumption wrecks on it.  Why should Gautama have so given himself to Yoga discipline?  Did he expect to escape age, sickness, death, in this life by that means?  No.  The assumption from the beginning is the belief in the doctrine of reincarnation.  It was in order to free himself from future returns of these ills that Gautama renounced his home.  But nothing whatever is said of his discovering or inventing the doctrine of reincarnation.  Both hell and karma are taken for granted throughout the whole early Buddhistic literature.  Buddha discovered neither of them, any more than he discovered a new system of morality, or a new system of religious life; although more credit accrues to him in regard to the last because his order was opposed to that then prevalent; yet even here he had antique authority for his discipline.

To return to Gautama’s[8] life.  Legend tells how he fled away on his horse Kanthaka, in search of solitude and the means of salvation, far from his home to the abode of ascetics, for he thought:  “Whence comes peace?  When the fire of desire is extinguished, when the fire of hate is extinguished, when the fire of illusion is extinguished, when all sins and all sorrows are extinguished, then comes peace.”  And the only means to this end was the renunciation of desire, the discipline of Yoga concentration, where the mind fixed on one point loses all else from its horizon, and feels no drawing aside to worldly things.