contain the decrees of a king, or raja, named Pyadasi, whom Mr. Turnour has shown to be the same as the famous Asoka, before alluded to.  This king appears to have come to the throne somewhere between B.C. 319 and B.C. 260.  Similar inscriptions have been discovered throughout India, proving to the satisfaction of such scholars as Burnouf, Prinsep, Turnour, Lassen, Weber, Max Muller, and Saint-Hilaire, that Buddhism had become almost the state religion of India, in the fourth century before Christ.[100]

Sec. 3.  Sakya-muni, the Founder of Buddhism.

North of Central India and of the kingdom of Oude, near the borders of Nepaul, there reigned, at the end of the seventh century before Christ, a wise and good king, in his capital city, Kapilavastu[101].  He was one of the last of the great Solar race, celebrated in the ancient epics of India.  His wife, named Maya because of her great beauty, became the mother of a prince, who was named Siddartha, and afterward known as the Buddha[102].  She died seven days after his birth, and the child was brought up by his maternal aunt.  The young prince distinguished himself by his personal and intellectual qualities, but still more by his early piety.  It appears from the laws of Manu that it was not unusual, in the earliest periods of Brahmanism, for those seeking a superior piety to turn hermits, and to live alone in the forest, engaged in acts of prayer, meditation, abstinence, and the study of the Vedas.  This practice, however, seems to have been confined to the Brahmans.  It was, therefore, a grief to the king, when his son, in the flower of his youth and highly accomplished in every kingly faculty of body and mind, began to turn his thoughts toward the life of an anchorite.  In fact, the young Siddartha seems to have gone through that deep experience out of which the great prophets of mankind have always been born.  The evils of the world pressed on his heart and brain; the very air seemed full of mortality; all things were passing away.  Was anything permanent? anything stable?  Nothing but truth; only the absolute, eternal law of things.  “Let me see that,” said he, “and I can give lasting peace to mankind.  Then shall I become their deliverer.”  So, in opposition to the strong entreaties of his father, wife, and friends, he left the palace one night, and exchanged the position of a prince for that of a mendicant.  “I will never return to the palace,” said he, “till I have attained to the sight of the divine law, and so become Buddha."[103]

He first visited the Brahmans, and listened to their doctrines, but found no satisfaction therein.  The wisest among them could not teach him true peace,—­that profound inward rest, which was already called Nirvana.  He was twenty-nine years old.  Although disapproving of the Brahmanic austerities as an end, he practised them during six years, in order to subdue the senses.  He then became satisfied that the path to perfection