earthly pleasure, and teach mankind what he conceived to be the way of life, through self-control.  He had tried pleasure; next he had tried extreme asceticism; he now struck out what he called “The Middle Path,” as between self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme bodily mortification as a thing of merit on the other.  This middle ground still demanded abstinence as favorable to the highest mental and moral conditions, but it was not carried to such extremes as to weaken the body or the mind, or impair the fullest operation of every faculty.[80]

There can be no doubt that Gautama’s relinquishment of Hinduism marked a great and most trying crisis.  It involved the loss of all confidence in him on the part of his disciples, for when he began again to take necessary food they all forsook him as a failure.  It was while sitting under the shade of an Indian fig-tree (Boddhi-tree) that this struggle occurred and his victory was gained.  There his future course was resolved upon; there was the real birth-place of Buddhism as a system.  He thenceforth began to preach the law, or what he regarded as the way of self-emancipation, and therefore the way of life.  He first sought his five followers, who had abandoned him, and succeeded in winning them back.  He gathered at length a company of about sixty disciples, whom he trained and sent forth as teachers of his new doctrines.  Yet, still influenced by the old Hindu notions of the religious life, he formed his disciples into an order of mendicants, and in due time he established an order of nuns.

It was when Gautama rose up from his meditation and his high resolve under the Bo-tree, that he began his career as “The Enlightened.”  He was now a Buddha, and claimed to have attained Nirvana.  All that has been written of his having left his palace with the purpose of becoming a saviour of mankind, is the sheer assumption of the later legends and their apologists.  Buddhism was an after-thought, only reached after six years of bootless asceticism.  There is no evidence that when Siddartha left his palace he had any thought of benefiting anybody but himself.  He entered upon the life of the recluse with the same motives and aims that have influenced thousands of other monks and anchorets of all lands and ages—­some of them princes like himself.  Nevertheless, for the noble decision which was finally reached we give him high credit.  It seems to have been one of the noblest victories ever gained by man over lower impulses and desires.  The passions of youth were not yet dead within him; worldly ambition may be supposed to have been still in force; but he chose the part of a missionary to his fellow-men, and there is no evidence that he ever swerved from his purpose.  He had won a great victory over himself, and that fact constituted a secret of great power.  Gautama was about thirty-five years of age when he became a Buddha, and for forty-five years after that he lived to preach his doctrines and to establish the monastic institution which has survived to our time.  He died a natural death from indigestion at the age of eighty—­greatly venerated by his disciples, and the centre of what had already become a wide-spread system in a large district of India.