for the growth which we see at Bodh-Gaya now cannot claim to be the branches under which the Buddha sat or even the trunk which Asoka tended.  At best it is a modern stem sprung from the seeds of the old tree, and this descent is rendered disputable by legends of its destruction and miraculous restoration.  Even during the time that Sir A. Cunningham knew the locality from 1862 to 1880 it would seem that the old trunk decayed and was replaced by scions grown from seed.

The texts quoted above leave the Buddha occupied in teaching the five monks in the Deer Park and the Mahavagga gives us the text of the sermon[331] with which he opened his instruction.  It is entitled Turning the Wheel of Righteousness, and is also known as The Sermon at Benares.  It is a very early statement of the main doctrines of primitive Buddhism and I see no reason to doubt that it contains the ideas and phrases of the Buddha.  The gist of the sermon is extremely simple.  He first says that those who wish to lead a religious life should avoid the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-torture and follow a middle way.  Then he enunciates what he calls the four truths[332] about evil or suffering and the way to make an end of it.  He opens very practically, and it may be noticed that abstruse as are many of his discourses they generally go straight to the heart of some contemporary interest.  Here he says that self-indulgence is low and self-mortification crazy:  that both are profitless and neither is the religious life.  That consists in walking in the middle path, or noble eightfold path defined in a celebrated formula as right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right rapture.  He then enunciates the four truths.  The first declares that all clinging to existence involves suffering.  I shall have occasion to examine later the pessimism which is often said to characterize Buddhism and Indian thought generally.  Here let it suffice to say that the first truth must be taken in conjunction with the others.  The teaching of the Buddha is a teaching not so much of pessimism as of emancipation:  but emancipation implies the existence of evil from which men must be freed:  a happy world would not need it.  Buddhism recognizes the evil of the world but it is not on that account a religion of despair:  the essence of it is that it provides a remedy and an escape.

The second and third truths must be taken together and in connection with the formula known as the chain of causation (paticcasamuppada).  Everything has a cause and produces an effect.  If this is, that is:  if this is not, then that is not.  This simple principle of uniform causation is applied to the whole universe, gods and men, heaven, earth and hell.  Indian thought has always loved wide applications of fundamental principles and here a law of the universe is propounded in a form both simple and abstract.  Everything exists in virtue of a cause and does not