of with her, he refused to break his promise.  The invitations of princes had no attraction for him, and he was a prince himself.  A fragment of conversation introduced irrelevantly into his deathbed discourses[367] is significant—­“How, Lord, are we to conduct ourselves with regard to womankind?  Don’t see them, Ananda.  But if we see them, what are we to do?  Abstain from speech.  But if they should speak to us what are we to do?  Keep wide awake.”

This spirit is even more evident in the account of the admission of Nuns to the order.  When the Buddha was visiting his native town his aunt and foster mother, Mahaprajapati, thrice begged him to grant this privilege to women but was thrice refused and went away in tears.  Then she followed him to Vesali and stood in the entrance of the Kutagara Hall “with swollen feet and covered with dust, and sorrowful.”  Ananda, who had a tender heart, interviewed her and, going in to the Buddha, submitted her request but received a triple refusal.  But he was not to be denied and urged that the Buddha admitted women to be capable of attaining saintship and that it was unjust to refuse the blessings of religion to one who had suckled him.  At last Gotama yielded—­perhaps the only instance in which he is represented as convinced by argument—­but he added “If, Ananda, women had not received permission to enter the Order, the pure religion would have lasted long, the good law would have stood fast a thousand years.  But since they had received that permission, it will now stand fast for only five hundred years[368].”

He maintained and approved the same hard detached attitude in other domestic relations.  His son Rahula received special instruction but is not represented as enjoying his confidence like Ananda.  A remarkable narrative relates how, when the monk Sangamaji was sitting beneath a tree absorbed in meditation, his former wife (whom he had left on abandoning the world) laid his child before him and said “Here, monk, is your little son, nourish me and nourish him.”  But Sangamaji took no notice and the woman went away.  The Buddha who observed what happened said “He feels no pleasure when she comes, no sorrow when she goes:  him I call a true Brahman released from passion[369].”  This narrative is repulsive to European sentiment, particularly as the chronicler cannot spare the easy charity of a miracle to provide for the wife and child, but in taking it as an index of the character of Gotama, we must bear in mind such sayings of Christ as “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple[370].”

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