BUDDHISM

=Buddha.=—­Millions of men who were not Brahmans, suffered by this life of minutiae and anguish.  A man then appeared who brought a doctrine of deliverance.  He was not a Brahman, but of the caste of the Kchatrias, son of a king of the north.  To the age of twenty-nine he had lived in the palace of his father.  One day he met an old man with bald head, of wrinkled features, and trembling limbs; a second time he met an incurable invalid, covered with ulcers, without a home; again he fell in with a decaying corpse devoured by worms.  And so, thought he, youth, health, and life are nothing for they offer no resistance to old age, to sickness, and to death.  He had compassion on men and sought a remedy.  Then he met a religious mendicant with grave and dignified air; following his example he decided to renounce the world.  These four meetings had determined his calling.

Buddha fled to the desert, lived seven years in penitence, undergoing hunger, thirst, and rain.  These mortifications gave him no repose.  He ate, became strong, and found the truth.  Then he reentered the world to preach it; he made disciples in crowds who called him Buddha (the scholar); and when he died after forty-five years of preaching, Buddhism was established.

=Nirvana.=—­To live is to be unhappy, taught Buddha.  Every man suffers because he desires the goods of this world, youth, health, life, and cannot keep them.  All life is a suffering; all suffering is born of desire.  To suppress suffering, it is necessary to root out desire; to destroy it one must cease from wishing to live, “emancipate one’s self from the thirst of being.”  The wise man is he who casts aside everything that attaches to this life and makes it unhappy.  One must cease successively from feeling, wishing, thinking.  Then, freed from passion, volition, even from reflection, he no longer suffers, and can, after his death, come to the supreme good, which consists in being delivered from all life and from all suffering.  The aim of the wise man is the annihilation of personality:  the Buddhists call it Nirvana.

=Charity.=—­The Brahmans also considered life as a place of suffering and annihilation as felicity.  Buddha came not with a new doctrine, but with new sentiments.

The religion of the Brahmans was egoistic.  Buddha had compassion on men, he loved them, and preached love to his disciples.  It was just this word of sympathy of which despairing souls were in need.  He bade to love even those who do us ill.  Purna, one of his disciples, went forth to preach to the barbarians.  Buddha said to him to try him, “There are cruel, passionate, furious men; if they address angry words to you, what would you think?” “If they addressed angry words to me,” said Purna, “I should think these are good men, these are gentle men, these men who attack me with wicked words but who strike me neither with the hand nor with stones.”