this point the danger of misrepresentation lies. It is true that the
Buddha lived before the time of Christ, and therefore anything of the
nature of real biography must be of an earlier date than the teachings
of Jesus; but whether the _legends_ antedate His life and doctrines is
quite another question. The Buddhist apologists all assume that they do,
and it is upon the legends that most of the alleged parallelisms in the
two records are based. How, then, shall we draw the line between history
and legend? The concensus of the best scholarship accepts those
traditions in which the northern and southern Buddhist records agree,
which the Council of Patna, B.C. 242, adopted as canonical, and which
are in themselves credible and consistent with the teachings of Gautama
himself. According to this standard of authority Gautama was born about
the sixth century B.C., as the son and heir of a rajah of the Sakya
tribe of Aryans, living about eighty miles north by northwest of
Benares. His mother, the principal wife of Kajah Suddhodana, had lived
many years without offspring, and she died not long after the birth of
this her only son, Siddartha. In his youth he was married and surrounded
by all the allurements and pleasures of an Oriental court. He, too,
appears to have remained without an heir till he was twenty-nine years
of age, when, upon the birth of a son, certain morbid tendencies came to
a climax, and he left his palace secretly and sought true comfort in a
life of asceticism. For six years he tried diligently the resources of
Hindu self-mortification, but becoming exhausted by his austerities,
almost unto death, he abandoned that mode of life, having apparently
become atheistic. He renounced the idea of merit-making as a means of
spiritual attainment, and he was sorely tempted, no doubt, to return to
his former life of ease. But he withstood the temptation and resolved to
forego 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]