ad lost it.'
_Life of the Buddha._

The life-story of Prince Theiddatha, who saw the light and became the
Buddha twenty-five centuries ago, has been told in English many times.
It has been told in translations from the Pali, from Burmese, and from
Chinese, and now everyone has read it. The writers, too, of these books
have been men of great attainments, of untiring industry in searching
out all that can be known of this life, of gifts such as I cannot aspire
to. There is now nothing new to learn of those long past days, nothing
fresh for me to tell, no discovery that can be made. Yet in thinking out
what I have to say about the religion of the Burmese, I have found that
I must tell again some of the life of the Buddha, I must rewrite this
ten-times-told tale, of which I know nothing new. And the reason is
this: that although I know nothing that previous writers have not known,
although I cannot bring to the task anything like their knowledge, yet
I have something to say that they have not said. For they have written
of him as they have learned from books, whereas I want to write of him
as I have learned from men. Their knowledge has been taken from the
records of the dead past, whereas mine is from the actualities of the
living present.

I do not mean that the Buddha of the sacred books and the Buddha of the
Burman's belief are different persons. They are the same. But as I found
it with their faith, so I find it with the life of their teacher. The
Burmese regard the life of the Buddha from quite a different standpoint
to that of an outsider, and so it has to them quite a different value,
quite a different meaning, to that which it has to the student of
history. For to the writer who studies the life of the Buddha with a
view merely to learn what that life was, and to criticise it, everything
is very different to what it is to the Buddhist who studies that life
because he loves it and admires it, and because he desires to follow it.
To the former the whole detail of every portion of the life of the
Buddha, every word of his teaching, every act of his ministry, is sought
out and compared and considered. Legend is compared with legend, and
tradition with tradition, that out of many authorities some clue to the
actual fact may be found. But to the Buddhist the important parts in the
great teacher's life are those acts, those words, that appeal directly
to him, that stand out br