avely, lit with the light of his own
experiences and feelings, that assist him in living his own life. His
Buddha is the Buddha he understands, and who understood and sympathized
with such as him. Other things may be true, but they are matters of
indifference.

To hear of the Buddha from living lips in this country, which is full of
his influence, where the spire of his monastery marks every village, and
where every man has at one time or another been his monk, is quite a
different thing to reading of him in far countries, under other skies
and swayed by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden in the
dusk, in just such a tropic dusk as he taught in so many years ago, and
hear the yellow-robed monk tell of that life, and repeat his teaching of
love, and charity, and compassion--eternal love, perfect charity,
endless compassion--until the stars come out in the purple sky, and the
silver-voiced gongs ring for evening prayers, is a thing never to be
forgotten. As you watch the starlight die and the far-off hills fade
into the night, as the sounds about you still, and the calm silence of
the summer night falls over the whole earth, you know and understand the
teacher of the Great Peace as no words can tell you. A sympathy comes to
you from the circle of believers, and you believe, too. An influence and
an understanding breathes from the nature about you--the same nature
that the teacher saw--from the whispering fig-trees and the scented
champaks, and the dimly seen statues in the shadows of the shrines, that
you can never gain elsewhere. And as the monks tell you the story of
that great life, they bring it home to you with reflection and comment,
with application to your everyday existence, till you forget that he of
whom they speak lived so long ago, so very long ago, and your heart is
filled with sorrow when you remember that he is dead, that he is entered
into his peace.

I do not hope that I can convey much of this in my writing. I always
feel the hopelessness of trying to put on paper the great thoughts, the
intense feeling, of which Buddhism is so full. But still I can, perhaps,
give something of this life as I have heard it, make it a little more
living than it has been to us, catch some little of that spirit of
sympathy that it holds for all the world.

Around the life of the Buddha has gathered much myth, like dust upon an
ancient statue, like shadows upon the mountains far away, blurring
detail here and t