he knew all
things, and that beyond his knowledge there was nothing.

No teacher more full of reverence, more humble than Gaudama the Buddha
ever lived to be an example to us through all time. He tells us of what
he knows; of what he knows not he is silent. Of the laws that he can
see, the great sequences of life to death, of evil to sorrow, of
goodness to happiness, he tells in burning words. Of the beginning and
the end of the world, of the intentions and the ways of the great
Unknown, he tells us nothing at all. He is no prophet, as we understand
the word, but a man; and all that is divine in him beyond what there is
in us is that he hated the darkness and sought the light, sought and was
not dismayed, and at last he found.

And yet nothing could be further from the truth than to call the Buddha
a philosopher and Buddhism a philosophy. Whatever he was, he was no
philosopher. Although he knew not any god, although he rested his claims
to be heard upon the fact that his teachings were clear and
understandable, that you were not required to believe, but only to open
your eyes and see, and 'his delight was in the contemplation of
unclouded truth,' yet he was far from a philosopher. His was not an
appeal to our reason, to our power of putting two and two together and
making five of them; his teachings were no curious designs woven with
words, the counters of his thought. He appealed to the heart, not to the
brain; to our feelings, not to our power of arranging these feelings. He
drew men to him by love and reverence, and held them so for ever. Love
and charity and compassion, endless compassion, are the foundations of
his teachings; and his followers believe in him because they have seen
in him the just man made perfect, and because he has shown to them the
way in which all men may become even as he is.

He was a prince in a little kingdom in the Northeast of India, the son
of King Thudoodana and his wife Maia. He was strong, we are told, and
handsome, famous in athletic exercises, and his father looked forward to
the time when he should be grown a great man, and a leader of armies.
His father's ambition for him was that he should be a great conqueror,
that he should lead his troops against the neighbouring kings and
overcome them, and in time make for himself a wide-stretching empire.
India was in those days, as in many later ones, split up into little
kingdoms, divided from each other by no natural boundary, overlooke