nowledge of the truth that will lead them unto the
Great Peace.'

This is the great renunciation.

I have often talked about this with the monks and others, often heard
them speak about this great renunciation, of this parting of the prince
and his wife.

'You see,' said a monk once to me, 'he was not yet the Buddha, he had
not seen the light, only he was desirous to look for it. He was just a
prince, just a man like any other man, and he was very fond of his wife.
It is very hard to resist a woman if she loves you and cries, and if you
love her. So he was afraid.'

And when I said that Yathodaya was also religious, and had helped him in
his thoughts, and that surely she would not have stopped him, the monk
shook his head.

'Women are not like that,' he said.

And a woman said to me once: 'Surely she was very much to be pitied
because her husband went away from her and her baby. Do you think that
when she talked religion with her husband she ever thought that it would
cause him to leave her and go away for ever? If she had thought that,
she would never have done as she did. A woman would never help anything
to sever her husband from her, not even religion. And when after ten
years a baby had come to her! Surely she was very much to be pitied.'
This woman made me understand that the highest religion of a woman is
the true love of her husband, of her children; and what is it to her if
she gain the whole world, but lose that which she would have?

All the story of Yathodaya and her dealings with her husband is full of
the deepest pathos, full of passionate protest against her loss, even in
order that her husband and all the world should gain. She would have
held him, if she could, against the world, and deemed that she did well.
And so, though it is probable that it was a great deal owing to
Yathodaya's help, to her sympathy, to her support in all his
difficulties, that Gaudama came to his final resolve to leave the world
and seek for the truth, yet she acted unwittingly of what would be the
end.

'She did not know,' said the woman. 'She helped her husband, but she did
not know to what. And when she was ill, when she was giving birth to her
baby, then her husband left her. Surely she was very much to be pitied.'

And so Yathodaya, the wife of the Prince Gaudama, who became the Buddha,
is held in high honour, in great esteem, by all Buddhists. By the men,
because she helped her husband to his resolve to seek for