t only in old age, after
having studied the Vedas all his life, practised all the rites, and
established a family.

BUDDHISM

=Buddha.=--Millions of men who were not Brahmans, suffered by this
life of minutiae and anguish. A man then appeared who brought a
doctrine of deliverance. He was not a Brahman, but of the caste of the
Kchatrias, son of a king of the north. To the age of twenty-nine he
had lived in the palace of his father. One day he met an old man with
bald head, of wrinkled features, and trembling limbs; a second time he
met an incurable invalid, covered with ulcers, without a home; again
he fell in with a decaying corpse devoured by worms. And so, thought
he, youth, health, and life are nothing for they offer no resistance
to old age, to sickness, and to death. He had compassion on men and
sought a remedy. Then he met a religious mendicant with grave and
dignified air; following his example he decided to renounce the world.
These four meetings had determined his calling.

Buddha fled to the desert, lived seven years in penitence, undergoing
hunger, thirst, and rain. These mortifications gave him no repose. He
ate, became strong, and found the truth. Then he reentered the world
to preach it; he made disciples in crowds who called him Buddha (the
scholar); and when he died after forty-five years of preaching,
Buddhism was established.

=Nirvana.=--To live is to be unhappy, taught Buddha. Every man suffers
because he desires the goods of this world, youth, health, life, and
cannot keep them. All life is a suffering; all suffering is born of
desire. To suppress suffering, it is necessary to root out desire; to
destroy it one must cease from wishing to live, "emancipate one's self
from the thirst of being." The wise man is he who casts aside
everything that attaches to this life and makes it unhappy. One must
cease successively from feeling, wishing, thinking. Then, freed from
passion, volition, even from reflection, he no longer suffers, and
can, after his death, come to the supreme good, which consists in
being delivered from all life and from all suffering. The aim of the
wise man is the annihilation of personality: the Buddhists call it
Nirvana.

=Charity.=--The Brahmans also considered life as a place of suffering
and annihilation as felicity. Buddha came not with a new doctrine, but
with new sentiments.

The religion of the Brahmans was egoistic. Buddha had compassion on
men, he loved them, and pr