n a tenement of flesh who, as such,
though he die, immediately is reincarnated; a god therefore always
present among his people, whose history is a continuous gospel. In
contemporaneous Italy, a peasant may aspire to the papacy. In the
uplands of Asia, men have loftier ambitions. There they may become
Buddha, who perhaps never was, except in legend.

In the _Lalita Vistara_ the legend unfolds. In the strophes of the
poem one may assist at the Buddha's birth, an event which is said to
have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with
the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar.
Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism.

History has its hesitancies. Often it stammers uncertainly. But its
earliest pages agree in representing Kapila as the initial religious
rebel. Kapila was the first to declare the divine a human and invalid
conjecture. The announcement, with its prefaces and deductions, is
contained in the _Sankhya Karika_, a system of rationalism, still read
in India, where it is known as the godless tract.

In the Orient, existence is usually a sordid nightmare when it does
not happen to be a golden dream. Kapila taught that it was a prison
from which release could be had only through intellectual development.
That is Kapilavastu, the substance of Kapila, where the Buddha was
born. In the _Lalita Vistara_ it is fairyland.

There, Gotama the Buddha is the Prince Charming of a sovereign house.
But a prince who developed into a nihilist prior to re-becoming the
god that anteriorly he had been. It was while in heaven that he
selected Maya, a ranee, to be his mother. It was surrounded by the
heavenly that he appeared. The fields foamed with flowers. The skies
flamed with faces. In the air apsaras floated, fanning themselves with
peacocks' tails. The galleries of the palace festooned themselves with
pearls. On the terraces a rain of perfume fell. In the parterres Maya
strolled. A tree bent and bowed to her. Touching a branch with her
hand she looked up and yawned. Painlessly from her immaculate breast
Gotama issued. An immense lotos sprouted to receive him. To cover him
a parasol dropped from above. He, however, already occupied, was
contemplating space, the myriad worlds, the myriad lives, and
announced himself their saviour. At once a deluge of roses descended.
The effulgence of a hundred thousand colours shone. A spasm of delight
pulsated. Sorrow and a