early
missionaries endured every hardship, cruelty, and persecution, with
unfaltering courage.

[8] At the Second Council there were two pupils of [=A]nanda,
consequently centenarians, while in Asoka's Council there were pupils
of those pupils.

PART II

THE DHARMA OR DOCTRINE

106. Q. _What is the meaning of the word Buddha?_

A. The enlightened, or he who has the perfect wisdom.

107. Q. _You have said that there were other Buddhas before this one?_

A. Yes; our belief is that, under the operation of eternal causation,
a Buddha takes birth at intervals, when mankind have become plunged
into misery through ignorance, and need the wisdom which it is the
function of a Buddha to teach. (See also Q. 11.)

108. Q. _How is a Buddha developed?_

A. A person, hearing and seeing one of the Buddhas on earth, becomes
seized with the determination so to live that at some future time, when
he shall become fitted for it, he also will be a Buddha for the guiding
of mankind out of the cycle of rebirth.

109. Q. _How does he proceed?_

A. Throughout that birth and every succeeding one, he strives to
subdue his passions, to gain wisdom by experience, and to develop his
higher faculties. He thus grows by degrees wiser, nobler in character,
and stronger in virtue, until, finally, after numberless re-births he
reaches the state when he can become Perfected, Enlightened, All-wise,
the ideal Teacher of the human race.

110. Q. _While this gradual development is going on throughout all
these births, by what name do we call him?_

A. B[=o]dhisat, or B[=o]dhisattva. Thus the Prince Siddhartha Gautama
was a B[=o]dhisattva up to the moment when, under the blessed B[=o]dhi
tree at Gay[=a], he became Buddha.

111. Q. _Have we any account of his various rebirths as a
Bodhisattva?_

A. In the J[=a]takatthakath[=a], a book containing stories of the
B[=o]dhisattva's reincarnations, there are several hundred tales of
that kind.

112. Q. _What lesson do these stories teach?_

A. That a man can carry, throughout a long series of reincarnations,
one great, good purpose which enables him to conquer bad tendencies and
develop virtuous ones.

113. Q. _Can we fix the number of reincarnations through which a
B[=o]dhisattva must pass before he can become a Buddha?_

A. Of course not: that depends upon his natural character, the state
of development to which he has arrived when he forms the resolution to