ignorant of, suddenly appeared to him in all its hideous reality. He discovered that this great evil was even more inexorable than the others; that it spared no one, king or slave, prince or pauper, and that each day it was making a new advance toward himself in order to strike him down in his turn. The young man returned a prey to an extreme agitation of mind. All the splendors wherewith he was surrounded melted away from his view; the vision of the repulsive corpse lighted in ghastly fashion by the funereal torches haunted him day and night, and he could neither eat nor sleep.

Finally in a fourth visit beyond the forbidden precincts he came across a man with shaven head and a yellow garment, who went along with his eyes cast down and without paying any attention to his surroundings. The prince accosted him and inquired who he was and what was his occupation. The other replied that he was an ascetic and that he was laboring for his salvation. This was an occupation of which Siddhartha had never heard, and feeling a deep interest in the subject, he brought the monk back with him into the palace and placed himself under his instruction. It was this his first master who decided his vocation.

Such is in substance the most famous perhaps of all known legends. St. John Damascene found it circulating in his day, and was firmly persuaded that it was of Christian origin. From him it was borrowed by Jacobus de Voragine who incorporated it into the Legenda Aurea under the title: 'Lives of SS. Barlaam and Joasaph'. It goes without saying that the primitive story underwent many changes in the long course of ages before it was embodied in the work of Jacobus the Archbishop of Genoa.

The fantastic Hindu imagination gave itself a free rein in dealing with the episode of Siddhartha's departure from his palace. However, the more ancient documents speak of it with more sobriety, and first of all they set forth briefly the considerations which determined the young Kshatriya to leave home and those dear to him. He said to himself: "Family life is a life of subjection and servitude, a sinful condition; liberty consists in abandoning one's home." Thus thought Gautama and he left his home.

He departed, not as is stated in the later documents, furtively and without even saying adieu to his wife and child, but with the full knowledge of the members of his family who by their prayers and tearful entreaties vainly sought to retain him. Turning his back on his home, he gave himself up straightway to the quest of that

science which was to dissipate the darkness of his soul and permit him to behold truth as it is in reality; in the possession of this science he sought for the discernment necessary in order that he might be delivered from his present state of illusion.

The sequel of the account of his life is almost entirely made up of late legends from which it is difficult to separate the few grains of historic truth which they may contain. During a period of seven years he wandered like a fugitive from solitude to solitude, from forest to forest, visiting the most renowned ascetics and placing himself under their direction. Thus he journeyed through vast regions, though always keeping near to the great basin of the Ganges, the holy river which he had been accustomed to revere ever since his early childhood. Nowhere in his peregrinations did he meet with aught but deception, but far from giving way to the temptations of discouragement by which he was at times assailed, he kept on his way, obstinate in his resolution to master at all costs the science of salvation.

His long perseverance was finally rewarded at a moment when he least expected it. One night weary from vain meditation on the great problem that had weighed so long and so heavily on his mind, he fell asleep at the foot of a pippala or sacred fig tree, when all at once the truth he had been seeking dawned upon his intelligence like a flash of lightning piercing through a mass of dark clouds, and immediately he was illumined to the very depths of his being. The young ascetic awoke to find himself the Buddha or illuminated one. At the same time a happiness such as he had never experienced flooded the soul of the seer. The crisis was over. The world no longer had for him any secret or mystery; henceforth he was enlightened as to its origin and destiny. Full of the assurance that he was not condemned to be born again, he felt in himself an intense and boundless joy.

In this illumination of Buddha (as we shall henceforth call him) some writers are pleased to see a solar myth, while others perceive in it a historical fact explicable by a kind of auto-suggestion such as we meet with so often in psychical investigation. The former view is hardly tenable, nor can much credence be given to the latter theory, however much in itself within the limits of possibility, for it is more than likely that we are dealing with a pure legend. I venture to put forward as my own opinion until such time as new

his

evidences, which I do not expect to be forthcoming, will have decided the case otherwise.

The newly illumined spent four weeks in recollection, solitude and silence. The comparison which has been made between this retreat in which Buddha prepared himself immediately for his apostolate and that of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the desert just after His baptism, is only, as Oldenberg remarks, a chance identity of situation, and of circumstances determined by this situation. I would add that that identity is merely on the surface, and that the conditions in which Christ sojourned in the desert are not at all the same as in the case of Buddha. The Messias never doubted of his mission, nor hesitated in fulfilling it, as happened with Buddha. Nor had He need of light from without to illumine Him in the accomplishment of that mission, He who was the Light itself come into the world.

At the end of the first week of his retreat Buddha saw unfold before his mind the whole chain of causes and effects of transmigration. Here briefly is his account of it.

"From ignorance come forms, and from forms knowledge, etc." I will come to the last links of that long chain which binds the first cause to last effects.

"From concupiscence comes attachment (to existence), from attachment (to existence) conception, from conception birth, from birth come old age and death, sorrow and groaning, pain, chagrin and despair." Ignorance, it is seen, produces, if not immediately, at least by a series of secondary causes of which it is itself the principal cause, birth into this world with all its evils. It is the mother of sorrow to suppress the one we must begin by suppressing the other.

In that last night of the first week, the Sublime, as he will call himself hereafter, assists at this long series of causes and effects. His imagination descended from that high pyramid where ignorance held sway to the ever enlarging base, where all the vanities and miseries of this world were rampant. When the vision was at an end and he turned back upon himself to draw the moral, the Perfect, (another of his numerous surnames), pronounced the following stanza: "Whilst the reign of eternal order unveiled itself to meditation, to the ardent meditations of Brahma, Brahma routed the legions of the Tempter as the sun pierces through the clouds."

The Tempter in question is none other than the famous Mara, the Spirit of evil, the Wicked One, who strove three several times to turn Buddha from his mission by promising to make him enter immediately into the supreme felicity of Nirvana. To the first temptation of Mara Buddha replied that he did not wish to enter Nirvana until he had formed a body of religious; to the second he replied that he wished first to assemble the religious women; to the third he expressed himself in these terms: "I shall not enter into Nirvana, O Wicked One, until the holy way of life I preach develops, is heard, is propagated among all the people and becomes familiar to all, after having been announced to all."

The texts in which we read this legend are far from being the most ancient, and if the Mahaparinibbana-sutta where they are found for the first time, as well as the Lalita-Vistara which reproduced it later are of a primitive redaction, anterior to the Gospels, which is not at all absolutely demonstrated, there is nothing to assure us that these works have escaped the common lot of Oriental writings, that they have not been retouched and have not undergone interpretations more or less considerable.

What might furnish this problem with a solution favorable to the partisans of the theory of borrowings from Buddhistic legends on the part of traditions in general and especially of the Gospelsa thesis dear to Ernest de Bunson, Rodophe Seydel and Arthur Lillie, not to speak of Max Müller, of Rhys-David, savants otherwise very estimable, nor of Emile Burnouf or of Jacolliot, to descend to these names is the epigraphic and iconographic monuments of India, for it can hardly be question here of other countries where Buddhism was solidly implanted only in the first centuries of our era, posterior therefore to the composition of the Gospels and to the fixing of the traditions relative to the life of Christ. And to return to the point we are treating, if we discover in this period for example an inscription of Acoka which makes mention of the temptation of Buddha by Mara, so different otherwise from that of Our Savior by Satan, or if we discover an image or a statue representing the episode, and dating plainly back beyond our era, there would be ground to conclude, not that Christianity had borrowed some of its traditions from Buddhism, Oldenberg, Barth and Eugene Burnouf, their master (do not confuse Eugene with Emile) would forbid us this, but it should at least be recognized that Buddhism, in this regard and on this side, owes nothing either to Christianity.

The borrowings of modern Buddhism from Catholicism, from the liturgical and cultural point of view, are numberless. What it does now in this line it may very well have done in other lines before. It is a religion of adaptation and this explains in part its enormous and lasting success.

Let us not forget, I say it once for all, that our position, for us Christians, is excellent when it is question of borrowings and plagiarisms, a propos of the similarities existing between the traditions of Christianity and Buddhism. The Gospels can be dated within the limits of a century, and apart from certain contested passages, mostly of secondary interest, they have not undergone interpolations, whereas the writings of Brahmic and Buddhistic India wherein are related the deeds and exploits of Krishna and of Buddha cannot be dated even approximately, and they may have undergone incessant retouching even down to our own day.

We have just read the account of the triple temptation of Mara to turn Buddha from his mission. According to another Buddhic monument of greater importance, the Mahavagga (the Great Part, the Great Good) things did not happen the same way. The newlyillumined asked himself whether he ought to keep for himself the truth he had conquered at the price of such terrible conflicts. While he deliberated within himself upon it, the god Brahma came down from heaven to comfort him and to determine him to undertake the conversion of the world despite the fatigues and the perils that would attend it. "Arise, he said to him, arise valiant hero, rich in victories, walk through the world thou stainless guide! Raise thy voice O Master: many will comprehend thy word."

Buddha did not respond to this first summons. He raised the objection of the uselessness of his efforts for a great number, who would reject his teaching.

Notice the difference between this legend and the preceding, that of the temptation of Mara. Three times Mara tried to turn Buddha from teaching the good doctrine, alleging besides what we have seen that same indifference of people toward him, and three times Buddha replied that had he but one soul to listen, that would suffice to determine him to speak. Here Brahma renews his prayer three times and presses the Sublime to quit his solitude and instruct the multitudes. It is not till the third time that he allows himself to be convinced. We are in the presence of two contradictory currents of tradition.