Of life and all flesh living cometh up
Into my ears, and all my soul is full
Of pity for the sickness of this world:
Which I will heal, if healing may be found
By uttermost renouncing and strong strife.

Thus masterfully does Sir Edwin Arnold depict the sentiment which
provoked this Great Renunciator. The testimony of thousands of
millions who, during the last twenty-five centuries, have professed
the Buḍḍhistic religion, proves that the secret of human misery
was at last solved by this divine self-sacrifice, and the true path to
Nirvāṇa opened.

The joy that he brought to the hearts of others, Buḍḍha first
tasted himself. He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the
taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value
to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself. The
social differences between men he found were equally arbitrary and
illusive; caste bred hatred and selfishness; riches strife, envy and
malice. So in founding his Faith he laid the bottom of its
foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the
clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to a clear
conception of Nirvāṇa will find his thought far away above the
common joys and sorrows of petty men. As to one who ascends to the
top of Chimborazo or the Himālayan crags, and sees men on the
earth's surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do
bigots and sectarians appear to him. The mountain climber has under
his feet the very clouds from whose sun-painted shapes the poet has
figured to himself the golden streets and glittering domes of the
materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various