many times and receive
the reward or the punishment of past existences in those that follow.
This belief is known as "the transmigration of souls." It is the
foundation of the faith of Buddha which is believed in to-day by
millions of persons in India and China, as well as in other countries.

In the truth that Buddha had acquired he learned many things. Chief of
them, as he believed, are four great facts of life and nature from
which the soul cannot escape--that there will always be sorrow and
suffering in the world; that these are caused by clinging to things
that are always changing or dying; that the only way to obtain peace is
to renounce these things and care for them no longer; and that the only
way to live is to walk in the paths of righteousness, honesty, virtue,
and to believe in the Buddhist faith.

Buddha also believed that animals have souls just as men do, and that
by some good action these animal souls become the souls of men. Then
the souls go through many existences. If they are righteous they
approach the peace of Nirvana, which is attainable only when they are
entirely purified; if they are unrighteous they are cast down again
into lower forms of life and once more have to struggle upward toward
the truth. There is no escape from the consequences of sin in the
Buddhist faith. Just so certainly as a man sins he will be punished for
it--if not in this life in the next one--and if his sin is sufficiently
deadly he will lose again the form of a man and return to the shape of
a snake or a lizard to expiate his wickedness through countless
generations.

Heaven and Hell have a place in the belief of Buddha also. They are
different from the Heaven and Hell that Christians know because in the
Buddhist religion they are only temporary abodes for the spirit between
its many existences on earth.

When his new faith had come to him, Buddha left the jungle to preach it
to mankind. On his way he met the five disciples that had deserted him
and he told them that the truth had indeed come to him and that he was
now a Buddha. After they heard him preach they were converted, and
after three months the number of Buddha's disciples had increased to
sixty, who, like himself, gave all their worldly possessions to assume
the garments of beggars and ask for their bread from door to door.

Buddha then told his disciples that they must go in different
directions and teach all that desired to learn. He himself went back to