There can be no doubt that Gautama's relinquishment of Hinduism marked a
great and most trying crisis. It involved the loss of all confidence in
him on the part of his disciples, for when he began again to take
necessary food they all forsook him as a failure. It was while sitting
under the shade of an Indian fig-tree (Boddhi-tree) that this struggle
occurred and his victory was gained. There his future course was
resolved upon; there was the real birth-place of Buddhism as a system.
He thenceforth began to preach the law, or what he regarded as the way
of self-emancipation, and therefore the way of life. He first sought his
five followers, who had abandoned him, and succeeded in winning them
back. He gathered at length a company of about sixty disciples, whom he
trained and sent forth as teachers of his new doctrines. Yet, still
influenced by the old Hindu notions of the religious life, he formed his
disciples into an order of mendicants, and in due time he established an
order of nuns.

It was when Gautama rose up from his meditation and his high resolve
under the Bo-tree, that he began his career as "The Enlightened." He was
now a Buddha, and claimed to have attained Nirvana. All that has been
written of his having left his palace with the purpose of becoming a
saviour of mankind, is the sheer assumption of the later legends and
their apologists. Buddhism was an after-thought, only reached after six
years of bootless asceticism. There is no evidence that when Siddartha
left his palace he had any thought of benefiting anybody but himself. He
entered upon the life of the recluse with the same motives and aims that
have influenced thousands of other monks and anchorets of all lands and
ages--some of them princes like himself. Nevertheless, for the noble
decision which was finally reached we give him high credit. It seems to
have been one of the noblest victories ever gained by man over lower
impulses and desires. The passions of youth were not yet dead within
him; worldly ambition may be supposed to have been still in force; but
he chose the part of a missionary to his fellow-men, and there is no
evidence that he ever swerved from his purpose. He had won a great
victory over himself, and that fact constituted a secret of great power.
Gautama was about thirty-five years of age when he became a Buddha, and
for forty-five years after that he lived to preach his doctrines and to
establish the monastic institution which has s