the secret of human misery
was at last solved by this divine self-sacrifice, and the true path to
Nirvana opened.

The joy that he brought to the hearts of others, Buddha 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 Nirvana 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 Himalayan 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
objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured:
around, above--Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of
thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the
philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the
heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of the materialistic
creed-builders.

What are the lessons to be derived from the life and teachings of this
heroic prince of Kapilavastu? Lessons of gratitude and benevolence.
Lessons of tolerance for the clashing opinions of men who live, move
and have their being, think and aspire, only in the material world.
The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of
manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or
ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness
of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the
necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for
doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the
bringing of the mind into subjection so that these may be accomplished
without selfish motive or vanity. Lessons of self-purification and
communion, by which the illusiveness of externals and