ceticism? Simply to guide each individual towards that path
which would finally bring him to Nirva_n_a, to utter extinction or
annihilation. The very definition of virtue was that it helped man to
cross over to the other shore, and that other shore was not death, but
cessation of all being. Thus charity was considered a virtue; modesty,
patience, courage, contemplation, and science, all were virtues, but
they were practised only as a means of arriving at deliverance. Buddha
himself exhibited the perfection of all these virtues. His charity
knew no bounds. When he saw a tigress starved, and unable to feed her
cubs, he is said to have made a charitable oblation of his body to be
devoured by them. Hiouen-thsang visited the place on the banks of the
Indus where this miracle was supposed to have happened, and he remarks
that the soil is still red there from the blood of Buddha, and that
the trees and flowers have the same colour.[72] As to the modesty of
Buddha, nothing could exceed it. One day, king Prasena_g_it, the
protector of Buddha, called on him to perform miracles, in order to
silence his adversaries, the Brahmans. Buddha consented. He performed
the required miracles; but he exclaimed, 'Great king, I do not teach
the law to my pupils, telling them, Go, ye saints, and before the eyes
of the Brahmans and householders perform, by means of your
supernatural powers, miracles greater than any man can perform. I tell
them, when I teach them the law, Live, ye saints, hiding your good
works and showing your sins.' And yet, all this self-sacrificing
charity, all this self-sacrificing humility, by which the life of
Buddha was distinguished throughout, and which he preached to the
multitudes that came to listen to him, had, we are told, but one
object, and that object was final annihilation. It is impossible
almost to believe it, and yet when we turn away our eyes from the
pleasing picture of that high morality which Buddha preached for the
first time to all classes of men, and look into the dark pages of his
code of religious metaphysics, we can hardly find another explanation.
Fortunately, the millions who embraced the doctrines of Buddha, and
were saved by it from the depths of barbarism, brutality, and
selfishness, were unable to fathom the meaning of his metaphysical
doctrines. With them the Nirva_n_a to which they aspired, became only
a relative deliverance from the miseries of human life; nay, it took
the bright colours of