his maternal aunt. The young prince distinguished himself by
his personal and intellectual qualities, but still more by his early
piety. It appears from the laws of Manu that it was not unusual, in the
earliest periods of Brahmanism, for those seeking a superior piety to turn
hermits, and to live alone in the forest, engaged in acts of prayer,
meditation, abstinence, and the study of the Vedas. This practice,
however, seems to have been confined to the Brahmans. It was, therefore, a
grief to the king, when his son, in the flower of his youth and highly
accomplished in every kingly faculty of body and mind, began to turn his
thoughts toward the life of an anchorite. In fact, the young Siddartha
seems to have gone through that deep experience out of which the great
prophets of mankind have always been born. The evils of the world pressed
on his heart and brain; the very air seemed full of mortality; all things
were passing away. Was anything permanent? anything stable? Nothing but
truth; only the absolute, eternal law of things. "Let me see that," said
he, "and I can give lasting peace to mankind. Then shall I become their
deliverer." So, in opposition to the strong entreaties of his father,
wife, and friends, he left the palace one night, and exchanged the
position of a prince for that of a mendicant. "I will never return to the
palace," said he, "till I have attained to the sight of the divine law,
and so become Buddha."[103]

He first visited the Brahmans, and listened to their doctrines, but found
no satisfaction therein. The wisest among them could not teach him true
peace,--that profound inward rest, which was already called Nirvana. He
was twenty-nine years old. Although disapproving of the Brahmanic
austerities as an end, he practised them during six years, in order to
subdue the senses. He then became satisfied that the path to perfection
did not lie that way. He therefore resumed his former diet and a more
comfortable mode of life, and so lost many disciples who had been
attracted by his amazing austerity. Alone in his hermitage, he came at
last to that solid conviction, that KNOWLEDGE never to be shaken, of the
laws of things, which had seemed to him the only foundation of a truly
free life. The spot where, after a week of constant meditation, he at last
arrived at this beatific vision, became one of the most sacred places in
India. He was seated under a tree, his face to the east, not having moved
for a day an