,
purification, intuition. And this end he believed that he had at last
attained. At last he _saw_ the truth. He became "wide awake." Illusions
disappeared; the reality was before him. He was the Buddha,--the MAN WHO
KNEW.

Still he was a man, not a God. And here again is another point of
departure from Brahmanism. In that system, the final result of devotion
was to become absorbed in God. The doctrine of the Brahmans is divine
absorption; that of the Buddhists, human development. In the Brahmanical
system, God is everything and man nothing. In the Buddhist, man is
everything and God nothing. Here is its atheism, that it makes so much of
man as to forget God. It is perhaps "without God in the world," but it
does not deny him. It accepts the doctrine of the three worlds,--the
eternal world of absolute being; the celestial world of the gods, Brahma,
Indra, Vischnu, Siva; and the finite world, consisting of individual
souls and the laws of nature. Only it says, of the world of absolute
being, Nirvana, we know nothing. That is our aim and end; but it is the
direct opposite to all we know. It is, therefore, to us as nothing. The
celestial world, that of the gods, is even of less moment to us. What we
know are the everlasting laws of nature, by obedience to which we rise,
disobeying which we fall, by perfect obedience to which we shall at last
obtain Nirvana, and rest forever.

To the mind of the Buddha, therefore, the world consisted of two orders of
existence,--souls and laws. He saw an infinite multitude of souls,--in
insects, animals, men,--and saw that they were surrounded by inflexible
laws,--the laws of nature. To know these and to obey them,--this was
emancipation.

The fundamental doctrine of Buddhism, taught by its founder and received
by all Buddhists without exception, in the North and in the South, in
Birmah and Thibet, in Ceylon and China, is the doctrine of the four
sublime truths, namely:--

1. All existence is evil, because all existence is subject to change
and decay.

2. The source of this evil is the desire for things which are to change
and pass away.

3. This desire, and the evil which follows it, are not inevitable; for
if we choose we can arrive at Nirvana, when both shall wholly cease.

4. There is a fixed and certain method to adopt, by pursuing which we
attain this end, without possibility of failure.

These four truths are the basis of the system. They are: 1st, th