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trying to perfect himself in sunnyåsa without ever having passed through the prescribed stages of a householder's preparatory course, we do not know. Probably it never occurred to him that a ladder was necessary to reach the top and that asceticism never led to anything but distress and pain unless accompanied by faith and knowledge of the right sort. Thus did Buddha live to a ripe old age, preaching the noble' middle path, and exhorting the people to seek release from pain in the extinction of being in nirvana. He died after eating a dish of boar's flest in the soth year of his life.
Buddha's teaching has appealed to a vast majority of mankind chiefly because it did not entail a severe discipline and went a long way to tone down the rigours of Hatha Yoga, truly a useless system of physical distortions which must be clearly distinguished from the true form of tapas as given in the Jaina siddhanta. But whatever we may say or think of the Buddhistic metaphysics, of its theory of metempsychosis that would make another being than the doer of deeds the recipient of rewards and punishments flowing from them, and of the teaching about the impermanence of souls, there can be 110 withholding of praise for Buddha's very clearest perception of the misery of unemancipated life and for the most faithful picture that he drew of it in words. Such language has seldom been surpassed. . “ Woo upon youth, threatened by old age! Woe upon health,
which so mnany maladies destroy! Woe apon human life
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