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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
mans, but, dissatisfied with their teaching, retires into solitude, followed by five of his fellow - disciples, and for six years practises rigorous austerities: finding their effects upon the body unfavourable to intellectual energy, he desists and adopts a more genial course of life, on which his five disciples quit him and he is left alone. He is then assailed by the demon of wickedness, Mára, “the killer", who is identical with Kámadeva, or the God of Love; but terrors and temptations fail to disturb his serenity, and the Tempter is compelled to acknowledge his defeat, and to withdraw. Buddha, resuming his meditations, contemplates the causes of things, which is the key to the well-known formula of the Buddhists found upon so many of their images, and of which the various readings, as given in a communication by Colonel Sykes, in the forthcoming number of our Journal", are evidently nothing more than the blunders of ignorant transcribers, or defects in cutting the letters on clay or stone. In the Lalita Vistara, Buddha's meditations are thus recapitulated:
"Thus thought the Bodhisattwa: 'from what existing thing come disease and death? age and death being the consequences of birth, birth is the cause of disease and death.” He then proceeds to analyse in the same strain the causes of birth, of conception, of desire, of sensation, of contact, of the senses, of name and form, of comprehension, of ideas; and concludes that igno
* [Journ. R. As. Soc., Vol. XVI, p. 37 ff.]
