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THE ORIGIN OF SUFFERING.
123 For some time Buddha remained near the tree of knowledge, fasting and enjoying the happiness of deliverance; the oldest narrative states that this His temptaperiod lasted four times seven days. After tion. this time, he is believed to have undergone severe temptation to enter at once into the desired condition of Nirvana instead of preaching his doctrine to the world. Meeting a Brahman, who questions his right to assume the title of Brahman, Buddha tells him that he is a true Brahman who has put away all evil from himself, who knows nothing of contempt or impurity, and has conquered himself. Finally at the request of the Supreme Being Himself, Brahma Sahampati, Buddha resolved to proclaim to the world the truth he had attained.
Buddha's formal mission, by general consent, opened at Benares. He is supposed to have started with preaching to the ascetics who had been his former com- Opening of panions, expounding to them the perfect way, his mission. a mean between mortification and self-indulgence, and leading to rest, to knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nirvana, by the eightfold path: “Right faith, The eightfold right resolve, right speech, right action, right path. living, right effort, right thought, right self-concentration." This, his first sermon, is recorded in a form which, if it can scarcely be regarded as giving the actual words Buddha uttered, embody a very early form of what the Buddhist monks regarded as the essence of their master's teaching. As we read it, we realise more vividly how suffering was regarded by Hindus generally the origin of as the bane of existence, a feeling which might suffering. well arise in the ceaseless turmoil of strife and oppression among which they lived. “Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, to be united with the unloved is suffering, to be separated from the loved is suffering, not to obtain what one desires is suffering; in short, the fivefold clinging to the earthly is suffering."
“This, monks, is the sacred truth of the origin of suffering: it is the thirst for being, which leads from birth to birth, together with lust and desire, which finds
