Nevertheless, while holding that his biography can never now be written, it is by no means my intention to imply that it is impossible to know anything about him. On the contrary, a picture not wholly imaginary may unquestionably be drawn of the character and doctrines of the great teacher of the Asiatic continent. Let us venture on the attempt. An imposing array of scholars agrees in fixing the date of his death in B.C. 543, and as he is said to have lived eighty years, he would thus have been born in B.C. 623. Without entering now into the grounds of their inference, I venture to believe that they have thrown him back to a too distant date. I am more inclined to agree with Köppen, who would place his death from B.C. 480 to 460, or about two centuries before the accession of the great Buddhist king Asoka. Westergaard, it is true, would fix this event much later, namely about B.C. 370. Supposing the former writer to be correct in his conclusions, the active portion of the Buddha's life would fall to the earlier years of the fifth century B.C., and possibly to the conclusion of the sixth. His birth, about B.C. 560-540, occurred in a small kingdom of the north of India, entitled Kapilavastu. Of what rank his parents may have been, the accounts before us do not enable us to say. The tradition according to which they were the king and queen of the country, I regard with Wassiljew as in all probability an invention intended to shed additional glory upon him. The boy is said to have been named Siddhartha, though possibly this also was one of the many titles bestowed on him by subsequent piety. At an early age he felt—as so many young men of lofty character have always done—the hollowness of worldly pleasures, and withdrew himself from men to lead a solitary and ascetic life. After he had satisfied the craving for self-torture, and subdued the lusts of the flesh, he came forth, full of zeal for the redemption of mankind, to proclaim a new and startling gospel. India was at that time, as always, dominated by the system of caste. The Buddha, boldly breaking through the deepest prejudices of his countrymen, surrounded himself with a society in which caste was nothing. Let but a man or even a woman (for it is stated that at his sister's request he admitted women) become his disciple, agree to renounce the world, and lead the life of an ascetic, and he or she at once lost either the privileges of a high caste, or the degradations of a low one. Rank depended henceforth exclusively upon capacity for the reception of spiritual truth; and the humblest individual might, by attending to and practicing the teacher's lessons, rise to the highest places in the hierarchy. "Since the doctrine which I teach," he is represented as saying in one of the Canonical Books, "is completely pure, it makes no distinction between noble and commoner, between rich and poor. It is, for example, like water, which washes both noblemen and common