What was the discovery that rewarded Gotama’s long travail and conflict under the Bo-tree at Bohimanda, and gained for him the title of Buddha, the Awakened or Enlightened One? and what was the message of “glad tidings” which since then has made so many millions of the human race regard him as their Deliverer? We shall never obtain the answer to these questions if we follow the legends and the later scriptures, although they profess to give all the steps of the process by which he wrought out his deliverance. These all date from a time when the seeds which he had sown among the thorns of uncleansed superstitions, had grown up into as gigantic and tangled a jungle of speculation as the world has ever seen. Had he confronted his day and generation proclaiming as the result of his laborious and painful inquiries the complicated metaphysical system formulated in these books, he would have made few converts. He might have become the head of another sect, the founder of another school, but he never would have established a religion so extensive as that which for so many centuries, and among so many peoples, has been known by his name. Following the Southern scriptures, and guided by the eminent Oriental scholars who have made them available by translations, we may be able to trace, in the wild growth of fancy which has grown up around them, the leading lines of the original teaching. The real doctrine of Buddha did not profess to be a philosophy inquiring into the ultimate ground of things. He is represented as having despised philosophisings, and as having inveighed against profitless questionings as earnestly as did St. Paul against vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.[181] His object was avowedly practical, and he kept silent when asked concerning themes whose discussion did not tend to “illumination and quiet.” Notwithstanding this, there must have been from the first, even in the earliest forms of his teaching, ideas and thoughts beyond the comprehension of the simple. For a while he hesitated, as we have seen, to proclaim his discovery, because “the way” was too hidden for men to know, and too hard, even when known, for them to follow. Like the Jewish Scribe, he conceived that to the wise alone, and not to the ignorant, belonged the law, and to the wise alone was reserved the hope of final deliverance. To children, and to the uninstructed struggling classes, the preaching was not made fully known, as really beyond them. Unlike Christ, whose preaching was for all without exception, whose gospel, though full of mystery, confers illumination even on babes, the law of Buddha was in its entirety for the sages only, and instead of conferring knowledge on those who obeyed it, it made knowledge a condition of obtaining deliverance. Nevertheless, though the deductions were within the grasp only of the few, his popularity proves that his fundamental and principal dogmas must have been such as all could