understand, and they seem to have been published, as Saint-Hilaire observes, in a language so “simple and vernacular” as to induce even the children and the ignorant to enter the paths that lead to deliverance.[182] He entered upon his travail, in order to find a way of escape from the endless cycles of unsatisfying change, and he believed that he had discovered it. Leavening every part of his system is his impression of the universality of suffering; and suffering, its origin, its extinction, and the path or method that leads to its extinction, are the so-called “four noble truths” which constitute in Buddhism the “Law of the Wheel.” In Buddhism the wheel is the dominant symbol, corresponding to the cross in Christianity, and he who would preach or roll onward the wheel must present to the affectionate consideration of the hearers these “four sacred verities”—the verity of suffering, the verity that concupiscence is the cause of suffering, the verity that concupiscence can be quenched in Nirvana, and the verity that the way that leads to Nirvana is the sublime eightfold path of Buddha’s law. From his first public discourse at Benares—corresponding to our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount—on to his last words on the night on which he died, this, with manifold amplifications, but ever as the one pathetic refrain, is the substance of his teaching, “through not understanding and grasping which, O monks, we have had to run and wander so long in weary paths, both you and I.”[183] The primitive creed of Buddhism was different from, though not wholly antagonistic to, the popular creed or theory of life of Brahmanism. Weighed by Brahmanism, existence was found wanting, as only illusion, a specious something which truly was a mere nothing, and identity of the personal with the universal self was the only reality. By Buddhism existence was condemned, not as an illusion, but as wholly and solely suffering.[184] “What think ye, O disciples: whether is more, the water that is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept, because that which ye abhorred was your portion, and that which ye loved was not your portion?”[185] It was not “vanity of vanities!” but “misery of miseries! all is misery!” Life was misery, because governed by the immeasurable and wretched past; death was misery, because opening up an equally immeasurable and wretched future. As long as man exists he must be miserable, unable to “cease his wanderings,” and “still from one sorrow to another thrown.” The only deliverance conceivable from this interminable evil would be to break the bands of existence altogether. “Surely ’twere better not to be.” And how “not to be” seems to have been the problem which Buddha professed to solve.