were many solitaries endeavouring to gain perfection or exhibit it, in types more conform to Nebuchadnezzar in his madness or the demoniacs who had their dwellings in the tombs. Buddha condemned uncleanliness in all its forms. The robes which he enjoined his monks to wear may have been made up of rags picked up from a dunghill or from a cemetery, but they were scrupulously washed, properly dyed, and carefully mended. The ground all round the vihara, as well as its floors within, had to be swept every day, and its every item of furniture had to be punctually dusted and garnished. His monks were Pharisees in regard to the washing of hands and bowls and other utensils, and they anticipated our modern demand for proper ventilation.[289] A Buddhist mendicant of the days of King Asoka might prove a good model of personal neatness and domestic tidiness for many a Christian minister in these days of Queen Victoria. He belonged to an Order originally founded by a man who was in every sense a gentleman, and which for long numbered among its members many noble and even princely men. Inheriting their instincts, he stoutly maintained their traditions, that “neither plaited hair, nor dirt, nor lying on the earth, nor rubbing with dust, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires”; “that he who, though well dressed, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with all other beings, he is indeed a Brahmana, a Sramana, a Bikkhu.”[290] Again, in these old pictures of Buddhist Sangha life, there is no reflection of that insane passion for suffering which marked the gaunt and self-mutilated Yogis around them, and which also distinguished many of the ascetics of Christendom. The flagellations, and lacerations, and macerations which at one time became popular in European monasteries, and which made even a man like the founder of the Franciscan Order refuse food and sleep for days together, spend whole nights in winter up to the neck in snow or water, put ashes in the meals which had been cooked for him, would not for an hour have been tolerated; yea, they would have been laughed out of the world by Buddha and his monks. Wherever they went, they encountered grievous companies of “Eyeless and tongueless, sexless, crippled, deaf: The body by the mind being thus stripped For glory of much suffering, and the bliss Which they shall win,”[291]