Who was he? Like the Author of Christianity, he has had to contend, as it were, for the recognition of his personal existence. Even to-day it is maintained that neither Christ nor Buddha ever existed, that they were merely incarnations of popular conceptions, and that all the legends concerning them can be reduced to a combination of anterior mythological elements. These mythical theories, however, in regard to the origin of Christianity, may be considered among the curiosities of criticism;[133] and in regard to the origin of Buddhism, though more justified by the confessed uncertainty as to dates, they have been satisfactorily dispelled as another instance of refining overdone.[134] Brahmanism and the successive phases of Hinduism can be traced to no individual founder, but in investigating the origin of Buddhism we breathe a very different atmosphere. There is a human and moral character about it which the other Indian religions lack: something real as in Mosaism, and palpable as in Islam.[135] We may rest assured that Buddhism had for its founder a real person, and though our best authorities have had to search for their facts through a vast amount of fabulous materials, we may accept the dates which they have approximately fixed for his birth and death, and the outlines which they have sketched of his life and ministry. Gotama, a name still found among the Rajput chiefs of Nagara, was born in the north-eastern region of India, about a hundred miles from Benares, about the year B.C. 557. His father, a Sakya, a name unknown in any native Indian family, and said to indicate descent from a race of northern nomad immigrants, was rajah of Kapila, and his mother was a daughter of the family of Koli.[136] His principalities, of very limited extent, seem to have been eventually swallowed up by the greater Indian monarchies, for when Fa-Hian visited the country Kapila had become a vast solitude, and there for ages its very name has perished from the living speech of men. Even though his royal pedigree be an embellishment of the later legends, there seems no reason to doubt that his father was noble and rich according to the standard of the time, and sufficiently independent of Brahman domination to train his son in his own way. It seems not to have been in their studies, but in the exercises befitting a warrior prince, that Gotama was educated, though a disposition thoughtful and melancholy, and strongly sympathetic, appears to have disinclined him from such a mode of life. Even as a youth the darker sides of existence threw a shadow over him; the sufferings of mankind were among his earliest impressions, and he brooded over them till his mind, poisoned by the contemplation of them, threw its gloom over everything around him, and made the very air hang heavy with the weight of woe.