And here I ought to state that my explanations and descriptions will, I fear, be wholly deficient in picturesqueness. My simple aim will be to convey clear and correct information in unembellished language; and in doing this, I shall often be compelled to expose myself to the reproach contained in the expressions, _ćarvita-ćarvaṇam_, ‘chewing the chewed,’ and _pishṭa-peshaṇam_, ‘grinding the ground.’ I shall constantly be obliged to tread on ground already well trodden. To begin, then, with the Buddha himself. LECTURE II. _The Buddha as a personal Teacher._ It is much to be regretted that among all the sacred books that constitute the Canon of the Southern Buddhists (see p. 61)—the only true Canon of Buddhism—there is no trustworthy biography of its Founder. For Buddhism is nothing without Buddha, just as Zoroastrianism is nothing without Zoroaster, Confucianism nothing without Confucius, Muhammadanism nothing without Muhammad, and I may add with all reverence, Christianity nothing without Christ. Indeed, no religion or religious system which has not emanated from some one heroic central personality, or in other words, which has not had a founder whose strongly marked personal character constituted the very life and soul of his teaching and the chief factor in its effectiveness, has ever had any chance of achieving world-wide acceptance, or ever spread far beyond the place of its origin. Hence the barest outline of primitive Buddhism must be incomplete without some sketch of the life and character of Gautama Buddha himself. Yet it is difficult to find any sure basis of fact on which we may construct a fairly credible biography. In all likelihood legendary histories of the Founder of Buddhism were current in Nepāl and Tibet in the early centuries of our era; but unhappily his too enthusiastic and imaginative admirers have thought it right to testify their admiration by interweaving with the probable facts of Gautama Buddha’s life, fables so extravagant that some modern critical scholars have despaired of attempting to sift truth from fiction, and have even gone to the extreme of doubting that Gautama Buddha ever lived at all. To believe nothing that has been recorded about him, is as unreasonable as to accept with unquestioning faith all the miraculous circumstances which are made to encircle him as with a halo of divine glory. We must bear in mind that when Gautama Buddha lived—about the fifth century B.C.—the art of writing was not common in India[9]. We may point out, too, that in all countries, European as well as Asiatic—notably in Greece (witness, for example, the familiar instance of Socrates)—men have thought more of preserving the sayings of their teachers than of recording the facts of their lives.