The dawn on which this remarkable struggle terminated was the birthday of Buddhism. Gautama was at that time about thirty-five years of age. It was then, and not till then, that his Bodhi-sattvaship (see p. 135) ended and he gained a right to the title Buddha, ‘the Enlightened.’ No wonder that the tree under which he sat became celebrated as ‘the tree of knowledge and enlightenment.’ It is remarkable, too, that just as the night on which the Buddha attained perfect enlightenment is the most sacred night with Buddhists, so the Bodhi-tree (in familiar language, Bo-tree) is their most sacred symbol—a symbol as dear to Buddhists as the Cross is to Christians. And what was this true knowledge, evolved out of a mind sublimated by intense meditation? This is, perhaps, the strangest point of all in this strange story. It was after all a mere partial one-sided truth—the outcome of a single line of thought, dwelt upon with morbid intensity, to the exclusion of every other line of thought which might have modified and balanced it. It was an ultra-pessimistic view of the miseries of life, and a determination to ignore all its counterbalancing joys. It was the doctrine that this present life is only one link in a chain of countless transmigrations—that existence of all kinds involves suffering, and that such suffering can only be got rid of by self-restraint and the extinction of desires, especially of the desire for continuity of personal existence. For let it be made clear at the outset, that whatever may be said of the Christian-like self-renunciation enjoined by the Buddhist code of morality, the only self it aims at renouncing is the self of personality, and the chief self-love it deprecates is the self-love which consists in craving for continuous individual life. To those who have never travelled or resided much in the East, indulgence in such a morbid form of pessimism, under glowing skies and amid bright surroundings, may seem almost an impossibility. But those who know India by personal experience are aware that its climate is not conducive to optimistic views of life, and that even in the present day men of the Buddha type, who seek in various ways to impress their pessimistic theories of existence on their fellow-men, are not uncommon. In the course of my travels I frequently met ascetics who had given up family and friends, and were leading a life of morose seclusion, and pretended meditation, undergoing long courses of bodily mortification. Nay, I have even seen men who, to prove their utter contempt for the pleasures of worldly existence, and to render themselves fit for the extinction of all personality by absorption into the Universal Soul, have sat in one posture, or held up one arm for years, or allowed themselves no bed but a bed of spikes, no shelter but the foliage of trees[14]. Gautama’s course of protracted cogitation therefore had in it nothing peculiar or original.