According to the teaching the number of the Buddhas is endless. He whom we know by this name, for the time being the last of this beginningless series, is the Buddha Gotama. His family name was _Siddhattha_. He came of the ancient race of the Sakyas, well known for their pride, and as such belonged to the warrior caste. He is, therefore, often alluded to under the name of “Sakyaputta,” scion of the Sakyas, or as “Samaṇa Gotama,” ascetic Gotama. He was born in _Kapilavatthu_, the capital city of a small state in Northern India, on the borders of present-day Nepal. His grave was discovered in the year 1898 near Pipravā, in the jungle-covered foothills of the Himalayas called the Terai. The years of his birth and of his death cannot be exactly determined. Meanwhile one does not go far wrong if one places the period of his activity in the neighbourhood of the year 500 before the Christian era. This would make him the elder contemporary of Heraklitus of Ephesus and somewhat younger than Lao Tse in China. He died at the advanced age of eighty years (if one does not choose to regard the recurring statements in the texts as to age, on the part of the most different personalities, as merely an indication of old age in general), after almost fifty years of active life spent in travelling about, preaching. The precepts, discourses, and explanations--all that which makes up the Buddhist canon--are gathered together into what is called the _Tipitaka_, or _Three Baskets_. The language of the canon is Pāḷi. Whether this was the Buddha’s own mother tongue or only related to it, is a question upon which there exist differences of opinion between native and European scholars. The mental atmosphere in which the Buddha arose may be briefly characterized as follows: A feeling of life as suffering, fermenting throughout the entire Indian people; a firm belief in the _transmigration of the soul_ and the endless prolongation of this suffering conditioned thereby; the conviction that asceticism purifies, after the effected purification from old guilt, heaps up merit, assures re-birth in heaven, and finally procures deliverance from _Samsāra_, this terrible, ceaseless wandering from existence to existence. Once more, the fundamental theme in this Indian symphony of destiny, recurring in unending variations, was this, _Life is Suffering_, or to say the least of it, a somewhat doubtful blessing. But this statement of life as suffering was not in ancient India the hollow phrase that it is with us to-day; neither was it that cold play of thought found in many philosophical systems. It was a grim reality which men sought to escape with an energy of self-immolation, a determination, a recklessness, an ardour of which we lukewarm creatures of to-day can form no conception. India in the days of the Buddha was full of companies of monks and schools of ascetics, all of them wrestlers with the riddle of life. But one only wrestles with life when one feels it as suffering.