The sons of noble families left their homes to search for truth either out there in the frightful solitudes of the Indian forest, or in the cloister of the monk. As in later days men went forth in search of El Dorado, so in those days did men go forth upon the search for truth. But what gives to the search for truth in ancient India a character entirely its own is this, that all search here is turned towards the _I_ itself; that the fight for truth did not as in ancient Greece exhaust itself in elegant rhetorical disputations and exercises in dialectic, but in full unmitigated rigour was lived out in one’s own _I_, without a single thought as to whether the outward form would support the heat of the friction within or not. Amid this swarm of searchers for truth the young Siddhattha also made his appearance. “Black-haired, in the bloom of manhood,” in spite of weeping and wailing parents, in spite of a loved and loving wife, in spite of a dear young son, he left his father’s halls where he had led a life of rarest pomp and pleasure to enter shaven of head and garbed in yellow, upon the inclement life-path of the penitent. It was the force of thought that drove him forth. He gazed face to face on the transiency of all that lives, and troubled, tormented by this irresistible, unseizable flood of appearances, he turned his mental eye inwards, resolved to find there in the depths of his own _I_ that hold and stay which the outer world everywhere denied to him, the weary. Truthfulness toward oneself, seriousness of search regardless of consequences, an unfailing sense of reality, that was the foundation upon which that most banal of all phrases, adapted as is no other to coquetting with itself--the phrase, “All is transient,”--became for him that unique teaching of which he himself could say with ample right, “It is the teaching which is founded upon itself.” In one of the Buddhist monk’s chants there occurs the phrase, “One single thing--he thinks it out!” This, in few words, is what the Buddha did. He thought out to an end, _one_ thought--the thought of transiency. I will not call his teaching the grandest or the deepest of all teachings. Grand, likewise, is Heraklitus’s teaching of the All-becoming; deep, likewise, is the Vedanta teaching of the All-one in Brahman; but the teaching of the Buddha is more than this--_it is actual_. Through this it obtains that really compelling character such as is possessed by actuality alone. For there is only one thing that is compelling--truth; and there is only one thing that is true--actuality.