The scene of his victory over life and the world received the name of Bodhimanda, (the seat of intelligence,) and the tree under which the religious reformer sat in his hour of moral and intellectual triumph was called Bodhidruma, (the tree of intelligence,) whence Bo-tree. The Buddhists believe that it marks the centre of the earth. Hiouen-thsang, the Chinese pilgrim, professes to have found the Bodhidruma, or some tree that passed for it, twelve hundred years after Buddha’s death, at a spot near Gaya Proper, in Bahar, where still may be seen an old dagoba, or temple, and some considerable ruins. Having at last attained to a knowledge of the causes of human suffering, and of the method of removing and counteracting them, the Buddha felt that the task was imposed upon him of communicating that knowledge to others. He began “to turn the wheel of the law,”--that is to preach,--at Benares; and among his earliest disciples was Bimbisara, the ruler of Magadha. His career as a teacher extended over forty years, during which period he travelled over almost every part of Northern India, making a large number of converts, and firmly establishing his religious system. He died at Kusinagara in Oudh, in 543 B.C., at the age of eighty, and his body being burned, the relics were distributed among numerous claimants, who raised monumental tumuli, or topes, for their preservation. All the expositions and teachings of the Buddha were oral, and the task of committing them to writing was undertaken by the chief of his disciples shortly after his death. These canonical books are divided into three classes, forming the “Tripitaka,” or “three-fold basket.” In the first class we find the _Soutras_, or Sermons of the Buddha; in the second, the _Vinaya_, or book of discipline; in the third, the _Abhidharma_, or philosophy. After a period of a century or so, the Buddhist leaders met and revised the Tripitaka, and a third revision took place in 250 or 240 B.C., since which date the text has remained without alteration. The doctrine of Buddha has been defined as a development of four main principles, (or “Sublime Verities.”) 1st. That every kind of existence is painful and transitory; 2nd. That all existence is the result of passion; 3rd. That, therefore, the extinction of passion is the one means of escape from existence and from the misery necessarily attendant upon it; 4th. That all obstacles to this existence must be swept away.