Within the last twenty years, under the authority of the Indian Government, researches have been carried on by a learned Babu named Chandra Mukherji, under the direction of Mr. Vincent A. Smith, and those researches, which are of the highest interest, corroborate the statements of the two Chinese monks, in whose accounts the differences are no more than what would be expected in the work of men separated by an interval of two hundred years. If we must remember that Prince Siddartha claimed no divinity—nor even divine inspiration or revelation—then stripped of the husk of fable and vain tales with which monkish folly has overlaid and obscured it, there is no more touching story in man’s record than that of the great renunciation with which Buddha entered upon the work to which he felt himself called. Brought up in the soul-stealing languor of an Oriental court, he left everything in order to face the hardships of a solitude and asceticism in which he was to find that peace which the world could not give to him, but which, if only he could attain the supreme wisdom, he might give to the world. Prince Siddartha, the Buddha that was to be, was the son of Suddhōdana, King of Kapilavastu in the Tarai of Nepal, under the shadow of the giant Himalaya mountains. Suddhōdana was the chief of the Shakya, a proud clan, descended from the solar race of the Gautama. It puzzles the uninstructed reader to find the Buddha often referred to as Shakya Muni, or Gautama Buddha. The first of these titles means the hermit or recluse of the Shakya clan, and Barthélemy St. Hilaire connects the word _muni_ with the Greek μόνος, the French _moine_, etc. Gautama Buddha simply means the Buddha of the Gautama race, in contradistinction to the many Buddhas that preceded him during the countless æons in which the Indians believe, and to those Buddhas that are yet to be, the next of whom is the Maitriya Buddha, the Buddha of brotherly love, for whom we have to wait many thousand years, and who is often represented as lying down and laughing—a favourite subject with Chinese sculptors and artists. The Queen of King Suddhōdana was the daughter of King Suprabuddha, a neighbouring monarch, a princess of such surpassing loveliness, wisdom and virtue, that she was called Maya the Illusion, for men could not believe that so wondrous a being could be aught but a dream, a vision, an unreal phantasy.