And so I have to cull from a whole garden of books written by French and English scholars what flowers I can, trying to weld together into some harmony of story their many dissonances. The chief difficulty begins with the tales of the marriage or marriages of Prince Siddartha. Not Sir Edwin Arnold alone is responsible for the tangled skein which we have to unravel. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Rhys Davids, Rockhill, Beal, and many others, have each of them their own version of the traditional events. With fairy-tales that is inevitable, but the salient facts of truth remain, and these are the same in all the books. On the day of Prince Siddartha’s birth there had appeared a mystic tree, which was called “The Essence of Virtue.” When the prince was twenty years old this tree was blown down and dammed the water which supplied Devadeha, which was the city of King Suprabuddha. In vain did the people try to remove it; but Chandana, the prince’s charioteer, drove him out to a certain garden whence he could hear the cries of the people, and he was about to go to their help when a wounded wild goose, the Hansa of Indian myth, fell at his feet. The prince took it up and tended it and bound up the wound. Now the goose had been shot by his kinsman Devadatta, and this was the beginning of a great enmity between them. For Devadatta sent a messenger to the prince to demand the bird of him, claiming it as the prize of his bow; but the prince would not yield it up, saying that the bird belonged to him who had saved its life rather than to him who would fain have taken it. From that time forth Devadatta hated him, and appears throughout the whole story of the Buddha’s life, and even in what are known as the “Birth Stories” of previous existences, as his bitter enemy. Then the prince left the garden, and seizing the tree which had defied all the strength of the people, threw it into the air so that it broke in two, the halves falling on the two different sides of the stream. As, after having performed this feat, he was returning home, he saw a beautiful maiden who was looking out from the terrace in front of her father’s house. The prince stopped his chariot and a great love sprang up between the two. The damsel was Gopā, the daughter of Dandapani, a noble of the Shakya clan. When King Suddhōdana heard what had happened, he was overjoyed, and asked the father for the maid as a bride for his son. But Dandapani scorned Siddartha as a dreamer of dreams. The Kshatriya was like the Samurai of Japan, whose sword is his soul, and full of this spirit he declared that it would bring shame upon a warrior were he to give his daughter in marriage to one who cared not a jot for those manly sports and contests which beseemed a Kshatriya, but spent his time in idle thought and vain imaginings. If he wanted Gopā, let him prove his mettle; let him fight for her and win her against all comers. So a great tourney was held, of which Gopā was to be the prize.