The founder of this religion was one of the last of a long line of kings, known as the Solar dynasties, who, from a period shortly subsequent to the advent of the Aryans into India, had held paramount sway in Ayodhya--the modern Oude. About the 12th or 13th century B.C. they were superseded by another race of much less purely Aryan blood, known as the Lunar race, who transferred the seat of power to capitals situated in the northern parts of the Doab. In consequence of this, the lineal descendants of the Solar kings were reduced to a petty principality at the foot of the Himalayas, where Sakya Muni was born about 623 B.C. For twenty-nine years he enjoyed the pleasures, and followed the occupations, usual to the men of his rank and position; but at that age, becoming painfully impressed by the misery incident to human existence, he determined to devote the rest of his life to an attempt to alleviate it. For this purpose he forsook his parents and wife, abandoned friends and all the advantages of his position, and, for the following fifty-one years, devoted himself steadily to the task he had set before himself. Years were spent in the meditation and mortification necessary to fit himself for his mission; the rest of his long life was devoted to wandering from city to city, teaching and preaching, and doing everything that gentle means could effect to disseminate the doctrines which he believed were to regenerate the world, and take the sting out of human misery. He died, or, in the phraseology of his followers, obtained Nirvana--was absorbed into the deity--at Kusinara, in northern Behar, in the 80th year of his age, 543 years[14] B.C. With the information that is now fast accumulating around the subject, there seems no great difficulty in understanding why the mission of Sakya Muni was so successful as it proved to be. He was born at a time when the purity of the Aryan races in India had become so deteriorated by the constant influx of less pure tribes from the north and west, that their power, and consequently their influence, was fast fading away. At that time, too, it seems that the native races had, from long familiarity with the Aryans, acquired such a degree of civilisation as led them to desire something like equality with their masters, who were probably always in a numerical minority in most parts of the valley of the Ganges. In such a condition of things the preacher was sure of a willing audience who proclaimed the abolition of caste, and taught that all men, of whatever nation or degree, had an equal chance of reaching happiness, and ultimately heaven, by the practice of virtue, and by that only. The subject races--the Turanian Dasyus--hailed him as a deliverer, and it was by them that the religion was adopted and proclaimed, and that of the Aryan Brahmans was for a time obliterated, or at least overshadowed and obscured.