Occasionally, however, there are priests who preach intelligibly to attentive hearers. Ordinary popular preaching is simply extracts from the traditional life and transmigrations of the last Buddha. The facts of his history are briefly, as set forth in the Buddhist writings, as follows: Gautama, the last and greatest of the seven Buddhas, had appeared on this earth at least five hundred and fifty times (working his way up from the lowest forms of existence, and always exhibiting absolutely self-denying charity) before he was finally born a son of the rajah of Magadha. According to the Ceylon tradition, he would be nearly contemporary with the prophet Daniel, as their sacred writings place his death in 543 B. C. From this period the sacred era of Siam is dated. This young prince fled from his royal father, and, forsaking rank and wife and child, became first a hermit. Later he wandered, in a course of open-air preaching, through the length and breadth of India, and, Southern Buddhists claim, even to Ceylon. By the force of his irresistible eloquence he founded a new sect. Fanatics of all ranks, taking on themselves voluntary vows of chastity and poverty, left their families to follow in his footsteps. He begged from door to door, taught the vanity of life, the terrors of transmigration and of the purgatorial hells, and claimed that his noble fourfold path was the only salvation from this dizzy round of birth and death; that Nirvana――or in Siamese _Nipan_――was the haven of final rest. He therefore urged his disciples of all ages and ranks to turn from other pursuits and devote themselves by a course of meditation, crucifixion of desire and meritorious acts exclusively to this one object――the attainment of Nipan. After forty-five years of such teaching it is claimed he passed into Nipan. Henceforth, for centuries, he has been held up as the Pure One (_Arahang_), and worshiped as the Buddha. Hence the confession of faith of a devout Buddhist is, “I take refuge in Buddha”――meaning that as the sage during all these hundreds of births distinguished himself by a self-sacrificing charity and acts of merit, denying and conquering all the natural appetites and desires, so the disciple bases his system of morals and his hopes of the future on the life and precepts of the founder. “Imitate Buddha; accept his ideas of life; renounce family relations, property, the carnal desires and passions,”――this is the one theme of Buddhist preaching. In Christian lands we speak of “the preaching of the cross;” so the Buddhist, adopting the _wheel_ as symbolic of the weary rounds of transmigration, speaks of “turning the wheel of doctrine” as most expressive of the Buddhist idea of salvation――rest or Nipan.