It may be said that the lessons of morality inculcated in these homilies are too exaggerated to be of any practical usefulness. Still this _modus docendi_ is very common in Sacred Books, where we often find an extreme standard held up in the hope of producing an impression that may be useful in less extreme cases. To offer the other cheek to whosoever shall strike our right cheek, to give up our cloak to him who takes away our coat, to declare that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, are all lessons which we also take _cum grano salis_. They ask for much in the hope that something may be given. That there is danger too in this mode of teaching cannot be denied. We are told that Ârya _S_ûra, in order to follow the example of Buddha in a former birth, threw himself in this life before a starving tigress to be devoured. Let us hope that this too was only a _G_âtaka. When once a taste for these moralising stories had arisen, probably owing to Buddha's daily intercourse with the common people, their number grew most rapidly. The supply was unlimited, all that was required was the moral application, the _Haec fabula docet_. The Buddhists give their number as 550. The earliest are probably those which are found in different parts of the Buddhist Canon. In the _K_ariyâ-pi_t_aka there is a collection of thirty-five stories of the former lives of Buddha, in each of which he acquired one of the ten Pâramitâs or Great Perfections which fit a human being for Buddhahood[3]. A similar collection is found in the Buddhava_m_sa[4], which contains an account of the life of the coming Buddha, the Bodhisat, in the various characters which he filled during the periods of the twenty-four previous Buddhas. [3] See Buddhist Birth-stories, translated by Rhys Davids, p. lv. [4] Some doubt attaches to the canonicity of the _K_ariyâ-pi_t_aka and the Buddhava_m_sa (see Childers, s. v. Nikâya). The _G_âtaka stories are therefore at least as old as the compilation of the Buddhist Canon at the Council of Vesâli, about 377 B.C.[5] It was at that Council that the great schism took place, and that the ancient Canon was rearranged or disarranged. Among the books thus tampered with is mentioned the _G_âtaka, which therefore must be considered as having existed, and formed part of the old Canon before the Council of Vesâli. This is what the Dîpava_m_sa (V, 32) says on the subject: