The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been their earliest place of settlement. And then, about 550 years before Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal. Here and there the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born. [Illustration: STATUE OF BUDDHA.] When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which man's misery could be relieved {29} was that he should strive by all means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless, that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and child and all {30} his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world preaching this doctrine. No doubt it was developed by his followers--for he quickly gained a numerous following--beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won, after many re-incarnations--that is to say, after living again and again on the earth in different human bodies--by being absorbed into some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length, and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it. [Sidenote: Buddhism]