It was not the favour or dislike of princes, nor the speculative power of his doctrine, nor the devotion of his nearest scholars, which procured a reception for Buddha's doctrine. On the contrary, the success of Buddha rests precisely on the fact that his teaching is not restricted to doctrine, nor to a school. He ventured to step out of the circle of the Brahmans, and the learned in the Veda, beyond the lonely life in the forest; he was bold enough to break through the limitations imposed upon instruction by tradition and law. He did not, like the Brahmanic teacher, hold sittings with his pupils, at which they alone were present; he spoke in the open market place, and addressed his words not only to the Dvijas, but to the Çudras and Chandalas also--an unheard-of event: for this purpose he speaks the language of the people, not Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmanas and the learned; he preached in a popular style, while the doctrines of the Brahmans, set forth in the formulas of the schools, must have remained unintelligible to the people, even if repeated in their language. With the people Buddha dwelt far more on his ethics than on his metaphysics, though he did not exclude the latter, and his ethical lectures in each case developed the principle in application to the particular instance.[472] In other respects his method of teaching must have been the most effective which could be applied in India, unless we are deceived by the legends. By means of the complete illumination vouchsafed to Buddha, he saw through the web of regenerations. For every man he deduced the circumstances of his present life, his good or evil fortune, from the virtues and sins of a previous existence. To a man whose eyes had been put out by the order of a king he revealed the fact that in a previous existence he had torn out the eyes of many gazelles; but as he had also done good deeds in that life he had been born again in a good family, with a handsome exterior.[473] He told another that in a previous existence he had killed an anchorite, and for this he had already suffered punishment in hell for several thousand years; he would also lose his head in this life, and would suffer the same misfortune for four hundred successive existences.[474]