“She went to Gaudama, and, doing homage to him, said: ‘Lord and master, do you know any medicine that will be good for my child?’ ‘Yes, I know of some,’ said the teacher. Now it was the custom for patients or their friends to provide the herbs which the doctors required; so she asked what herbs he would want. ‘I want some mustard seed,’ he said; and when the poor girl eagerly promised to bring some of so common a drug, he added: ‘You must get it from some home where no son, or husband, or parent, or slave has died.’ ‘Very good,’ she said; and went to seek for it, still carrying her dead child with her. The people said, ‘Here is mustard seed, take it’; but when she asked, ‘In my friend’s house has any son died, or a husband, or a parent, or a slave?’ they answer, ‘Lady, what is this that you say? The living are few, but the dead are many.’ Then she went to other houses, but one said, ‘I have lost a son’; another, ‘We have lost our parents’; another, ‘I have lost my slave.’ At last, not being able to find a single house where no one had died, her mind began to clear, and summoning up resolution she left the dead body of her child in a forest, and returning to the Buddha, paid him homage. He said to her, ‘Have you the mustard seed?’ ‘My Lord,’ she replied, ‘I have not; the people tell me that the living are few, but the dead are many.’ Then he talked to her on that essential part of his system, the impermanency of all things, till her doubts were cleared away; she accepted her lot, became a disciple, and entered ‘the first path.’” But, after all, Buddhism, with its exquisite code of morals, has never succeeded in cleansing the Augean stables of the human heart. It is a religion without God, or prayer, or pardon, or heaven. Its laws lack the authority of a Law-giver. Its _Nirvana_ is a cheerless and uninviting prospect. It is a system of despair. The spirits are weighed down by the vast load of demerits, and haunted by the anticipation of endless ages of misery. There is no “pity sitting in the clouds.” There is no way of forgiveness, no sense of Divine presence and sympathy. Under such a system of cold abstractions, it is not strange that the common people should distort the conception of _Nirvana_ into an earthly paradise, and fly for refuge even into demon-worship, and other forms of Shamanism. In Edwin Arnold’s beautiful poem this religion has been presented in a most burnished and fascinating form, but no one whose mind is not filled with misconceptions of Christianity, would think for a moment of exchanging the “Light of the World” for the “Light of Asia.”[19] In the _Missionary Magazine_ of 1818 Mrs. Judson writes: