his dignity, and cause his expulsion from the society. [2] The five Rahans alluded to are the very same individuals who met Phralaong in the solitude at the time he was undergoing a great fast and performing all sorts of works of self-denial and corporal austerities in the most rigorous manner. During all the time he spent in those hard exercises of strict mortification, to conquer his passions and secure the complete triumph of the mind over the senses, he was assisted in all his wants by those five Rahans, who rendered to him the usual services disciples are wont to perform to their teacher. When they saw Phralaong at the end of his mighty efforts in that great struggle resuming the habits of a mendicant, they left him at once, unwilling to believe that he would ever become a Buddha. Our Phra, not unmindful of the good services he had received from them, resolved to impart first to them the blessings of his preachings. Alara and Oodaka, his two first teachers in the science of Dzan, were destined to be the first who would have heard the good news had they not been dead. Gratitude seems to have been the first and main motive that induced him to select as the first objects of his mission the very same persons who had been instrumental in furthering his efforts to acquire the Buddhaship. The unpleasant epithet of heretic is given to those five Rahans, as well as to another named Upaka, as designed to mean that they held tenets at variance with those of Buddha, and refused to acknowledge him as possessed of the perfect intelligence. Buddhists, in their writings, invariably call their opponents by the name of holders of false doctrines. The Brahmins or Pounhas who refused to seek refuge in Buddha, his law, and the assembly of his disciples, are spoken of as professors of heterodoxical doctrines.