Buddha is great, in his own opinion, because he has conquered all passions, not by curbing them under the yoke of reason, but by rooting them out of his very being. When he wished to become an ascetic, he practised at first self-renouncing, not merely by giving up riches, palaces, dignities and honours, but chiefly and principally by denying to himself and for ever the enjoyment of sensual pleasures. A firm and unshaken resolution of parting for ever with his wife and concubines, and living in a perpetual celibacy, was considered as a preliminary and essential step for entering upon the course of life of a sincere searcher after truth and perfection. During the six years he spent in solitude, he laboured with unremitting zeal for securing to the spiritual principle an undisputed control over the material one, by stifling the vehemence and ardour of his passions. His austerities and mortifications during that long period had no other object than that of first weakening and then finally destroying passions, and in particular concupiscence. When he is praised in the writings, he is much extolled for having come out from the net of passions. His victory over concupiscence is repeatedly alluded to as the greatest of all achievements. The master, therefore, having laid such stress on this favourite and important maxim, could not but preach and enjoin it on all his future imitators and disciples. The earliest records of Buddhism bear testimony to the paramount importance attached to the practice of chastity. It has ever been considered as an essential requirement in all those that have desired to follow the footsteps of Buddha and imitate his mode of life. No qualification, ever so great and shining, could be admitted as a substitute for chastity. Science, talent, zeal, and fervour could never entitle an individual to the distinction of member of the assembly of the perfect without having previously given up the gratification of sensual pleasures. Independently of what is found written on this subject in the Wini, or book of discipline, the opinion of the Buddhist public is on this subject positive, universal, and absolute. He who leaves the condition of layman to become a religious must live in a state of perfect continence. An infraction of the regulations on this point is looked upon with horror and indignation by the people at large. The guilty individual is inexorably expelled from the religious house, after having been previously stripped of his religious dress and subjected to a humiliating degradation in the presence of the assembled members of the community. Nothing short of such a severe treatment could satisfy a public so deeply hurt and offended in their religious feelings. How is it that the practice of perfect continence is not merely a desideratum in an individual consecrated to religion, but an absolutely required qualification, which can never be equivalently supplied by any other moral or scientific attainment? How is