surrounded by his relations, all weeping, lamenting, wailing, their hair disordered, placing dust upon their heads, and beating their breasts.” The violent emotion produced by the sight of the dead man caused the prince to say to himself: “Woe to youth threatened with old age! Woe to health, the prey of every kind of disease! Woe to the life of man which lasts but a little while! Woe to the attractions of pleasure which seduce the hearts of the wise.” These reflections of Çakya-Mouni are the basis upon which Buddhism is founded, and that religious philosophy is impregnated with pessimistic doctrines relating to human life. Modern pessimists hold views resembling Buddhism. Schopenhauer from early youth was engrossed by the great problems of human life. His mother, in a letter to him[135] reproached him with “grumbling at the inevitable,” which shows that at twenty-seven years of age he had revolted against the idea of death. The problem of mortality was one of those in which he was most deeply interested, and his fear of disease and death was such that he left Berlin at the first outbreak of cholera in 1831 (influenced by the death of Hegel, who succumbed to the disease), and went to live at Frankfort, a town unvisited by the epidemic. He affirms[136] that “the greatest, and generally speaking the worst, misfortune that can befall any one is to die, and there is no fear equal to the fear of death.” It was the impossibility of escape that suggested to him the idea of a pessimistic philosophy.