This beautiful fable belongs to the general class of the ancient stories of Divine visitants, but it has a more direct affinity with the lovely legends of the Middle Ages, in which pious people who give their beds to lepers or others suffering from loathsome disease find that it was Christ they harboured. Though the story of the Hawk and the Pigeon may be used simply as a fairy tale, the moral of it is what forms the essential kernel of other-worldly religions. Through the mazes of Indian thought emerges the constant conviction—like a Divine sign-post—that martyrdom is redemption. The gods themselves are less than the man who resigns everything for what his conscience tells him to be right. Indra bows before Wusinara and seeks to learn the Law from him. India’s gods are Nature-gods, and Nature teaches no such lesson:— “There is no effort on _my_ brow— I do not strive, I do not weep, I rush with the swift spheres and glow For joy, and when I will, I sleep.” Higher religions are a criticism of Nature: they “occupy the sphere that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more the more it seeks,” and if they change with the change of moral aspirations they are still the passionate endeavour of the soul to satisfy them. The Buddhists took the story of the Hawk and the Pigeon and adapted it to their own teaching. Indra, chief of the gods, feels that his god-life is waning—for the gods of India labour, too, under the sense of that mysterious fatality of doom which haunted Olympus and Walhalla. Indra, knowing his twilight to be near, desired to consult a Buddha, but there was not one at that time upon the earth. There was, however, a virtuous king of the name of Sivi, and Indra decides to put him to the ordeal, which forms the subject of the other story, because, if he comes out scathless, he will be qualified to become a full Buddha. King Sivi had a severe struggle with himself, but he conquered his weakness, and when he feels the scale sink under him he is filled with indescribable joy and heaven and earth shake, which always happens when a Buddha is coming into existence. A crowd of gods descended and rested on the air: the sight of Sivi’s endurance caused them to weep tears that fell like rain mingled with divine flowers, which the gods threw down on the voluntary victim.