Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/456

 II. BUDDHISM

HE life of Gotama, the Enlightened One, or Buddha, a life of eighty years, is divided into two parts, one of thirty-five years and one of forty-five, by the event of his Enlightenment or Bodhi. This seeing of a new light is to a Buddhist the one supreme event of the incalculably long aeon now current, just as is the birth of Jesus in Occidental chronology. Those first thirty-five years are again divided into two parts, the period of his life as a prince or the time from his birth until (at the age of twenty-nine ) he forsook the world to struggle for the Supreme Enlightenment, and the period of the six years of that struggle. Of these thirty-five years we have elaborate accounts. Of the last forty-five, tradition has little to say in the way of entertaining story, but very much by way of reporting "the Teacher's" teachings. These teachings as laid down in the canonical scriptures of Buddhism are in very deed his life in the truest sense.

THE BIRTHS OF BUDDHA

The belief that a man must be born and live and die, only to be born and die again and again through a weary round of existences, was widespread in India long before Buddha's day. And accordingly the "biography" of a Buddha must include an account of some of those former "births" or existences. The story of Sumedha is one of these. The "Jātaka," the most charming of all Buddhist story books, contains the narrative of not less than 547 former existences of Gotama. Next after all this prenatal biography comes the account of Buddha's birth into the existence which concerns us most nearly,