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India and the Frontier States of Afghanistan, Nipal and Burma
India and the Frontier States of Afghanistan Nipal and Burma Author:James Talboys Wheeler, Edgar Saltus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI MEDIAEVAL RAJAS B.C. 500 TO A.D. 1000 THE belief that there is but one God, and that the soul is immortal, has done much toward elevating the b... more »arbarian into a civilized and responsible being. But there is another belief that has extended widely over the eastern world: it is known as the dogma of the metempsychosis, or belief in the transmigrations of the soul. Sakya Muni,1 afterward known as Gotama Buddha, was the son of a Raja of Kapila, a country seated on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Sakya Muni was brought up in every luxury, married a loving wife, and was the father of a son. But he was wearied or surfeited with pleasure, and felt a loathing for life. According to the legend, he saw an old man, a diseased man, and a dead man; and his eyes were opened to the woes of humanity. In the agony of his soul he is said to have exclaimed, "Youth, health, and life itself are but transitory dreams; they lead to age and disease; they end in death and corruption.'' This feeling was intensified, and magnified, by the belief in the transmigrations of the soul. He saw the evils, not only of an individual life, but of an endless chain of successive existences, beginning in an unknown past and running on to eternity. Sakya Muni next saw one of those religious mendicants who have abounded in India from the remotest antiquity.The man had no cares or sorrows, no wife or family, no earthly ties of affection or kinship. He lived on the daily alms of food which are given to such mendicants by the masses. Sakya Muni resolved to become a religious mendicant in like manner; to abandon his father's palace, his wife and son, and his expectation of a throne, and to lead a life cut off from all the ties that bind men to the world. 1 The era of Sakya Muni is still uncertain...« less