begged from door to door, taught the vanity of life, the terrors of transmigration and of the purgatorial hells, and claimed that his noble fourfold path was the only salvation from this dizzy round of birth and death; that Nirvana—or in Siamese Nipan—was the haven of final rest. He therefore urged his disciples of all ages and ranks to turn from other pursuits and devote themselves by a course of meditation, crucifixion of desire and meritorious acts exclusively to this one object—the attainment of Nipan. After forty-five years of such teaching it is claimed he passed into Nipan. Henceforth, for centuries, he has been held up as the Pure One (Arahang), and worshiped as the Buddha. Hence the confession of faith of a devout Buddhist is, "I take refuge in Buddha"—meaning that as the sage during all these hundreds of births distinguished himself by a self-sacrificing charity and acts of merit, denying and conquering all the natural appetites and desires, so the disciple bases his system of morals and his hopes of the future on the life and precepts of the founder. "Imitate Buddha; accept his ideas of life; renounce family relations, property, the carnal desires and passions,"—this is the one theme of Buddhist preaching.
In Christian lands we speak of "the preaching of the cross;" so the Buddhist, adopting the wheel as symbolic of the weary rounds of transmigration, speaks of "turning the wheel of doc-
