"But the sight of the miseries of the world turned me away from pleasure. I fled.
"I begged my way upon the high roads, clad myself in rags gathered within the sepulchres;—and, hearing of a most learned hermit, I chose to become his slave. I guarded his gate! I washed his feet.
"Thus I annihilated all sensation, all joy, all languor.
"Then, concentrating my thoughts within vaster meditation, I learned to know the essence of things, the illusion of forms.
"Soon I exhausted the science of the Brahmans. They are gnawed by covetousness and desire under their outward aspect of austerity; they daub themselves with filth, they live upon thorns,—hoping to arrive at happiness by the path of death!"
Hilarion.... "Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchres, generation of vipers!"
The Buddha. "I also accomplished wondrous things,—eating but one grain of rice each day (and the grains of rice in those times were no larger than at present)—my hair fell off; my body became black; my eyes receding within their sockets, seemed even as stars beheld at the bottom of a well.
"During six years I kept myself motionless, exposed to the flies, the lions and the serpents; and the great summer suns, the torrential rains, lightnings and snows, hails and tempests,—all of these I endured without even the shelter of my lifted hand.
"The travellers who passed by, believing me dead, cast clods of earth upon me!