Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2.11

c7.s2.11

It cannot be ascertained whether any political convulsions or social revolutions were also in play at that time, to direct people's minds with particular earnestness and energy to thoughts and questions such as these. Christianity founded its kingdom in times of the keenest suffering, amid the death struggles of a collapsing world. India lived in more settled peace; if the government of its small states was the evil despotism of the Oriental, men knew of no other government and made no complaint; 'was the gulf between poverty and wealth, between knight and yeoman, a wide one—and it has always been so in that land by natural necessity—still it was by no means the poor and oppressed alone, or even chiefly, who sought in monastic robes freedom from the burdens of the world.