Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t4.19

c8.s1.t4.19

What more than anything else distinguished Buddha from the most of his rivals was his dissentient attitude towards the self-mortifications, in which they saw the path to deliverance.* We saw how, according to tradition, Buddha himself in the period of search through which he passed when a young man, had endured self-mortifications in their most rigorous severity, and had found out their fruitlessness in his own case. What drives earthly thoughts out of the soul is not fasting and bodily agony, but self-culture, above all the struggle for knowledge, and for this struggle man derives the power only from an external life, which is far removed alike from luxury and from privation, and still more from self-inflicted pain. In