BUDDHA (bo'dha), a man possessed of infinite or infallible knowledge; a dei fied religious teacher. There was said to be a series of them, a number having come and gone before Gautama, the per sonage described below. When no Buddha is on earth, the true religion gradually decays, but it flourishes in pristine vigor when a new Buddha is raised up. He is not, however, entitled at once to that honorable appellation; it is only after he has put forth arduous exertions for the faith that he attains to Buddhahood. Most of the Buddhas preceding the per sonage described below appear to have been purely fabulous. His immediate predecessor, Kasyapa or Kassapo, may have been a real person. The word is chiefly applied to a distinguished per sonage of Aryan descent, whose father population of the two towns was little more than 50,000; since then it has grown very rapidly until now it is esti mated at about 1,000,000. After the signing of the Austrian armistice, Hun gary seceded from the Austrian Empire and established a republic with Budapest was king of Kapilavastu, an old Hindu kingdom at the foot of the Nepaulese Mountains, about 100 miles N. of Ben
ares. He was of the Sakhya family, and the class of the Gautamas, hence his dis tinguished son was often called Sakhya Muni, or Saint Sakya, and Gautama, or Guadama. The Chinese call him Fo, which is the name Buddha softened in the pronunciation. The Aryan invaders of India looked down with contempt upon the Turanian inhabitants of that land, and, to keep their blood uncon taminated, developed the system of caste. Buddha, whose human sympathy was wide-reaching, broke through this old restraint, and, though he was himself an Aryan, preached the equality of races, a doctrine which the oppressed Turanians eagerly embraced. By the common ac count he was born in 622 B. C. attained to Buddhahood in 580, and died in 543, or, in the opinion of some, in 477 B. c. and other years than these, such as 400 B. c., or even lower, have been contended for. Buddha became deified by his ad miring followers. Those images of an Oriental god made of white marble, so frequently seen in museums and in pri vate houses, are representations of Buddha.