The history of the Buddhist faith begins with a band of mendicant monks who gathered round the person of Gotama, the Buddha, in the country bordering on the Ganges, about five hundred years before the commencement of the Christian era. What bound them together and gave a stamp to their simple and earnest world of thought, was the deeply felt and clearly and sternly expressed consciousness, that all earthly existence is full of sorrow, and that the only deliverance from sorrow is in renunciation of the world and eternal rest. An itinerant teacher and his itinerant followers, not unlike those bands, who in later times bore through Galilee the tidings: the kingdom of heaven is at hand, went through the realms of India with the burden of sorrow and death, and the announcement: open ye your ears; the deliverance from death is found.