ABSTRACT
One can see the first Sakyans as laymen studying tapas probably under the Jains, studying nyaya under Sanjaya, and probably studying Sankhya under some successor of Kapila. Further, the first men were out to become missioners. The starting of organized mission work appears very early in the incidental history of the Vinaya books. Now, in India at least, a man did not become a monk primarily to be a missioner. Siddhattha Gotama, friend and leader, is at first glad to win over any of his worthier student-comrades to form a missioner-group. He leaves his home to seek, in new thought, new teaching, a way of salvation, wherein the decay and death of the body should no longer form the woeful drag on man's happiness that it was. He, meanwhile, also deeply interested in his friends' talks on causation, tries to weld it into a gospel for the ending of ill.
