cy of his message. He faced believers of different religions, and he also successfully converted many of them to be his followers. But the Buddha used very little in addition to the power of his teachings. But, as was previously mentioned, different circumstances called for different actions.Throughout the Buddhas life he preached the dhamma and his path to enlightenment. In addition to his calm and serene appearance and the actual message the Buddha taught, the Buddha developed a spectacularly successful ability: he could adapt his dhamma to his audience, so that he could truly speak to their condition (Buddha, 128). When the Buddha did so, the reaction was immediate and awesome. When he spoke to some fire-worshippers at Gayā, after they had listened to the Buddhas sermon, which spoke so powerfully to their religious consciousness, they all achieved Nibbāna and became Arahants (Buddha, 128). Clearly, the Buddhas dhamma was aided by his ability to adapt his message so that it would reach his audience at that time. There was one final tool that the Buddha would use occasionally to convince others of his enlightenment: miracles. The Buddha achieved [his most] startling conversion in the forests around Urevelā when he converted one thousand brahmins (Buddha, 124). At this time he completed a number of remarkable miracles including taming the very dangerous cobra, entertaining the gods who visited his hermitage at nightlighting the woods with a glowing radiance, splitting logs incredibly, ascending to the heavens and bringing back a celestial flower, and he even read the leader of the groups mind (Buddha, 125). While these were acts of a highly trained yogin, they still made clear to the brahmins that the Buddha was all that he claimed to be, and accordingly, all one thousand brahmins immediately joined his sangha. The combination of these two abilities was so successful that the Buddha rarely criticized and/or ad...
