Thus sometimes hope, sometimes the fulfilment of hope, deceives us. If it gives, it is but to take away. The fascination of distance presents a paradise, like an optical illusion when we have allowed ourselves to be allured thither. Happiness accordingly lies always in the future or in the past; and the present is to be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over a sunny plain. Before it and behind it all is bright, it alone casts a shadow. The present therefore is never satisfactory; the future uncertain; the past irrecoverable. Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly small, great and greater misfortunes, with its frustrated hopes and mishaps baffling all calculation, bears so plainly the impress of something we should become disgusted with that it is difficult to understand how any one could have mistaken this and been convinced that life was to be thankfully enjoyed and man destined to be happy. On the other hand the eternal delusion and disappointment as well as the constitution of life throughout seem as though they were intended and adapted to arouse the conviction that nothing whatever is worthy of our striving, driving and wrestling,that all goods are nought, the world bankrupt throughout, and life a business that does not meet expenses,-so that our will may turn away from it.

"The manner in which this vanity of all objects of the will reveals itself, is, in the first place, time. Time is the form by means of which the vanity of things appears as transitoriness, since through time all our enjoyments and pleasures come to nought; and we afterwards ask in amazement what has become of them? Accordingly our life is like a payment which we receive in copper pence, and which at last we must receipt. The pence are the days, death the receipt. For, at last, time proclaims the sentence of nature's judgment upon the worth of all beings by destroying them.

And justly so; for all things from the void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed.

T'were better, there were nought created.-Goethe.

"Age and death, to which every life necessarily hurries, are the sentence of condemnation upon the will to live, passed by nature herself, which declares that this will is a

struggling, that must defeat itself. What thou hast willed', it says, 'ends thus ; will something better'.

"The lessons which each one learns from his life consist, on the whole, in this, that the objects of his wishes constantly delude, shake and fall; consequently they bring more torment than pleasure, until at length even the whole ground upon which they all stand gives way, inasmuch as his life itself is annihilated. Thus he receives the last confirmation that all his striving and willing were a blunder and an error.

Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him comprehend
After a search so painful and so long

That all his life he has been in the wrong.'

"Whatever may be said to the contrary, the happiest moment of the happiest mortal is still the moment he falls asleep, as the unhappiest moment of the unhappiest mortal the moment he awakens." *

Despite the gruesome misery of life man does not grow desperate. True to his nature as a living being he is continually striving after self-preservation. With all his labour in civilisation man strives for nothing else than his salvation, his deliverance from sorrow and suffering. What man speaks of as pleasure or happiness is nothing else than deliverance from pain. We know nothing positive about pleasure. Some desire or want is the condition that precedes every pleasure. With the satisfaction of the want, the wish and, therefore, the pleasure cease. All that is given to us directly is merely the want, ie, the pain. Even when all other wants have been satisfied, there is one desire which man cannot attain. Man's instinctive impulse towards self-preservation has created in him a desire for changeless and deathless life, a desire to be free from old age and death. How can this desire be attained? How can man obtain deliverance from the inevitable doom of death? How is it possible to maintain a continuity in spite of the perpetual change going on in the great struggle of existence? This is everywhere the problem of religion. Everywhere religion is the instinct of self-preservation manifesting itself in the form of hope and

* The world as Will and Idea, vol II, Chapter 46.

aspiration. Wherever man meets with circumstances which cannot be made serviceable to him, but to which on the contrary he is obliged to suit himself and his life aims, there arises religion. Religion, in the true sense of the word, has nothing to do with the origin or purpose of the world. As Prof. Leuba says, "not god, but life, more life, a larger, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion." With true insight and wisdom has the Buddha declared: "Have I promised to reveal to you secrets and mysteries? I have, on the contrary, promised to make known to you suffering, the cause of suffering, and the way of escape from suffering. As the vast ocean is impregnated with one taste, the taste of salt, so also my disciples, this Dharma, this teaching, is impregnated with one taste, the taste of deliverance."

In his attempts to find a perfect life, a life free from misery and death, man has through ignorance fallen a victim to the creations of his own fancy. To satisfy his longing for a deathless life he invented immortal souls which could survive the death of the body. Judging the unknown, upon which he found himself hopelessly dependent for the realisation of his desires, in the light of what was best known to him, that is to say, of what he fancied about his own nature, he peopled the universe with gods, souls like himself but more mighty and capable of doing him good or harm. To win the favour of the gods or avert their wrath, man invented all kinds of prayers, charms, magical formulæ, and bloody sacrifices. Especially the last have played such a prominent part in religion that many writers on anthropology have mistaken it for 'the fundamental doctrine of religion'. Even the very gods have been supposed to become incarnate human beings and offer themselves in sacrifice for the salvation of mankind.* But all these are not essential to religion, and the Buddha saw that clearly. He put an end to all kinds of sacrifices, rejected the use of charms and magical

* 46

A curious relic of primitive superstition and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism-a doctrine irrational and unintelligible. and for that very reason wrapped in the deepest and most sacred mystery a belief in the sacrifice of Dionysos himself, and the purification of man by his blood."

formulæ, and pointed out the ineptitude of gods to save mankind. He taught that misery and suffering were not the result of the wrath of gods, but that they were the consequences of man's ignorance of his own nature and his surroundings. Nor is death the result of sin. Life and death are inseparable. All life is change; and what is change but the death of the present? Man shudders at and fears death, and yet death and life are not different. Just as all energy tends towards dissipation, so does all life tend towards death. All life is progressive death. The great Chinese philosopher Licius, pointing to a heap of mouldering human bones, rightly remarked to his scholars: "These and I alone have the knowledge that we neither live nor are dead." Similarly just before his death the Buddha said: Everything that lives, whatever it be, is subject to the law of destruction; the law of things combined' is to 'separate.'

66

The world process did not come into existence all perfected. It started with blind potentialities, and when self-conscious man made his appearance on the scene there, was already an outcrop of inherited tendencies. That man

*

originated from an animal is no longer doubted. All known facts demonstrate that man, looked at from a purely zoological standpoint, is nothing more than a simian 'monster', a sort of arrested development in an anthropomorphic ape of an anterior epoch. He is only a prodigy child of an anthropoid born with a brain and intelligence more developed than those of its parents. As a result of this origin there have survived in man qualities fitted for a nonmoral life. But his development gave rise to the necessity of associating with his fellows into families, and this has led to the growth of social life, a life of morality. What is called the feeling of sinfulness is nothing else than the consciousness that the actions suited to an individual life are not suited to the requirements of a social or moral life, a consciousness which varies in proportion to the development of social claims and the moral sense.

Evolution takes place through all forms, from the mineral through plants and all kinds of animal forms, until perfec

*Elie Metchnikoff: Etudes sur la nature humaine.

tion is reached in the Buddha. All beings are what they are by their previous and present karma. The germ of enlightenment (nirvāṇadhātu) first manifests itself as sentient reflex activity, but gradually develops through the path of conscious concurrence into self-conscious rational reaction. In the initial stage of sentient reflex activity the living being acts under the influence of some inherent impulse which enables it to accomplish some good in a mechanical way. This reflex activity excludes all freedom and evil propensities; the living being is devoid of all notion of good or evil, and it lives, so to speak, in unconscious communion with the whole of nature. In the middle stage of conscious concurrence the living being begins a life of individuality, differentiating itself more and more as it progresses from other beings and disputing with them for as large a share as possible of enjoyment and satisfaction. Though it has lost the primitive simplicity which, in the initial stage, enabled it to do some good unconsciously, yet it has acquired freedom. It is now constantly bent on evil, but when it does evil it knows not that it does evil.

During the final stage of self-conscious rational reaction the living being enters on the struggle for life, engages in the strife for pleasure and comfort, and sacrifices as many beings as it can for the satisfaction of its own egoistic appetites, but when it does evil there arises within itself a feeling of remorse. Gradually the notion of duty takes root in the heart of man, and it becomes a check to the free play of his passions. As he makes constant efforts to arrest his passions, his moral sense, the keen perception for improvement, becomes more and more active. He finds it necessary to wipe off the effects of his bad tendencies, and he resolves to suppress them in future. He thus gets a glimpse of the Noble Path that leads to perfection. The more intense this self-conscious reaction in a man is, the more does he feel a necessity to return to a stage similar to that of reflex activity, though acting in the full consciousness of freedom. He can henceforth do nothing else than good, but, instead of doing it in an involuntary mechanical way like the beings of the initial stage, he does it voluntarily with a view to accumulate merit. He does good to others, not in order that they may do good to him, but