righteousness, of which enfranchisement from worldly desires, universal brotherhood, and spiritual equality were the great laws:—

To give light to them enshrouded in darkness,

And to open the gate of immortality to men.1

2

We know how during the forty years of his public ministry he went up and down the country watered by the Ganges, occupied, like One greater than he, of whom he may without irreverence be deemed the precursor, in doing good: receiving all who came to him without distinction of rank or castehis law, he was wont to say, was "a law of grace for all"--but especially calling to him all that laboured and were heavy laden, the poor, the sorrowful, and the sinful, who were above others dear to his pitiful heart. So much is luminously clear "through the mists of fabling time" regarding this great Teacher's life. But in truth the fables are not less valuable sources of information regard

1 Beal's Romantic Legend from the Chinese, p. 245. Immortality must not be taken in the sense of endless life, but in the very different sense of deliverance from "the load of death called life ": cessation of individual existence: or, in the words of the Sutta Nipâta "not going to rebirth," "leaving death behind." The passage the Chinese poet has reproduced will be found in Sacred Books, vol. xiii. p. 88, § 12.

2 The late excellent Bishop of Calcutta, Dr. Milman, writes: "Among the heathen precursors of the truth I feel more and more that Sakya-Muni was the nearest in character and effect to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.'"-Memoir of Bishop Milman, p. 203.

CHAP. I.] THE DOCTRINE OF THE BUDDHA.

25

ing him than the facts themselves. It is a profound saying of Plato, and very pertinent to this subject, that poetry comes nearer vital truth than history.

I shall have occasion to touch again upon this point. I now proceed to glance at the doctrine of the Buddha, the gospel which he spent his life in preaching. Its foundation is the illusoriness of the world, the subjection of all that is, to the great law of mutability, the misery inseparable from the condition of man, so long as he remains in "the whirlpool of existence." In the account which is given of the workings of his mind in the first watch of the great night which he spent under the Bo-tree, he is represented as going through the chain of "the Twelve Causes and Effects,' and tracing back all the evil that is in the world to Ignorance,' the prime illusion, the fundamental error of those who cling to individual existence. And in his sermon to the seventy Brahmins he declares "to know as truth that which is true, and to regard as false that which is false, this is perfect rectitude, and shall bring true profit." And then he goes on to point out as the primary truth.-" Everywhere in the world there is death: there is no rest in either of the three worlds. The gods indeed enjoy

1 They cling to individual existence, because they know not the Four Noble Truths, which are enumerated on the next page, and of which a detailed exposition will be found at pp. 151-154. This Ignorance is the source of all evil and of all suffering. See Sacred Books, vol. xiii. p. 76: Bishop Bigandet's Life or Legend, vol. i. p. 93.

a period of bliss, but their happiness must also end, and they must also die. To consider this as the condition of all states of being, that there is nothing born but must die, and therefore to desire to escape birth and death, this is to exercise oneself in religious truth." For death is in itself no deliverance from the burden of being. To die is merely to pass from one state of existence to another. So long as tanhá-thirst, passion, desire-remains, the source of being remains. To root out tanha is the only way of escaping "the yawning gulf of continual birth and death." It is this which is expressed in the Four Truths, thought out by the Buddha, in that great night, after he had followed the sequence of the Twelve Causes and Effects-the Four Noble Truths, as they are called, regarding Suffering, the Cause of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path which leads to the Cessation of Suffering, which may be reckoned great fundamental doctrines of the Buddhist Church. But there are two other tenets of no less importance. common with almost all oriental thinkers, the Buddha believed in Transmigration-an hypothesis, in support of which a certain amount of evidence may be adduced, and which, as Mr.

2

In

1 Beal's Dhammapada, p. 65. I translate "Devas" by "gods." 2 I refer, of course, to

"Those shadowy recollections"

of which Wordsworth speaks, and

"Which, be they what they may,"

are an indubitable fact of man's mind; a fact affording, as Words

CHAP. I.]

KARMA.

27

Rhys Davids observes, "is incapable of disproof, while it affords an explanation, quite complete, to those who can believe in it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution of happiness or woe." The doctrine of Karma, which plays so great a part in Buddhism and which is the main source of its moral excellence, is the complement of the doctrine of Transmigration, and the link which connects it with the "Four Noble Truths." It is the teaching of the Buddha that there is no such thing as what is commonly called a soul. The real man is the net result of his merits and demerits, and that net result is called Karma. A god, a man, a beast, a bird, or a fish-for there is no essential difference between all living beings— is what he does, what he has done, not only during his present existence, but very far more, during his countless previous existences, in various forms. His actual condition is the result of the deeds done in his former births, and upon his present deeds, plus the past, will depend his destiny in future existences, divine, human, or animal. And the character of his acts depends upon his intention. "All that we are," the Teacher insists, "depends worth judged, " presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence." See the very interesting note prefixed by him to the magnificent ode in which, as he tells us," he took hold of the notion of preexistence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising him to make, for his purpose, the best use of it he could as a poet."

1 Buddhism, p. 100.

99 1

upon what we have thought.' Thus life in all its grades, from the highest to the lowest, is, in the strictest sense, a time of probation. "Two things

in this world are immutably fixed," the Buddha is reported to have said upon another occasion-"that good actions bring happiness, and that bad actions bring misery." 2 In the pregnant Buddhist phrase, "we pass away, according to our deeds," to be reborn in heaven, or in hell, or upon the earth as man or animal, according to our Karma. To say that a man's works follow him when he dies, that what he has sown here he shall reap there, falls far short of this tremendous doctrine. His works

are himself, he is what he has sown. All else drops from him at death. His body decays and falls into nothingness; and not only his material properties (Rúpa), but his sensations (Vedand), his abstract ideas (Sanna), his mental and moral predispositions (Sankhara), and his thought or reason (Vinnána)— all these constituent elements of his being pass away. But his Karma remains, unless he has attained to the supreme state of Arahat-the crown of Buddhist saintship-when Karma is extinguished and Nirvána is attained.

Such is Karma-a great mystery which the limited intellect of ordinary man can but contemplate as it were "through a glass, darkly": only

1 Professor Max Müller's Dhammapada in Sacred Books of the East, vol. x. p. 3. 2 Beal's Dhammapada, p. 75.