Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/696

BUDDHISM. 618 BUDDHISM. most heyond the powers of even Indian notation to express. A meritorious life, on the other hand, secures the next birth either in an exalted and happy position on earth, or as a blessed spirit, or even divinity, in one of the many heav- ens, in which the least duration of life is about ten billions of years. But however long the life, whether of misery or of bliss, it has an end. and at its close the individual must be born afrain. and may again be either happy or miserable — cither a god or. it may be. the vilest inanimate object.* The Buddha himself, before his last birth as Sakyamuni, had gone through every conceivable fonn of existence on the earth, in the air, and in the water, in hell and in heaven, and had filled every condition in human life. When he attained the perfect knowledge of the Buddha he was able to recall all these exist- ences; and a great part of the Buddhist legend- ary literature is taken up in narrating his ex- ploits when he lived as an elephant, as a bird, as a stag, and so forth. The Buddhist conception of the way in which the quality of actions — which is expressed in Sanskrit by the word karma, including both merit and de- merit — determines the future condition of all sentient beings, is peculiar. They do not con- ceive any god or gods as being pleased or dis- pleased by the actions, and as assigning the actors their future condition by way of pimish- nient or of reward. The very idea of a god. as creating or in any way ruling the world, is ut- terly absent in the Buddhist system. God is not so much as denied : he is simply not known. Contrary to the opinion once confidently and generally held, that a nation of atheists never existed, it is no longer to be disputed that the luimerous Buddhist nations are essentially athe- ist; for they know no beings with greater super- natural, power than any man is supposed capable of attaining to by virtue, austerity, and science. The future condition of the Buddhist, then, is not assigned him by the Ruler of the I'niverse; the 'karma' of his actions determines it by a sort of virtue inherent in the nature of things — by the blind and unconsciois con<at<'nation of cause and effect.. But the laws by which conse- quences are regulated seem dark, and even capricious. A bad action may lie donn.ant, as it were, for many existences; the taint, however, is there, and it will some time or other break out. A Buddhist is tluis never at a loss to ac- count for any calamity that ma3' befall hini-self or others. Another basis of Buddhism is the assumption that human existence is on the whole miserable, and a curse rather than a blessing. An enerat- ing climate and political conditions may have aided in producing the feeling common to Brah- man and Buddhist that life is evil. But the root of the matter is philosophical. Life is a whole: nature is a whole; to be born is to become sepa- rate or individualized from the whole. Individ- uality implies limitjition: limitation implies er- ror; error implies ignorance. Hence birth is an •Accordinp: to one legend the Bhajfavat, in order to im- press upon the monies of a nionjist^'ry the iniportanre of their duties, pointed to a beBoiu, and. by his supernatural insight, he revealed to them that It had once beenanovire. who had been negligent In sweeping the hall of asweinbly. The walls and pillars, again, he told them, had onoeexisted as monks, who soiled the walls of the hall by spitting upon th«m. evil because it is inseparable from ignorance, and it is only the removal of ignorance which can lead to the suppression of desire, while only the suppression of desire can lead to peace. The little value that Hindus set upon their lives is manifested in many ways. The jmnishment of death, again, has little or no terror for them, and is even sometimes coveted as an honor. In the eyes, then, of Sakyamuni and his fol- lowers, sentient existence wa.s hopelessly miser- able. Misery was not a mere taint in it, the removal of which would make it happy — misery v.as its very essence. Death was no escape from this inevitable lot, for, according to the doctrine of transmigration, death was only a passage into some other form of existence equally doomed. Even the heaven and the state of god- head, which form part of the cycle of changes in this system, were not final ; and this thought poisoned what happiness they might be capable of yielding. Brahman philosophers had sought escape from this endless cycle of unsatisfying changes by making the individual soul be ab- sorbed in the universal spirit (Brahman) ; Gau- tama had the same object in view — viz., exemp- tion from being born again; but he had not the same means of reaching it. He recognized no soul, and his philosophy was utterly atheistic. Gautama sees no escape but in what he calls Nirvana, literally 'extinction,' 'blowing out,' of desire ; but most (Irientalists are agreed that in the Buddhist scriptures generally it is equiva- lent to annihilation. Even in those schools which attempt to draw a distinction, the distinc- tion is of the most evanescent kind. See Nik- van A. The key of the whole scheme of Buddhist sal- vation lies in what Gautama called his four sublime verities. The first asserts that pain exists; the second, that the cause of pain is desire or attachment — the meaning of which will appear further on ; the third, that pain can be ended by suppressing desire ; and the fourth shows the way that leads to this. This way consists in eight things: Right faith, right judgment, right language, right purpose, right practice, right effort, right thinking, and right meditation. In order to understand how this method is to lead to the proposed end. we must turn to the meta- physical part of the system contained in the "concatenation of causes,' or 'chain of causation,' which may be looked ujion as a deelo])ment of the second 'verity' — namely, that the cause of pain is desire — or rather, as the analysis upon which that verity is founded. The "immediate cause of pain is birth, for if we were not bom we should not be ex])osed to death or any of the ills of life. Birth, again, is caused by previous existence; it is only a, transition from one state of existence into another. All the actions and alfcctions of a being throughout his migrations leave their impressions, stains, attachments ad- hering to him, and the accumulation of these determines at each stiige the peculiar modifica- tion of existence he must next assume. This is the only soul that Buddha recognizes. These ad- hesions or attachments, good and bad. depend upon desire. We thus arrive at desire — includ- ing both the desire to possess and the desire to avoid — as one link in the chain of causes of continued existence and pain. Beyond this the dependence of the links is very difficult to trace;