We seek to change souls all unripe for changes;

We build upon a treacherous human soil

Of moral quicksand; and the world avenges

Its crime upon us, while we vainly toil. In the black coal-pit of the popular heart, Rain falls, light kindles, but no flowers upstart.

Know this!-For men of ignoble affection, The social scheme that is were better far

Than the orbed sun's most exquisite perfection;

Man needs not heaven till he revolves a star.

Why seek to win the mad world from its strife?

Grow perfect in the sanity of life.

Grow perfect! bide thy time! in thine own being

Solve, by an actual test, the problems vast

That vex mankind; and, if the years are fleeing,

Wait patiently. Backward the shadow passed

Once at a prophet's word, and may for thee

Nay, will, if thou from self art perfectfree.

Be chaste! be true! be wholly consecrated

To virgin right! So shall thy soul unchain

The powers that for the perfect man have waited.

Though thought and instinct fail, bear every pain,

Till thy resolving elements are free From the dread curse thy fathers cast on thee.

New heavens of light shall dawn, the mind enskying;

Age shall decease, and youth revive the frame;

And, from the desert where men thought thee dying,

Thou shalt return, flushed with celestial flame.

But even then, with gentlest motion, stir The corpses of the world's dread sepulchre.

Move as the air moves, rich with summer spice,

O'er fields of tropic bloom, and where

soever

Thou meetest hearts self-locked in Arctic

ice,

Still and invisible, the angels go.

This is the difficulty in the way of many ardent souls; themselves they

can

save, others they can only touch, and that not always. Having the power in themselves of living above the world, they cannot raise others to the same level by making of them monks and nuns. A shallow soul is not to be made a deep one, or a fool a sage, or frivolity turned into sympathy, by a profession of conversion or by any form of words, nor even always by service under the banner of the most inspiring master.

In his isolation as a prophet, Buddha was not contemptuous of mankind, but very full of pity for all. The assumptions of the

Brahman caste were no doubt for him lesson enough for pride. The following words are among those attributed to him:-" If any man, whether he be learned or not, consider himself so great as to despise other men, he is like a blind man holding a candle-blind himself, he illumines others."

Buddha in his earnestness went so much deeper than the orthodox formalist that it need cause no surprise that his doctrines had to be modified to suit minds less passionately real. He was such as he describes the man who, in striving after true religion, forgets himself. In his revolt against the luxurious ideal of a heaven realising all earth's most selfish gratifications without its pains, he taught that by the enlightened man not only were the sorrows of earth to be avoided, but the joys of heaven. We may remember another and an even more burning protest against spiritual selfishness: he that would save his soul must lose it; he must absolutely cast away himself. In the continuing alertness of the highest faculties to be for ever used for the good of others, lies the only way of arriving at a soul-quality worth saving.

The incessant cry of early Buddhism is upon the inherent repulsiveness of the physical life, and tends to show how deep was the impression made upon Sakya's nature when developing into manhood, by the disabilities of humanity. This tendency developes into morbid excess when a preference is shown for regarding ugly or revolting objects in corporeal life because of the support they bring to his doctrine. If we believe at all that the circumstances of life are adjusted to our truest needs, we are bound to concede that the immitigable facts of mortal life are lesson enough to those who are awake; while the

constant repetition of depictions of the more hideous ills to which man is heir would tend rather to a dull and deadened habit of mind with regard to life in general, than incite it toward higher ranges of spiritual vision, such as might open themselves to the eyes of the patient seeker after truth.

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"What room for mirth, what room for laughter, remembering the everlasting burning?" (This expression must not be regarded as anywise betokening our conventionalised notion of hell; it denotes rather that burning of selfish lusts and eager ambitions which is regarded as the cause of the ceaseless succession of transmigration.) Surely this dark and dreary world is not fit for one to seek security and rest in. Behold this body in its fashioning! What reliance can it afford as a resting place, filled with crowded thoughts, liable to every disease? Oh! how is it men do not perceive its false appearances? When old, then its beauty fades away; in sickness, what paleness and leanness-the skin wrinkled, the flesh withered, death and life both conjoined. And when the body dies, and the spirit flees, as when a royal personage rejects a broken chariot, so do the flesh and bones lie scattered and dispersed. What reliance, then, can one place on the body?'

This passage, as rendered from the Pali, is even more striking in its mournful and ghastly effect : "How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning? Why do you not seek a light, ye who are surrounded by darkness? Look at this dressedup lump, covered with wounds, joined together, sickly, full of many thoughts, which has no strength, no hold! This body is wasted, full of sickness, and frail; this heap of corruption breaks to pieces, the life in it is death.

These white bones, like gourds thrown away in the autumn, what pleasure is there in looking on them? After a frame has been made of the bones it is covered with flesh and blood, and there dwell in it old age and death, pride and deceit."

In a sunny country, life is apt to turn to a gaiety that may become mere carelessness. Buddha, no doubt, knew the life of the wealthy princes to be rarely more than a gay round of thoughtless pleasure, taken often to the detriment of their subjects. It was necessary to show how close were the sterner facts of life to this unreasoning revel. We to whom the daily newspaper brings the record of all the pains and calamities that are befalling the world from one end of it to the other, can scarcely need so much to be reminded of the disabilities of mortal life and the impermanence of the condition of humanity. But in the days when Buddha proclaimed his gospel with frequent use of phrases like the ghastly inscriptions we sometimes see on tombstones, there were no newspapers to bring close to men the story of the mishaps of their brethren; and the meaning of the lesson of human imperfection is perhaps less readily brought home to the individual in a land where the individual is of small account, and, unless he be the head of a village community, passes away with but little disturbance to the ways of his fellows.

The kind of love which Buddha manifests is compassion-pity for the human race, which is blinded by the hood of self upon its eyes, and struggling vainly in the clinging toils of the immediate surroundings of its existence. Apart from this pitiful affection, which extends to the minutest thing that has life, Buddhism is an abstract philosophy that conveys a sense of

chill, as if a skeleton absolutely perfect in the order of its bones were our companion. We are told the only certain way of escape; it rests with us to pursue it. To reach it we must, so far as our mortal appetites are concerned, attain the Jesuit ideal, and become perinde ac cadaver. Thus-and thus only

by the conquest of the human frailties and selfishnesses that disturb us and keep us in the mesh of the lower elements, may we enter into the sight of the mystic promised land of Nirvana.

Man being in this world of sorrow and suffering, the question arises, How got he thither? This question, with its answer, is conspicuous in the Buddhist system. The belief on this point we may find in a popular form in the Pratyasataka (Century of Maxims):

Not from the king that rules the realm proceed our ills and woes,

Nor from the ministers of state, our kinsmen, or our foes!

Nor from the shining host of orbs that glitter in the sky,

Descend the ills that compass us, and shall do till we die, And after.

But the real source of all our

Uttering the sentiments of a Buddhist, a man might say-I regard myself as a sentient being, now existing in the world of men. But I have existed in a similar manner in many myriads of previous births; and may have passed through all possible states of being. I am now under the influence of all I have ever done in all those ages. This is my KARMA, the arbiter of my destiny. Until I attain NIRVANA, I must still continue to exist; but the states of being into which I shall pass, I cannot tell. The future is shrouded in darkness impenetrable."

It

may be questioned whether Sakya himself would not have defined the future as consisting of light impenetrable rather than darkness, but truly the idea of the developed negationist is rather one of darkness.

"It is the mind alone (spirit)," according to the doctrine of the Dhammapada (Beal), "that determines the character of (life in) the three worlds. Just as the life has been virtuous or the contrary, is the subsequent career of the individual. Living in the dark, darkness will follow; the consequent birth is as the echo from the cavern ; immersed in carnal desires, there cannot be anything but carnal appetite; all things result from previous conduct, as the traces follow the elephant step, or the shadow the substance."

The worthlessness of existence with the primitive Buddhist is not a doctrine of mere pessimism; what he means by existence is not pure being, but such life as is due to that quality in man or angel which Swedenborg called the proprium. Even the Devas, who dwell in higher worlds than man and in joys of long duration, eventually have to complain of their imperfect character, and to find that they are still in the net of transmigration. What it is to be absorbed into the universal life without loss of our own identity is a condition for us ineffable; but it is in the cutting off of every root of subjection to lower desire that, according to Buddha, the entrance into that sublime state of purity is to be found. Impurity is the cleaving to sensible objects; purity is the absence of such attachment. The substance of Buddha's doctrine is this: "That the spirit or soul is the individual, and the body is the habitation of the soul. As the spirit As the spirit comes or goes, so the abode of the spirit (ie., the body) is perfected

or destroyed. It may be objected to this that in such a theory there is no room for real birth-it is merely the soul coming into a body; and also, in case of death, it is merely the same soul going, and the abode falling to decay. But the fact is, men generally know nothing about this soul-they only think of their bodies-and so are led to desire life and fear death; and so their case is a pitiable one.' Among the enlightened this ignorance vanishes; the knowledge of former existences is one of the definite attributes of arrival at the supernatural condition. Among the Buddhist legends is one of a father who, after the death of a young son who had shown a marvellous grace and knowledge, was allowed, in answer to his prayers, to be admitted to a sight of his child, who was in a city of such heavenly spirits as sometimes dwell among men. He addressed the child as his own, when the boy upbraided him for using such a foolish term as father or child, and refused to return with him to the earthly tabernacle. The story has no doubt been made to illustrate the doctrine of Buddha.

In superficial thought it may appear that such doctrines end in indifference to all that is beautiful, alike with all that is evil. It is true that in developed Buddhistic doctrine there is an overhaste for emancipation, a lack of acknowledgment of the fact that the beauty we find on the way of our pilgrimage is a kind gift, so long as rightly used. It is true that we find also a tendency to a cold selfishness such as that of Lucretius, but it may be presumed to arise from the pronounced intellectualism of the Hindu character, rather than from any characteristic of Buddha's teaching with which it is so manifestly inconsistent; for though we find even in the Dham

mapada such a sentence as "Climbing the terraced heights of wisdom, the wise man looks down upon the fools, serene he looks upon the toiling crowd, as one that stands upon a mountain looks down upon them that stand upon the plain," it does not follow that it emanated from Buddha himself, while it seems probable enough that it proceeded from some disciple who had become somewhat puffed up by the new wine of a great teacher's words. And after all there is a truth in the crushing sarcasm of the Dhammapada: "If a fool be associated with a wise man all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup." Buddha's own indifference may have been natural indifference, that is, disregard of what is physical and transitory, but he cannot be accused of spiritual indifference. The question on its own merits is a plausible one, whether, when the selfish passions that actuate mortal life are stilled, not by lapse of faculties as in old age, but through conquest of the lower by the higher, there does not arise a spiritual passion which fills the being of the truly earnest and enlightened individual with something that is very far removed from indifference. Buddha, who taught an indifference that would repel most persons who live strongly in the physical life, was a worker all his life for love.

A most striking passage in the Dhammapada we may speculatively attribute to Sakya as representing his feelings on the attainment of the gleam of vision for which he had so long striven, the illumination that sent him forth to preach with power for the remainder of his natural life. The passage requires to be studied carefully, for its expressions are otherwise apt to mislead. There is no antitheism in it, for there is no

reference either to a divine creator or to a demiurge; the great architect represents the cause of birth, discovered when the soul awakens to consciousness of itself, the building being the necessary expression of our state, the exact correspondence to what we are and have been in selfish desires. We will give more than one translation of the passage.

Mr. D'Alwis renders:

"Through transmigrations of numerous births have I run, not discovering (though) seeking the house-builder; birth again and again (is) sorrow. O House-builder! thou art (now) seen. Thou shalt not again build a house (for me). All thy (rafters) ribs are broken (by me). The apex of the house is destroyed. destroyed. (My) mind is inclined to nibbana. (It) has arrived at the extinction of desire."

Mr. Childers begins the passage: "I have run through the revolution of countless births seeking the architect of this dwelling, and finding him finding him not; grievous is repeated birth."

Professor Max Müller has both these scholars against him in rendering the tense as a future, which also makes the passage unintelligible:

"Without ceasing shall I run through a course of many births, looking for the maker of this tabernacle, and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou

hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, being sundered, has attained to the extinction of all desires."

Another of the striking passages of the Dhammapada, composed, as it would seem, to stick to the mind like a burr to the garment, which is the prerogative of parabolic or