(Reprinted from the Buddhist Review, No. 11, pp. 149-63.)

Edtor's Note: This essay was published in 1921, before Adolf Hitler and his Nazis came to power. Bennett's use of the word "Aryan" should not therefore be misconstrued as implying any sort of ideological affiliation on Bennett's part.

PERHAPS the most fundamental, as, for its historical import, certainly the most noteworthy, of all the manifold lines of cleavage which in so many directions traverse the vast fabric of our human thought, is that which lies between the spiritual and the material world-views. It separates all humanity's innumerable philosophies and ontologies into two essentially opposed groups. On this side are all the various types of idealism ; on that, the no less numerous thought-modes of materialism. So profound are the divergencies, so far-reaching in their several consequences on the minds of men, are the different modes of mental action thus contrasted, that we might almost attribute them to two fundamentally different types of mentality. This fact recalls the division demonstrated by modern psychologists, i.e. those who think and remember in forms­in mental images­and those whose thoughts and memories are involved in words. Or, again, into the division propounded by the great American psychologist of "tough" minds and "tender"; or, yet again, in the still more recent nomenclature of the psychoanalysts into "Introverts" and "Extroverts" respectively.

I have written "modes of mental action" rather than "systems" of thought because I am employing these two words, Idealism and Materialism, in the widest possible sense; a sense involving a profound and perhaps an ineradicable contrast of character, as well as outlook upon life. By a Materialist I mean one whose mental orientation is from within outward towards the visible universe; one who looks upon that universe, presented by the senses, as the great Reality; who regards consciousness and thought as an exceedingly rare and difficult function of the highest sort of life. Life itself appears to his mental vision as an exceedingly rare resultant of certain highly-specialized combinations of that fundamental matter of which, together with its inseparable energy, he conceives his Universe-concept to be composed. For him, therefore, his own being appears as a species of accident, and its duration limited to the extent of his body's life. In short, and here we come to the crux of the whole position, to the Materialist this world, this human life, appears as all-in-all to him. Hence he cannot help being obsessed by the great antinomy of Self as against the Universe. The only really logical rule of life for such a one is summed up in the old words, "Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." He regards his own conscious, thinking life as having had no antecedents of a similar order, and as inheriting no similar conscious life in the future.

The Idealist, on the other hand, I would define as one whose mental orientation is fundamentally from without to within. To him it is life, consciousness in the widest sense of the term, which is the underlying Reality. The Universe without he regards as merely one of the manifold possible modes of manifestation of that consciousness. If he carries this conception to its logical conclusion, he must conceive his own conscious existence both as the resultant of antecedent states of consciousness, and as destined to inherit, after his death, further conscious existence in some form or other. All, for the Materialist, lies in this world. For the Idealist this world, this life, appears as but the veriest moment in an aeonian cycle of conscious manifestation.

But it must, of course, be understood that, in thus classifying all human beings as falling in one or the other of these two categories, it is not for a moment intended to imply that any given member of either group must necessarily have thus thought out and defined his mental position, on the one hand; or, on the other, that any person who, with complete mental honesty, might claim to belong to one or the other type of thinker, should properly be assigned to the group he claims. Something much deeper than a mere surface system of thought is involved in the classification in question. Here, as in so many other departments of life, deeds speak very much louder than words. Or, perhaps words do not speak at all! In this present age in particular, passing as we are through an epoch wherein the whole past content of human consciousness is in the melting-pot, there is (happily for the world) a great number of men who would quite honestly claim to take the materialistic outlook upon life, but who in reality are radically idealistic; whilst some at least of those who would call themselves idealists are, judging by that keen test of their daily lives and acts, out-and-out materialists at heart. It is by men's lives and deeds, as in the ancient Buddhist aphorism, that we must judge them; in this particular respect as in all others. The fundamental test for the classification of which I speak is simply the extent of each individual's selfishness or unselfishness of life. For, whatever he may call himself or imagine that he really is, that man whose underlying outlook is on this world, who regards this life as the sole Reality, must live and work for Self alone; whilst he who takes the wider view that consciousness is the Real has already (whether he may realize the fact or no), taken the first great step towards realising his oneness with the whole of conscious life.

Not, of course, that it imports but little to the progress of each one of us what view we take in conscious thought. Far from it. For, however idealistic by nature a man may be, each time he entertains what I would term a fundamentally materialistic thought, he turns, as it were, another key upon the liberation of his selfhood. And, vice versa, every truly idealistic concept that we cherish in our consciousness goes toward our liberation from the all so-subtle bonds of self-desire. As the Dhammapada puts it:­

"Think thou not lightly of the Good, saying, 'This cannot come to me.'
See how the Filter-jar is brimmed, drop by drop falling, ceaselessly !
So doth the Wise grow full of Good, long in the garnering tho' he be."

For the power of thought upon our characters which, like all else, are ever subject unto change, is one unhappily all too little regarded or comprehended here in these Western lands. We pay, indeed, much heed to the exercising of our gross bodies. We realise, for these at least, that health involves constant usage; that the member never exercised must, given time enough, atrophy and decay, since, in this context usage is but another term for life. But the mind, no less than the body, demands constant and right usage if it is to improve; else, like all unused things, it, too, must atrophy. Yet it is obvious to all of us that, in a very much more real sense than can be said of our bodies, we are our minds. These, if we are to find any real progress in existence, need constant, rightly directed use in thinking all those kinds of thought which we consider high and noble; thoughts which are true, as best we understand the word; which lead to understanding the true nature of life, so that we may see it clearly and see it as it really is.

And here, before passing on to what is more definitely my subject, I may perhaps advantageously suggest one such useful line of thought connected with this subject of the antinomy of the material and ideal views of life. It is doubtless a thought which has come to many, like all other ways of thinking, whether good or bad; but I do not recall having ever seen it definitely expressed as a possible contribution to this great question­whether the truth lies in the materialistic or the idealistic outlook upon life. It is as follows: It is a fact now generally admitted, almost obvious, one might say (were it not often the case that the obvious is the last thing we see), that each of our several organs of sense, and hence each of our special senses themselves, has come into existence, and could only have come into existence, by virtue of an antecedent motion in the universe of a type to which such special sense responds. Take, for example, sight or hearing. Neither of these could ever have found place in our organization but for the fact that light and sound respectively anteceded their appearance in living organisms. In a lightless world, sight could never have come into existence. We know, indeed, that creatures which have for generations existed in lightless caverns have lost the sense of sight that once their ancestors, coming from the outer world of light, possessed. It is the existence of light which has endowed us with sight. It is the existence of sound which has created our hearing and that of all lower animals. Then, it would seem to follow of necessity, it is an antecedent thought-motion in the universe which has created in us the organ of thought, of consciousness. There seems to be no possible evasion of this deduction.

Now this is precisely an integral portion of the Buddhist teaching as to conscious life. The universe that Buddhism, the most logically idealistic of all idealisms (in the sense in which I have so far employed the term), envisages is compared to a mighty Ocean, the Ocean of Samsara, of Being in its most fundamental sense. Each one of us may be regarded as a particular wave upon that all but infinite Ocean, just as in the physical ocean any given wave does not, as we now know, consist of a separate body of water moving over the surface, but of a complex of forces which so acts as to bring ever new waters in succession to form momentarily a portion of the wave ; so we (thought-waves upon a sea component of thought-elements innumerable) consist in reality of a complex of forces bringing ever new thoughts into the substance of our being; there to dwell a moment, and from us to pass away to form component parts of another and yet another wave. From the Ocean of Thought ever these new thought-elements are entering our being; even as others pass from our minds to form a fraction of the mental complex that we would term some other being. Only, and herein lies our only hope of emancipation from these ever-changing surges, we are able, as the physical wave is not, a little to modify our own wave-nature as we go. We have a certain small power of rejecting the undesirable thoughts, or at least of minimising their action; of cherishing and improving the good thoughts; since thought is living in a sense the water does not live. So by our living may the waters of that bitter Ocean grow a little sweeter. That is our privilege and our ideal of life.

What, then, are the thoughts which we should strive to minimise or inhibit? What are those which we should cherish and make strong, before they leave us for their aeonian journey ? They go forth to poison or ennoble other lives, made worse or better for our having thought them. In the answer to that question lies the whole ambit of the Buddhist life; and we may read the lesson which the Greatest and the Wisest of Humanity achieved for us in terms of but a single word.

When, out of Uruvela's mighty forest depths, fresh from the incomparable Enlightenment that followed his six years of lonely strife and search for healing for mankind, the Great Teacher spoke, in hearing of his erstwhile Five Disciples, that message to mankind which was to change so marvellously all the history of humanity, he taught the existence of Four Great Truths whereto he gave the title of Aryan, or Noble. Since we have seen how all-important is the directing of our thoughts in certain definite ways, it will be good to recapitulate them here. First came the Aryan Truth of Sorrow. Next the Aryan Truth of Sorrow's Cause. Third is the Aryan Truth of Sorrow's Ceasing. And the Fourth Aryan Truth is the Way whereby this vast enfranchisement may be attained. Later, we will examine them in detail.

Now each of these Four Truths the Teacher designated as Aryan, which we may best translate as Noble, using the word in its highest, most ideal sense.

A study of the few pages of human history that remain to us shows us clearly how that great Aryan Race whereof we ourselves are offshoots stands out clearly, in each and all of the manifold departments of human activity, as excelling all other races of which our records tell. We are thus brought to the conclusion that in this Race we have the final product, so far, of our human evolution; the supreme achievement of nature in the life of our globe.

Cradled, there is good reason for believing, upon the shores of that great central sea which once occupied a large area of what now is Middle-Asia, that great Race seems, even from the first, to have realised the mighty destiny in store for it. We know how, as it developed alike in numbers and in capacity, it sent forth, in successive great waves of emigration, branch after branch; and how, earliest amongst these great waves of human movement, from the central home of the race, came that group which, penetrating the Himalayan passes, occupied the greater part of Northern India, ultimately infiltrating southwards, even into the Dravidian countries and across the narrow straits to Ceylon.

This earliest Indian branch it was which preserved for us that proud style assumed by the parent Race, which, as has been said, appears to indicate an almost conscious foreknowledge of the great destinies whereof its offspring were to be the heritors. It is the style which, throughout Indian literature and tradition, has descended to us even to this present day. For they styled themselves the Aryas, the Noble Ones. As we know from the Indian literatures, their leaders made it a fixed principle, even of their very religion, that they should never dilute the purity of their Aryan blood by intermarriage with the baser races amongst which they settled. So highly did they esteem the preservation of their racial purity. For them the greatest evil lay in many of the more animal practices of those autochthonous by whom, in India, they found themselves surrounded. The leading minds amongst them made their disgust of, and their repulsion from, many of these animal-like habits, a very powerful aid towards the maintenance of a high standard of morality in general; enlisting thus this, by no means ignoble, pride of race itself as a spur towards a really high level of ethical behaviour. We find a very similar use made in our own day's of the word "gentleman" in the education of our youth; and just as in a modem public school much that is evil is eradicated by classifying it as bad "form," "un-English," or "ungentlemanly"; so, in a still more far reaching fashion, were the evil tendencies of these early Indian tribes reduced or inhibited altogether by their teaching that such thoughts and actions were un-aryan, ignoble, base. Strangely enough, indeed, that very word "form," in the sense we have referred to, is the lineal descendant of the old Aryan word Dharma­"Duty." It was the Aryan Dharma, the Noble's Way, the Good Form, to live finely and justly and greatly, as they envisaged greatness; the ancient Indian equivalent and parallel of the ideal to which the Japanese give the title "Bushido."

Thus we see that the Buddha found already to his purpose a moving and potent word, one very fully grasped and clearly and vividly understood, amongst the peoples whom he was to teach; and already in his first sermon we find him using it in just the sense involved. He contrasts the Aryan Way of the Middle Path, the mean between the cruel austerity of the Indian sages of his time on the one hand, and the base life of the barbaric tribes, given over to a gross abandonment to the life of sense, upon the other. And in many a subsequent sermon and lesson he dilated on this contrast, and vivified and spiritualised the meaning of the word Aryan itself, malting it clear that a man was Aryan, was noble, not by lineage and descent at all, but only as he acted nobly; and how the noble act arose and was engendered solely by the noble thought which led to it; by the noble outlook upon life that formed the background of the thinker's consciousness.

And such nobility of thought and outlook is indeed more needful in the case of Buddhism than with any other great religion of the world. It needs a very real nobility of mind to put aside the childish hopes and dreams of immaturity; to face life as it really is, in place of imagining it as we should wish it to be. Too long have men refused to face the central circumstance of its inalienable suffering. He who would find the Truth must first face what of Truth lies to his hand.

This, then, is in its essence what we mean by the Buddhist life; to see life clearly and to see it whole. To grasp the underlying terror of its all, and still, nobly, to push on undismayed; to live, not pettily or meanly in our life on earth, but of full-fixed high purpose, noble, Aryan, loving and compassionate, great.

Understanding this, we Buddhists of the West believe that in this great Aryan Religion is to be found the reconciliation between the seemingly irreconcilable and antagonistic viewpoints of Materialism and of Idealism. And not only this, but that, when its essential teaching becomes better known, it will be the means of ending most of those interminable and futile controversies which occupy so much time and energy in these days of earnest doubt and questioning and of honest and eager inquiry. The solutions which satisfied our forefathers do not satisfy us their descendants, though it is true that they wrought as well as they knew how. Having now access to the achievements of the ancient founders of our Race in the intellectual-religious, or to use a word most familiar, in the " spiritual "realm," we believe that these problems were satisfactorily solved more than two thousand years ago. Nay more, that these are the very solutions which the Western World is seeking.

The transcendent genius of the gifted Aryan Race has, in the last short century, marvellously altered all the conditions of human life through its direction into the field of material science and its applications. Through the spirit of self-surrender to law, to the concept of the state, the Romans became masters of so large an area of the world known to them. In the realms of art and of philosophy and geometry Greece became the pattern of the world's thought to this day. The same spirit was manifested amongst the Indo-Aryans of the earlier days in the direction of spiritual attainment. In the fertile valleys of the great Indian rivers, in that warm and forcing climate which could yield two, and in some cases three crops from the same soil in a single year, where so little was needed by those hardy Aryan invaders in the way of expenditure of human effort upon such matters as housing and clothing, life afforded far more of leisure and of physical ease than fell to the lot of those later Aryan emigrants who penetrated to the Mediterranean littoral. So it was natural that, in place of turning to the outer, physical and tangible world, which with its harsher climate and conditions demanded the best part of the energies of our own forbears of the Euro-Aryan stocks, Indian thought should have turned rather to the world within; to the world of thought and conscious knowledge which lies behind and within the outer realm of mere sensation; to the world of the causes of those effects which our senses present to us ; to the world of noumena behind the manifest phenomena of life. In a word the peculiar field of Indo-Aryan thought was just Religion, using the term here in its deepest and most fundamental sense.

In that world, that inner, spiritual realm, the Aryan genius achieved conquests no whit less mighty than it was destined to achieve, in later offshoots of the same great race, in the realms of art and discipline and scientific knowledge. By mastery of the physical appetites, by rigid training of the mind, the early Indian saints and sages found the way, centuries before the epoch of the Founder of Buddhism, into that interior world which lies at the back of all this conscious, living, breathing life we know. They found that,just as a man, plunged in some evil dream, may by dint of concentrating such small powers as his mind then has, awaken out of the dream-life into the incomparably more vivid, more real, and more enduring waking life in which we now are functioning; so, by intense interior concentration may be "waken" out of this life we now are living, into an inner life, far more real, incomparably more vivid, than the normal waking consciousness, as this in its turn transcends the dim and haunted consciousness of dreams.

Gaining the mastery of that interior life, they found opened to their mental vision another world, another level, as it were, of being. It is the universe of the mental causes which lie behind the phenomena of the waking life, and which bring these latter into being: even as these in their turn lie behind and bring about the phenomena of the world of dreams. They found that inner world extended in a space so vast that all our universal space seemed but the veriest film upon its surface, subject to time conditioning beyond our waking understanding, lit by another sun, another moon, a Light that glows beyond our waking ken. And, since the mind must ever dramatise, must ever personify the powers which move it into functioning, they found that universe of force behind all matter was peopled, just as it peoples for us this world or that dim universe of dreams below. The hidden potencies of life, of nature that there beat upon them they dramatised, in their return to waking consciousness, as vast aeonian beings, Gods of the sun and moon, of glowing fire and flowing wave, of rushing air and all-enduring stable earth ; and (oldest of them all and greatest) the God of the all-containing sky, the Space wherein this universal life is held.

Nor were their memories of that universe of power, of force that animates this world of matter which we know, confined to representations in terms of sight alone. Most, indeed, of that immense experience was, on the immeasurable collapse into the waking selfhood, lost to their knowledge in this dim, darkling world. Yet something carried over; and, as a given Seer grew more practised, more frequent in his journeyings into that interior realm, he slowly built, as one might say, a bridge between the consciousnesses. So he came to carry over more and more of his experience in the World of Power. As his mind dramatised into the mighty personalities of the Gods of Nature the greater potencies of life in terms of seeing, in the same way other forces of the inner life took shape in his memories in terms of sound, of hearing. Life's rhythmic powers, building the crystal in the heart of the earth ; setting the leaflets of a plant in just one perfect spiral round its stem; the clashing of the elements in the living fire; the shock and hurtling rush of tempest and of storm. All these, and, mounting higher in the scale of vastitude, the very music of the heavenly orbs themselves; nay, at the back of all the fundamental rhythm of nature, the pulsing surge of the Great Breath of Life itself, he heard in terms of sound, of melody. Some of the greatest of them strove, on their return to normal conscious life, to render into earthly assonance of words some faint, dim memory of those great harmonies of Nature. Thus came into being the earliest of the Indian Scriptures, the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the most wonderful poetry in all the world, each classified as Sruti, "heard"; or as Smriti, "recollected"; according to the fashion whereby it had been carried over from that universe behind the veil of manifested life.

As time rolled on, and the peculiar genius of the Indo-Aryan Race for such high inner attainment developed, the greatest of these keen and ardent minds, meditating in their forest hermitages, found that even that immeasurable awakening to the inner life was in itself only a preliminary stage, only a first step in the tremendous path of spiritual experience behind life's veil. By ever greater-growing powers of the mind; by use of faculties as unknown to the normal man as sight is to the man born blind, they found the way to "waken" out of that vivid flaming conscious life into another beyond, and still another, and another yet again! From those immeasurable heights of consciousness they beheld, in the aeonian time that conditioned them, how every living being, animal, or man, or god, or others yet of which the world has no experience, passed on from one conditioning of life to a new birth, now rising, now falling. Highest of all, they taught, there existed the Brahman, the Paramatman or Highest Soul, which, when time began, emitted all this universal life, and unto which, when time shall end, all beings will return again. So, they taught, it had been forever. The Day of Brahman, the Aeon of the Manifested Life, wherein the One became the many; and, through long and arduous toil, passing from life to life through untold ages, at last the Many would return and be again absorbed into the Oneness. So came about the Night of Brahman, when all that now is evolved would be once more involved in That.

Such was the condition of Indo-Aryan religious thought when he, who was thereafter to be known as the Buddha, the Utterly-awakened One, was born.

And when, after his Great Attainment, he went forth into the world to set forth that saving Truth that he had won, his teaching was so strange, so utterly different from all that had been known of religion even there in religion's very home, that it seems to have sprung up anew from that one mighty mind. True indeed, much that was already known was in a sense embodied in his teaching, but ever with some new understanding, ever with some all-altering change of view. There were, indeed, he taught, those Gods of whom the ancient saints and seers sung. But they, no less than men themselves, were straitly bound upon the whirling wheel of life, were unable to help man to liberation, or even to liberate themselves. There were, indeed, he taught, those inner worlds, one subtler than another, deep after deep of inward spiritual life; and, rightly used, those states could help men to find liberation. But the New Way he taught lay not at all through those successive realms of spiritual life. His Path lay in a new direction altogether, the direction of the giving-up of this Selfhood which all men hold so dear. Not in the union with the Brahman of the ancient teaching lay the Goal, the Great Peace of Nirvana that he taught; for, as the Vedas themselves declared, that Brahman, after all this teeming universal life had once more become involved in It, must yet again, in some incalculable future, emanate yet another universe, and so on to eternity. But the Goal whereto he pointed was the final, ultimate, the very fruition of all life and utterly beyond it; a Final Peace, wherein all self-desire was utterly extinct; so that nevermore would any who had reached to Its incomparable security return to selfhood or to ignorance or pain.

And his own actual teaching was so simple, so obvious, that, like all that is really, greatly, true, one marvels, once one has understood, that one had not thought of it before. It is all summed up by the Great Teacher himself in one simple formula, to which he gave the style of the Four Aryan or Noble Truths. It is a formula which, like all such plain and simple things, seems at first sight to be obvious even to triteness, but which, as the more we study it, reveals ever greater and still vaster deeps, until the mind fails at their profundity; and yet there are deeps beyond.

First comes the Truth of Suffering: how sorrow, pain, lies at the very root of life, is inseparable from it as shadow is inseparable from objects moving in the light. The Second Truth tells of Suffering's Cause: how all this mass of suffering that permeates all life springs from Desire, from self-desire alone, since, lacking some longed-for object of the sense or mind, we cannot win to it; or, having it, we weary of possession; or, still desiring, fear to be deprived of that we so desire. The Third Truth is that of Sorrow's Ceasing: how, when this Self-desire dies out, Suffering too soon finds its end. And Truth the Fourth consists in the Noble Eightfold Path whereby this end may be attained, not, of necessity, in some imagined future life, but, if we but follow this high Path, even here in this life and now. That Path consists of eight members or parts, not, be it understood, successive stages in time, but, as it were, the eight conditionings that together constitute the Path. It is just as an actual road might be said to be composed of the road-metal, the sidewalks, the watershed, the water-channels on each side, and so forth. These eight members together constitute a threefold discipline or training, a discipline of body, of speech and of thought. Each of these members is itself the proper subject of a whole treatise, so much does each separate term convey to the instructed Buddhist. Therefore but little can be given here beyond the bare terms, with an indication of what these involve.

It is characteristic of the teaching of that clear-seeing mind that first amongst the eight we find Right Views. This term implies the training of the mind to see things as they really are; the courageous acceptance of its reality, in place of the belief in some condition we should like. It means, in its initial sense, the intellectual acceptance and comprehension of that view of life as a whole which will be further presented later on; but in its final development (for we must bear in mind that each of these members of the Eightfold Path is in itself a discipline) ; in other terms, a means of growth towards enlightenment. In its final development it involves far more than this, for its full attainment is tantamount to Arhanship, sainthood, full Enlightenment. So, in this deeper sense, it means far more than a mere intellectual grasp and acceptance of certain views ; it means the utter inward Realisation of the truth of that Buddhist world-view. Next comes Right Aspiration: the training of the mind to compassion with all that lives, to the highest and noblest ideals of which we may be capable. Third comes Right Speech: the watching of all our words until we can confine them only to such speech as is loving, noble and true. Fourth comes Right Action: a similar training applied to all our deeds. Fifth is Right Livelihood: the living by some means as can inflict no suffering, and, preferably, by some way of life as shall bring peace and healing in its train. Seventh is Right Strenuousness: the infusing into all our acts, words, thoughts, of all our energies, the putting of all our strength into whatever we may be doing, and doing all things earnestly and at our best. The last two members are styled Right Recollectedness, and Right Concentration or Right Meditation respectively. But these bare terms convey little of all they mean to the instructed Buddhist. Primarily, both refer to the two most important branches of that method of mental culture which the Buddhist regards as of such paramount importance. Right Recollectedness may thus in practice be regarded as consisting in watching all our ordinary thoughts and words and acts impersonally; trying to cast the "self " thought out of each consciousness as it arises, and ever bearing in mind our high aim in life. Right Concentration, as a practice, consists in taking some one object of contemplation and fixing the mind on it alone, with all the mental energy of which we are capable. Such practices, if rightly regulated and guarded from certain dangers by the preliminary practice of Right Recollectedness, result in those successive "awakenings" into the interior spiritual realms of which mention has been made. Thus, provided always that these practices are rightly understood and properly directed, there comes about what may be termed a quickening of the inner being which renders vastly easier the inward, spiritual growth towards selflessness.

Now we must turn once more to the first of these eight members of the Path, Right Understanding of Life, or otherwise Right Views. As these are intimately connected with the whole Buddhist world-view, the Buddhist outlook upon life, they are summed up in what are termed the Three Signata, the three great characteristics of all forms of being enselfed, from the life of the animal to the life of the being in the spiritual worlds. The teaching here is strangely in accordance with the teachings of modem science, as is so much of Buddhism when we come to grasp it rightly. The Three Characteristics are that all possible forms of life are Transitory; that all possible forms of life inhere in Suffering; that all possible forms of life are Unreal, or, in another way of putting it, are destitute of any immortal or eternal principle of Spirit or Soul.

The remarkable parallel between Buddhist thought and some of the more modern phases of scientific thought has been already referred to. Thus, I cannot do better, in support of the first of these three theses, than point to the modern conception of the material universe with which alone our modem science deals. The electron theory shows us all matter as built up of minute electric charges, certain assemblages of which, put together in certain definite ways (ways involving constant internal change, be it noted) constitute the chemical atom. Assemblages of atoms, again subject to constant internal change, constitute the molecules; certain highly-complex molecules united in special ever-changing ways constitute those protein cells which form the basis of all organic life. From the stars that men once deemed immutable and fixed, down to the solid and dead-seeming rocks of the earth, all, science teaches, as Buddhism taught so long ago, is made up of elementary parts involved in constant change. It is not, indeed, the matter itself that we see or touch, but the resultant of this unceasing, kaleidoscopic motion.

Modern biology, again, casts an important and essential sidelight on the old Buddhist doctrine how all this life is involved in pain when it shows us, in its own terms, how irritability (the irritability, be it observed, that results from the constant changefulness) of protoplasm is at the beginning of all organized life. Buddhism, of course, was directed to mankind; it dealt with life in terms of the human perfectible consciousness, not with those lower and rudimentary types of life that modem biology deals with. But if, as science teaches, all sensation, nay, even consciousness itself, is evolved out of that fundamental "irritability" of the humblest organisms, then we can well understand the meaning of the Buddhist teaching, that all life is intimately involved in and enslaved by Suffering. For what the dim irritability is to the amoeba, that is suffering, physical or mental, in the sphere of the higher organisms. So here again we find the strange parallelism between Buddhist and modern thought that has been mentioned.

The last characteristic, denying as it does the existence of an immortal spirit, soul or principle within us, or in any living being howsoever highly developed, is the most difficult of all Buddhist doctrines to set before a Western reader. For the Buddha taught, as did his Hindu predecessors, that all beings pass from life to life. The difference lies here, that whereas the Atma, the Breath or Soul or Spirit, was conceived by the earlier Indian sages to be some very subtle underlying substance which at the body's death passed on to assume some new manifestation, the Buddha taught that what passes over was really only the bundle of life-forces; the Karma or Doing of the man. But, since the Buddhist understands that all that which is now what he terms himself is just that same bundle of forces, it amounts to much the same in practice. In short, whilst the Hindu teaching regarded the being from the static, the Buddhist looked at it from the dynamic aspect; we are, from the Buddhist point of view, our Karma, an eddy, a vortex in the great Ocean of this Universal Life.

Finally, to take the matter at its widest, the Buddhist view of existence like that, again, of modern physical science, is as of a very vast, but yet not infinite mechanism, which is steadily passing to some unimagined but yet attainable goal. Vast as the number of beings, of sentient bundles of life-forces, might be, it still fell short of the infinite. How it came into being or why, were questions the great Teacher deprecated, as having no true answers, or any that our minds could understand. But in every age, in every sphere of life, from time to time the aim of life realizes itself, so to speak, in the appearance of a Buddha, who finds and teaches this old way of selflessness, whereby many enter the path, and pass beyond all life into the Great Peace Beyond. Given only time enough, as the Sutra of the Diamond Cutter puts it: "When the hearts of all beings shall have become in harmony with the heart of all the Buddhas, there shall not remain one speck of dust that now is but shall have entered into Peace for evermore."

ANANDA M.