30 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad bnt 

 thinking makes it so. If the cosmos "is just and of our pleasant 

 vices makes instruments to scourge us/' it would seem that the 

 only way to escape from our heritage of evil is to destroy that 

 fountain of desire whence our vices flow ; to refuse any longer to 

 be the instruments of the evolutionary process and withdraw from 

 the struggle for existence. If the karma is modifiable by self- 

 discipline, if its coarser desires, one after another, can be extin- 

 guished, the ultimate fundamental desire of self-assertion, or the 

 desire to be, may also be destroyed.* Then the bubble of illusion 

 will burst, and the freed individual "Atman '' will lose itself in 

 the universal " Brahma." 



Such seems to have been the pre-Buddhistic conception of sal- 

 vation and of the way to be followed by those who would attain 

 thereto. No more thorough mortification of the flesh has ever 

 been attempted than that achieved by the Indian ascetic ancho- 

 rite ; no later monachism. has so nearly succeeded in reducing the 

 human mind to that condition of impassive Q-wasi-somnambulism 

 which, but for its acknowledged holiness, might run the risk of 

 being confounded with idiocy. 



And this salvation, it will be observed, was to be attained 

 through knowledge, and by action based on that knowledge; just 

 as the experimenter, who would obtain a certain physical or 

 chemical result, must have a knowledge of the natural laws in- 

 volved and the persistent disciplined will adequate to carry out 

 all the various operations required. The sujjernatural, in our 

 sense of the term, was entirely excluded. There was no external 

 power which could affect the sequence of cause and effect which 

 gives rise to karma ; none but the will of the subject of the karma 

 which could put an end to it. 



Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the remarkable 

 theory of which I have endeavored to give a reasoned outline. It 



* " It is interesting to notice that the very point which is the weakness of the theory 

 the supposed concentration of the effect of the Karma in one new being presented itself to 

 the early Buddhists themselves as a difficulty. They avoided it, partly by explaining that it 

 was a particular thirst in the creature dying (a craving, Tanha, which plays otherwise a 

 great part in the Buddhist theory) which actually caused the birth of the new individual 

 who was to inherit the Karma of the former one. But, how this took place, how the crav- 

 ing desire produced this effect, was acknowledged to be a mystery patent only to Buddha." 

 (Rhys Davids, Ilibbert Lectures, p. 95.) 



Among the many parallelisms of Stoicism and Buddhism, it is curious to find one for 

 this Tanha, "thirst," or "craving desire" for life. Seneca writes (Epist. l.xxvi, 18): "Si 

 enim ullum aliud est bonum quam honestum, sequetur nos aviditas vitce aviditas rerum 

 vitam instruentium : quod est intolerabile infinitum, vagum," [Besides, was there any 

 other good than what is right and fit, we should be persecuted with the desire of life, and 

 an insatiable hankering after all the requisites thereto, which is intolerable, infinite, vague. 

 MorelVs translation.^ 



