174 THE REV. R. COLLINS, ON 



of view ? What is virtue from his point of view ? Now, if we 

 enter into those points, wo find that his sin is very often no sin to 

 us, his virtue is no virtue to us and his right conduct would be 

 wrong conduct to us. One of the very first propositions he lays 

 down as to right conduct would bring the human race to extinction 

 in one generation, and so with regard to other points. 



Now, with regard to Buddha's teaching, the starting point, as 

 1 understand it, is to be found in the Upanishads. Buddha believed 

 that the world was as bad as it could possibly be, that suffering 

 was the predominant feature of the world and the universe, and 

 that the great thing that man had to do was to find out a way by 

 Avhich suft'ei'ing could be destroyed ; and when he discovered, as he 

 believed he did discover, the right way by which this could be 

 accomplished, he held that suffering was the result of desire, of 

 action and of ignorance ; but the starting point is, really, suffering, 

 and if we care to know that these — desire, action, and ignorance — 

 are the cause of suffering, then we .start in the right way for 

 the destruction of suffering : and undoubtedly he inade one of the 

 great points of his argument, that existence, in any fornr what- 

 ever, is the cause of suffering, just as he did desire, action and 

 ignorance. 



There is another matter I will say a word on, and that is with 

 regard to the literature referred to on the last page but two of the 

 paper. 



" Many of the legends of Buddha's life have entered the Buddhist 

 accounts we know not how or when. We can only trace up to 

 Buddha those methods on which he taught his band of ascetics 

 after he himself had become an ascetic. He claims to have 

 reached his conclusions himself. He certainly claims no divine 

 power. The various legends of his divine birth ; the adoration of 

 Asita (of which there are several different versions) ; the 

 temptation of Milra ; the homage paid to him by various divine 

 beings ; his miracles ; are entirely inconsistent with the real 

 history of Buddha. They appear only, for the most part, in 

 later books, some of them wi'itten probably hundreds of years 

 after Buddha's death." 



T would say, not some of the books but all were written 

 hundreds of years after the death of Buddha. There is not a 

 single book that goes back to within 300 or 400 years of the 

 death of Buddha. Then some of them as you will also see 

 from another part of the lecture, were written as late as the 

 13th certui'y of the Christian Era. I should have liked to have 



