THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 65 



From this it may be seen that Buddhism is but another name 

 for pessimism of life and asceticism. Its object is to remove the 

 misery resulting not only from bodily action but also from false 

 knowledge. This view of human life is arrived at by the Buddhist 

 from the following reasoning : As birth is necessarily followed by 

 age, misery, and death, this individual existence can be only an 

 expression of misfortune or punishment. If such, then life must 

 have had some previous existence whose condition was responsible 

 for the misery suffered by the individual in the present life. Thus 

 the Buddhist has a remarkable chain of reasoning by which, from the 

 basis of ignorance, he traces the conscious individuality of this life ; 

 from individuality, birth ; from birth, decay ; and from decay, death. 

 But, recognizing this life as a life of retribution only, the Budd- 

 hist at once must claim for all forms of earthly life a previous exist- 

 ence. This leads to the doctrine of transmigration, the great 

 central principle of the Buddhist faith. Personal life is but the 

 revolution of a wheel, which carries us from the present life into the 

 unseen world, and vice versa. To this wheel all individual exist- 

 ence, whether of this or the unseen world, is bound, and its cease- 

 less revolutions are but the expression of the various rewards and 

 punishments incident to personal existence. To teach man how to 

 escape from this wheel of life and death is the object of the Budd- 

 hist faith. To do this we must lose our personal identity, must 

 enter a state where thought shall cease to be our thought, and where 

 life shall, as it were, cease to live, — a state without condition and 

 without attribute. This state is the Nirvana, or the real heaven of 

 Buddhism. Situated without the revolution of the wheel of personal 

 existence, it contains only what is permanent and enduring. To 

 arrive at this the soul must renounce the world of the flesh and 

 purify itself by constant meditation, the real saviour of the system. 



From this it may be seen that the basis of this doctrine is 

 metaphysical and transcendental. 



Although the speculative philosophy of the Buddhists, in its in- 

 troduction into Chinese life, suffered much from its contact with the 

 materialism of Chinese thought, still the benefits which it has con- 

 ferred on the national character are great and most apparent. Both 

 the native forms of belief had busied themselves only with the physi- 

 cal, the practical and the seen. No account was taken of these 



