BUDDHIST ESSAYS

The author reveals that the following essays contain nothing new or original concerning Buddhism, but they may perhaps serve to render easier the understanding of some socalled obscure points in the teaching of the Buddha. What claim ? if any ? this work may have to superiority over many others upon the same subject, rests in this ? that it is the outcome, not only of the study of books, but also of personal intercourse with native scholars both in Ceylon and Burma. Buddhism, that wonderful teaching which declares life to be sorrow and yet is free from pessimism; which apparently inculcates the profoundest egoism and yet is charged with the loftiest morality; which denies the ” I,” the soul, and yet teaches absolute responsibility for their own deeds through rebirth; which is without God or faith or prayer and yet offers the most certain salvation, ? this wonderful teaching was founded by Gautama, of the aristocratic Sakya clan ? the “proud Sakyas.” He saw and felt that all life was sorrow, and, pained and disgusted, “blackhaired, in the bloom of youth,” he left his father’s palace as a mendicant, in order that by religious exercises and mortifications he might find salvation from the universal sorrow. The horrors of disease, old age, and death all at once burst upon his sight. It was with him as with some traveller by night who believes himself in the midst of a beautiful landscape. So far as has appeared necessary to a full understanding of the text, references in the original tongue have been added, but as the book is designed for the lay reader alone, no particular effort has been made to meet the demands of an exacting scholarship. One reproach, however, may possibly be brought against it ? that it abounds in repetitions ? but the cause of this is to be found in the specific character of the Buddha’s thought, which is no mere picture, but a genuine product of nature existing, as it were, in three dimensions. It was originally published in 1908.