That the problem has not yet been even approximately solved is my sincere conviction. I have read many treatises on Buddhism; but I have yet to find the writer who, when expounding the philosophy (as distinguished from the ethical system) of Buddha, teaches "as one having authority and not as the Scribes." The indisputable fact that Buddha himself kept silence with regard to the ultimate realities and ultimate issues of life, shows that the task of interpreting his creed is one for "criticism" (in the widest and deepest sense of the word) rather than for "scholarship,"--for judgment, the judgment that enables a man to make use of the learning of others, rather than for learning as such. One of my objects in writing this book has been to vindicate the right of the "layman" to explore a region which the linguistic expert has hitherto been allowed to regard as his private preserve. Should any other "layman" feel disposed to follow my example, he may start on his enterprise with the full assurance that the field before him is as open as it is wide.

One or two words of warning I may perhaps be allowed to offer him. He will do well to suggest to himself at the outset that the Western way of looking at things may not be the only way which is compatible with sanity, that the Western standard of reality may not be the final standard, that the world which is encircled by the horizon of Western thought may not be the whole Universe. The student of Buddhism who is bound, hand and foot, by the quasi-philosophical prejudices of the Western mind, will be unable to survey his subject from any Eastern standpoint, or to approach it along the line of Eastern thought. This fundamental disability will be fatal to his enterprise. There is a special reason why the student of Buddhism should be able (on occasion) to look at things from Eastern standpoints, and to enter with sympathy into Eastern modes and habits of thought. The teaching of Buddha can in no wise be dissociated from the master current of ancient Indian thought. The dominant philosophy of ancient India was a spiritual idealism of a singularly pure and exalted type, which found its truest expression in those Vedic treatises known as the Upanishads. The great teacher is always a reformer as well as an innovator; and his work is, in part at least, an attempt to return to a high level which had been won and then lost. Whether Buddha did or did not lead men back (by a path of his own) from the comparatively low levels of ceremonialism and asceticism to the sublimely high level of thought and aspiration which had been reached in the Upanishads is, perhaps, an open question. But