There is no part of Buddha's teaching in which his wisdom shines out more clearly than in this. At first one might feel disposed to think that Right Action was everything. Buddha does not think so. Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Living may perhaps be grouped together under the general head of Right Conduct; but there are other elements of Righteousness which Buddha seems to regard as not less important than these, to wit, Right Faith, Right Resolve, Right Effort, Right Thought, Right Self-Concentration. In other words, Buddha lays as much stress on the inward as on the outward side of morality; and he would have us realize that conduct, when divorced from faith and thought and purpose, is worth nothing. Under the Jewish Law--at any rate in the later developments of legalism--correct action was regarded

as the one thing needful. The consequences of this assumption were disastrous in the extreme. A mechanical and quasi-material conception of life and duty was introduced into the very heart of religion and morality; and spiritual freedom was crushed out by an ever-growing burden of narrow, rigid, and despotic rules. Buddha, like other moral teachers, found it necessary to give men rules for the conduct of life; but not only did he make his rules as few, as simple, and as comprehensive as possible, but by associating faith, thought, and purpose with speech and action, by impressing on his disciples that the inward side of conduct counts for at least as much as the outward, he provided against that miserable pullulation of trivial rules, which is sure to arise whenever correct action is regarded as an end in itself; and in doing so he shielded spiritual freedom from the most oppressive and most deadly form of constraint.

Nevertheless, when we have once realized that the inward side of action--the inward approaches to it and the inward consequences of it--is to the full as real and as significant as the outward, we may safely affirm, what Buddha would not have denied, that Right Conduct is the aspect of Righteousness which concerns us most. What we do, besides being the outward and visible sign of our inward and spiritual state, reacts, naturally and necessarily, on what we are, and so moulds our character and controls our destiny--for "character is destiny"--both in this and in future earth-lives. That being so, and conduct being the aspect of a man's general bearing for which directions are

at once most needed and most easy to give, it is not to be wondered at that Buddha should have thought it necessary to formulate moral rules for the guidance of his followers,--men who were presumably ignorant and unenlightened (for his message was addressed to all men) and therefore in need of some measure of ethical direction.