150. A citadel of bones. There are occasional gleams of grim humour in the Buddhist books: the following story illustrates both the "law of apperception" and the Buddhist attitude to the body. The hermit Maha-Tissa was walking near Anuradhapura meditating upon the transiency of life. A woman who had quarrelled with her husband passed him, gaily dressed and bejewelled, and smiled at him, showing her pearly teeth. When the husband, who was in pursuit, came up with him he called to him: "Reverend Sir, did you see a woman pass this way?" "I saw only a skeleton," replied the sage; "whether it was man or woman I know not" (Visuddhi-Maggai).

151. Cf. "My words shall never pass away."

152. Like the ox. So the prophet Amos addresses the fat and sensual women of his day: "Ye kine of Bashan" (Amos iv, 1): "massive in body but small in mind " (c f. Deut. xxxii, 15).

153, 154. These famous words are held by Buddhists to have been those uttered by Gautama at the moment of enlightenment.

The allegory that underlies them is this: The Builder is Desire (Tanha) the cause of rebirth: the seeker tried long to find this cause; at the moment of his enlightenment it flashed into his mind, "If desire be dead, then there is nothing to bind man to the wheel of existence." The Builder causes the body to be built: its "corner-stone" (or ridgepole) is ignorance (avijja), and its "beams" are bad states of consciousness.

Admirably rendered by Sir Edwin Arnold:

"Many a house of life
Hath held me--seeking ever him who wrought
These prisons of the senses, sorrow-fraught;
Sore was my ceaseless strife.
But now,
Thou Builder of this tabernacle--Thou!

[paragraph continues] I know Thee! Never shall Thou build again
These walls of pain,
Nor raise the roof-tree of deceits; nor lay
Fresh rafters on the clay;
Broken Thy house is, and the ridge-pole split!
Delusion fashioned it !
Safe pass I them--deliverance to obtain."

155. Cf. "Like a pelican of the wilderness" (Ps. cii, 6).

157. This is a practice enjoined in the Books: the passage may mean also "for one of the three periods of life."

158. Cf. Matt. vii, 1-5: "Judge not, that ye be not judged," etc.

164. Bears fruit ...It dies down after flowering.

166. The hedonistic note in Buddhism cannot be denied: "Ethics," says Dr. Martineau, "must either perfect themselves in religion, or disintegrate themselves in hedonism." Buddhist ethics, seeing no great social purpose being worked out in the world, fails to reconcile the claims of self-culture and benevolence, falling back upon the monastic compromise that in the long run self-culture is the highest benevolence. (Cf. Introduction, p. 14)