"Home have I left; for I have left my world!
Child have I left, and all my cherished herds!
Lust have I left, and Ill-will too is gone,
And Ignorance have I put far from me;
Craving and root of craving overpowered,
Cool am I now, knowing Nibbana's peace."
Thera-gatha, 18.
(MRS. RHYS DAVIDS' Translation.)

Its earnestness:

"Not for sleep is the star-spangled night, but for work to him who is wise."

Thera-gatha, 192.

"When disease assailed my body, then my mind awoke and cried, "The sickness is upon me! It is high time to play the man."

Ibid., 30.

"Happy freedom! Happy freedom! Good it is to be freed from three crooked things, from scythe and plough and hoe. There they stand; no use have I for them! Let me meditate again and again; let me lead the strenuous life (of thought)."

Ibid., 43.

"Of yore my mind would wander whither caprice and desire led it. To-day I hold it in check as the mahout can hold with his prod the elephant in rut."

Ibid., 76.

"They who have lost their foothold fall. But they can, if they will, arise again and yet again. I have won up the steep slope: loving what is lovely I have easily attained."

Ibid., 62.

APPENDIX

THE BUDDHIST IDEAL

(ARAHATSHIP OR NIRVaNA)

AS DEPICTED IN THE DHAMMAPADA

THE "ambrosial (or deathless) path," Nirvana, is the prize which these stanzas hold out to the strenuous: this is at once the goal of effort and its cessation, a calm haven after strenuous voyaging. [**] The seer speaks with a quiet rapture and a serene assurance which convince us as we read, that whether it is Gautama himself who speaks, or whether it is the collective voice of his followers, here is in any case the utterance of a real experience of the soul. Can it be that these men entered behind the veil of sense and time, and that their voices ring down the ages from that mysterious Beyond to which the mystics of all ages have aspired?

We cannot say; yet it is very clear that if the metaphysical Nirvana is a fantasy, the ethical Nirvana is real enough: and Gautama was above all things an ethical teacher. That

we shall understand Nirvana from a perusal of those pages is not likely; that it will attract Western thinkers is not wholly to be desired; but we can at least study the ethical experience of which Nirvana is but the description and the attempted explanation: and a grasp of what Arahatship means is essential to the understanding of Buddhism. The Arahat is one who, through obedience to the preaching of Buddha, has reached that calm state when the will no longer struggles, but is unified and at rest.