Section XV of the Dhammapada is the Buddhist analogue of the Beatitudes of Jesus, and, as an ideal of the Happy Life, ranks high indeed.

It is an ideal of kindliness and serenity, of peace and unity, which is very winsome: it would be hard to pick a quarrel with the exponents of such a life!

To the Christian it seems none the less an ideal more passive and stoical, less loving and mystical than that of Jesus; and yet we cannot but rejoice that the East has had this ideal so long before it. To the Karma-haunted millions of India it has shone with a steady and alluring radiance, in time past more potent than to-day, but even now embedded in their subconsciousness.

Its calm and cool attractiveness is beautifully

symbolised in the poetic imagery of the Dhammapada:

"The good man shines like the moon escaped from clouds, he is pure as some unruffled lake." (95.)

[paragraph continues] And the company of such a leader with his disciples is

"As the moon following the path of the stars." (208.)

Another lovely moonlit scene embodies and symbolises the spirit of this ideal:

The Buddha's six chief disciples are in a park, and as they sit in the tropical moonlight they ask one another what quality in the Bhikkhu could add to the beauty of the scene. Amongst the answers are three which throw light upon the meaning of Arahatship:

"The peace and insight of moral victory," says one,
"The joy and insight of Emancipation," says another;

[paragraph continues] and Sariputta wins the Master's approval by his reply:

"When a Bhikkhu masters his heart (cittam) and does not let it master him."

"Hear from me," says Gautama. "Hear from me what kind of Bhikkhu could add a lustre to the wood; one who, sitting serene and controlled, resolves: "Till my heart is freed from the ferments of lust I shall not quit my seat." [**]

This scene is most suggestive, for it throws

into strong contrast Buddhist and Christian Ethics, and further it leads us into the heart of a vexed and difficult problem.

With regard to the first point, it is sufficient to say here that Buddhism teaches a rigorous and calm self-mastery, Christianity demands a passionate self-surrender.

With regard to the second, we may state the problem thus: Is Nirvana a social ideal? Or is it an ideal of solitude and forgetfulness? The answer seems to be that Buddhism holds out no promise of the reunion of emancipated "souls"; Nirvana is the cessation of all personal existence: yet the experience of the peace and joy of Noble Companionship--such companionship and communion of soul as is here depicted--is too good not to be desired. And this desire has tinged the ideal picture of the Beyond: in spite of metaphysics the ethical, asserts itself