section II

And what shall we say of his system as religion? The student of these pages will find himself in a moonlit world, beautiful yet cold:

"A common greyness silvers everything."

[paragraph continues] Here is no "sunset touch," no mystic hint of Him "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns"; our hearts are not stirred as we read by any assurance of the reality of the Unseen.

Mysticism in short finds no entrance here--a fact which makes the Dhammapada almost unique amongst the great things of religious literature. Instead we find "common sense" supreme, mathematical, and a little cold, yet confident of itself and of its firm grasp of all the factors in life's equation. Instead of passion and romance we shall find self-mastery and a half-humorous sweet reasonableness. Everywhere Law is at work, and there is nothing besides: no hint of whence law emanates, of how it works, or why. These are questions alike

unprofitable and unanswerable. It is enough, the Buddha would say, that the world makes for righteousness, that sin is punished, and that goodness does not go unrewarded. "As you sow, so shall you reap." Happiness is the bloom upon virtue; sorrow is the blight upon sin: and this is the ultimate motive to the strenuous life.

"Is such a world worth while?" asks full-blooded Youth. "And is a calm like this enough?" "The world," comes the serene answer, "is worth nothing at all: it has no reality and no purpose, save that of retribution: man's only happiness is to escape. The calm and peaceful frame of mind is the only happy one, the promise of a Rest hereafter, ineffable and placid: to this man can and must attain."

K. J. S.

TRINITY COLLEGE, KANDY.
Eastertide, 1912.

Footnotes

^13:* Bouddhisme, p. 70.

^15:* Dr. J. Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 329.

^15:+ Tibetan Buddhism illustrates these three cardinal vices by pictures of the cock (lust), the snake (anger), and the hog (stupidity).

NOTE