The great question of the retribution that waits on human actions had been brought solemnly before the Asiatic world by the impressive fall of the Babylonian Empire, before both Asia and Europe, during the lifetime almost of S'akyamuni himself, by the overthrow of Xerxes at Marathon and Salamis. The Greek theologian-poet Aeschylus treated of this theme in his "Eumenides," and again in his tragedy of the "Persians." The prophet of the Captivity, Ezekiel, had been proclaiming to his countrymen (Ezek. xviii.) a new law of retribution. Each soul, said the prophet, should bear its own burdens; there should be no more reason to say in Israel, "the fathers had eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth had been

set on edge." We shall also do well to remember that the deutero-Isaiah and Ezekiel had both insisted on the value and benefit of the sabbath day, and that a fresh impetus had been given to the moral law by the labours of Ezra, the reviser of Holy Scripture (Isa. lvi. 6, 7; Ezek. xx. 12, etc., xviii. 2, etc.; Deut. viii. 12; Ps. cxix.).

What S'akyamuni taught was this: the universal existence of Pain (and Pain must be taken in its widest sense); the root of Pain, which is the Lust that is in the human heart; the end to be attained, which is the Destruction of Desire; and the way to obtain it. Desire, Karma, the wheel of Life and Death: the quenching of Desire, the Destruction of Karma, the Peace of Nirvana. Karma is no Nemesis, such as in Aeschylus pursues the unjust and the slayer. Nemesis is vengeful, seems to be given to wrath, and to be guided by anger; Nemesis, to men's eyes, is fitful, irregular, and therefore unjust. Karma, as S'akyamuni saw it, is a universal law, working quietly and steadily along a twelve-fold chain of causation, and binding its victim to the ever-revolving wheel of Life and Death. It works unobtrusively, but surely; yet it can be broken. There is what S'akyamuni calls a noble Eight-fold Path, of right views, right aims, right actions, etc., which leads in time to the destruction of evil Karma by the quenching of Desire, and it seems to have been S'akyamuni's life-work to instil into his hearers the way of the Noble Path, which alone can lead to emancipation. Of philosophy he spoke but little; the so-called Philosophy of Buddhism was a later product.