developed and perfected. When this material garment wears out after a long use, we throw it away and put on a new one and appear in the same laboratory (and not anywhere else, not even in Heaven, let me remind you) as our own successors. We examine what our former lives have accomplished and apply all our moral and spiritual energy to the furtherance and perfection of the karma. The doctrine that the Buddha was able to reach his ideal eminence after his untiring practice of the six virtues of perfection (paramitas)} throughout his innumerable lives since the dawn of consciousness, is no more than the Buddhist conception of immortality and of the eternal striving after ideals. Let us, therefore, go not anywhere else after death even if an indulging benefactor should attempt to persuade us to join his celestial hosts; but let us remain in this universe, let the karma we have accumulated here bear its fruit and be brought to a happy consummation; for we are not strong enough to stand the grave charge to be preferred by posterity to the effect that we have scattered all our precious ancestral legacy to the four winds.

Footnotes

^53:1 Read before Green Acre Fellowship, Washington, D. C., April, 1906.

^61:1 (1) Charity, (2) Observation of Moral Precepts, (3) Meekness, (4) Energy, (5) Meditation, (6) Wisdom.