noble, worthy ideals, and our duties of life are thereby discharged. Pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows are merely accidents of life. They do not enter into its essential fabric. And consequently they are ignored by the Buddhists. They are not taken into any serious consideration in the determination or selection of duties of life.

Therefore, let us work, let us develop all our possibilities; not for ourselves, but for our fellow-creatures. Let us be enlightened in our efforts, let us strive after the general welfare of humanity and indeed of all creations. We are born here to do certain things. Life may be misery or not; it concerns us not; let us do what we have to do. We are not here wholly alone, we are not the center of the universe, everything is not coming to us. But our existence is conditioned. The fact that we are here at all is due to our mutual support and dependence. We cannot save ourselves unless others are saved. We cannot advance unless the general progress is assured. We must help one another, we must abandon our vulgar ego-centric ideas, we must expand ourselves so that the entire universe is identified with us, and so that our interests are those of humanity. It is therefore most evident that the assertion of the self-will and the giving way to the clamors of the ego-soul is against the reason of life. The attainment of Nirvana and the manifestation of the Buddhist life is possible

only through the denial of selfhood and through the united labor of all our brother creatures.

This is the doctrine proclaimed by the Buddha after many years of profound meditation on the bank of the Ganges, and constitutes the essence of the Wheel of the Good Law which has been in fact revolving ever since the dawn of sentiency.

The statements above made are usually put down in formula and called the Fourfold Noble Truth; viz., (1) Life is suffering, (2) There is cause for it, which is ignorance, (3) Nirvana, which transcends pain and pleasure, is the goal of our life, and (4) To reach it the moral laws must be put into practice.

Footnotes

^110:1 As for what is the practical ethics of Buddhism, read the article entitled "Buddhist Ethics." (<page 69>.)