Collected Works (Vol. II)

246 SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM shriek of a peripheral anguish. Here we leave the domain of fact; but at least as far our knowledge extends, all or nearly all the operations of Nature are vanity and vexation of spirit. Consider food, the desire for which periodically arises in all conscious beings.! The existence of these desires, or rather necessities, which I realise to be mine, is unpleasant. It is this desire inherent in me for continued consciousness that is responsible for it all, and this leads us to the Third Noble Truth. (3) SoRROW’S CEASING.—The cessation of desire is the cessation of sorrow, This is a simple logical inference from the second Truth, and needs no comment. (4) THE NosLeE EIGHTFOLD ParH.— There f a way, to be considered later, of realising the Third Truth. But we must, before we can perceive its possibility on the one hand, or its necessity on the other, form a clear idea of what are the Buddhist tenets with regard to the Cosmos; and, in particular, to man.? IV. THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS. The Three Characteristics (which we may predicate of all known existing things): (a) Change. Anikka. (6) Sorrow. Dukkha. (c) Absence of an Ego. Anatta. 1 Change is the great enemy, the immediate cause of pain. Unable to arrest it, I slow the process, and render it temporarily painless, by eating. This is a concession to weakness, no doubt, in one sense. Do I eat really in order to check change, or to maintain my ego- consciousness? Changel desire, for my present condition is Sorrow. I really desire the im- possible ; completely to retain my present egoity with all its conditions reversed.—A. C. 2 For an able and luminous exposition of ‘« The Four Noble Truths” I refer the reader to the pamphlet bearing that title by my old friend Bhikkhu Ananda Maitriya, published by the Buddhasasana Samagama, 1 Pagoda Road, Rangoon.—A. C. This is the Buddhist Assertion. What does Science say? (a) Huxley, ‘‘ Evolution and Ethics” : ‘* As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world that it is. As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has become the past; the ‘is’ should be ‘ was.’ And the more we learn of the nature of things the more evident is it that what we call rest is only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at-every moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces, a scene of strife, in which all the combatants fall in turn. What is true of each part is true of the whole. Natural knowledge tends more and more to the conclusion that ‘‘all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth” are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of evolution, from ‘nebulous potentiality, through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite, through all varieties of matter ; through infinite diversities of' life and thought, possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much of a permanent entity as of a changeful process, in which naught endures save the flow of energy and the rational order which pervades it.” This is an admirable summary of the Buddhist doctrine. (6) See above on the First Noble Truth. _(c) This is the grand position which Buddha carried against the Hindu philosophers. In our own country it is the argument of Hume, following Berkeley to a place where Berkeley certainly never meant to go—a curious parallel fulfilment of Christ’s curse against Peter (John xxi.). The Bishop demolishes the idea of a substratum of matter, and