SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM 
103
but here I have nothing to do with what 
is 
uncertain.1 
There is an excellent tes t for the value of 
any passage in a Buddhist book.  We are, I 
think, justified in discarding passages which 
are clearly Oriental fiction, jus t as  m odern 
criticism, however secretly Theistic, discards 
the Story  of Hasisadra or of Noah. 
 In 
justice to Buddhism, let us not 
charge  
its Scripture with the Sisy
phean task of 
seriously upholding the literal interpreta-
tion of obviously  fantastic passages. 2  May 
our Buddhist zealots be warned by  the fate 
of old-fashioned English orthodoxy
!  But 
when Buddhism condescends to be vulgarly 
scientific; to observe, to classify , to think ;  
I conceive we may take the matter seriously, 
and accord a reas onable investigation to its  
assertions.  Examples of s uch s uccinctness 
and clarity may be found in The Four 
 
Noble Truths  ; The Three Characteris tics ; 
The Ten F etters; and there is
 clearly a 
definite theory in the idea of Karm a.  Such 
ideas are bas ic, and are as  a thread on which 
 
1 See Huxley’s c lassical exam ple of  the horse, 
zebra and centaur. 
2 Sim ilarly, wher e Buddhist par
ables are  
of a m
ystical nature, where 
a complicated 
symbolism of num bers (for example) is intended 
to shadow a tr
uth, we m
ust discar d them .   
My experience of  m ysticism is som ewhat large; 
its final dictum  is that 
the parable x ma y b e 
equated to a, b, c, d . . . 
z by  six- and-twenty 
different per sons, or  by  one per son in six- and-
twenty differ ent m oods.  E
ven had 
we a  
strong traditional explanation I should m
ain- 
tain m y position.   T he weapons of the Higher 
Criticism, supplem ented by  Common Sense,  
are perfectly valid and inevitably destructive 
against any such structur
e.  But I am
 surely  
in danger  of becom
ing r idiculous in writing  
thus to the scientific wo
rld.  Wh
at I 
really  
wish to show is that one ned not look for
 all the 
Buddhist fancy dishes to the per il of the scientific 
digestion.  And by
 a 
backhanded str oke I   
wish to im
press as deeply
 as 
possible upon  
my Buddhist friends that too m
uch zeal for 
 
the accidentals of  our religion will surely 
result  
in the overwhelm
ing of its essentials 
in the  
tide of justly scornful 
or justly casuistic criti-
cism.—A. C. 
the beads of Arabian-Night-Entertainment 
are strung.1 
I propose therefore to deal with these and 
some other minor points of the Buddhist 
metaphysis, and trace out their s
cientific 
analogies, or, as I hope to show, more often 
identities. 
First then let us
 exam ine that great 
Summary of the Buddhist Faith, the Four 
Noble Truths. 
III. 
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS. 
(1) S ORROW.—Existence is Sorrow.  T his 
means that “no known form of Existence is 
seperable from Sorrow.”  This truth is stated 
by Huxley , almost in so many
 words, in 
Evolution and Ethics.  “It was no less plain 
to some of these antique philosophers than 
to the fathers of modern philosophy
 that 
suffering is the badge of all the tribe 
 
of sentient things; that it is  no accidental 
accompaniment, but an essential constituent 
of the Cosm ic Process.”  And in the 
same 
essay, though he is disposed to 
deny more 
than the rudiments of consciousness to the 
lower form s of life, he is quite clear 
that 
pain varies directly  (to put it loosely) with 
the degree of consciousness.  Cf. also 
“Animal Automatism,” pp. 236-237. 
(2) S ORROW’S CAUSE.—The caus e of 
sorrow is desire.  I take desire here 
to 
include such a phenomenon as the tendency 
of two molecules of hy drogen and chlorine 
to com bine under certain conditions. 
 If 
death be painful to m e, it is presum ably so 
to a m olecule ; if we represent one opera-
tion as pleasant, the converse is presumably  
painful.  Though I am not conscious of the 
individual pain of the countless 
deaths in-
volved in this my act of writin, it m ay be 
there.  And what I call “ fatigue” may be the 
echo in my  central consciousness of the 
 
1 See Prof. Rhys Davids on the “Jataka.”