The Sword of Song

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.”