The Sword of Song

SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM 104 shriek of a peripheral anguish. Here we leave the dom ain of fact; but at leas t 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.1 The existence of thes e desires, or rather necessities, which I realise to be m ine, 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) S ORROW’S CEASING.—The ces sation of desire is the cessation of sorrow. This is a simple logical inference form the second Truth, and needs no comment. (4) T HE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH.— There is a way , to be cons idered 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 Cosm os; and, in particular, to man.2 IV. THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS. The Three Characteris tics (which we may predicate of all known existing things: (a) Change. Anikka. (b) Sorrow. Dukkha. (c) Absence of an Ego. Anatta. 1 Change is the great enem y, the im mediate cause of pain. Unable to arrest it, I slo w the process, and render it tem porarily painless, by eating. T his is a concession to weakness, no doubt, in one sense. Do I eat r eally in or der to check change, or to m aintain m y ego- consciousness? Change I desire, for my present condition is sorrow. I really desire the im- possible; completely to retain m y present egoity with all its conditions reversed.—A. C. 2 For an able and luminous exposition of “The Four Noble T ruths” I r efer the r eader to the pam phlet bearing that title by by old friend Bikkhu 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 d ip his foot twice into the sam e water, so no man can, with exactnes s, affirm of any thing in the sensible world that it is. As he utters t he words, nay, as he thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the pres ent 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 e very 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 com batants 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 mo des of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are com petent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its impermenance. It as sumes 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 adm irable s ummary of the Buddhist doctrine. (b) 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 B erkeley certainly never meant to go—a curious parallel fulfilm ent of Christ’s curse against Peter (John xxi.). The Bishop demolishes the idea of a substratum of matter, and