THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING
cackling over the future like hens over a china egg, and soon
they would be back at the old game of counting their chickens
before they were hatched. He also must have seen, that if he
postulated a God, or First Cause, every unfledged rationalist
in Pataliputta would cry, ‘Oh, but what a God, what a wicked
God yours must be to allow all this sorrow you talk of . . .
now look at mine . . .” little seeing that sorrow was just the
same with the idea of God as without it, and that all was
indeed Moha or MAaya—both God and No-God, Sorrow and
Joy.
But Buddha being a practical physician, though he knew
sorrow to be but a form of thought, was most careful in keep-
ing it as real a calamity as he could; for he well saw, that if
he could only get people to concentrate upon Sorrow and its
Causes, that the end could not be far off, of both Sorrow and
Joy; but, if they began to speculate on its illusiveness, this
happy deliverance would always remain distant. His business
upon Earth was entirely a practical and exoteric one, in no
way mystical; it was rational not emotional, catholic and
not secret.
What then is the Cause of Sorrow? and the answer given
by Gotama is: Karma or Action, which when once completed
becomes latent and static, and according to how it was accom-
plished, when once again it becomes dynamic, is its resultant
effect. Thus a good action produces a good reaction, and a
bad one a bad one. This presupposes a code of morals,
furnished by what?* We cannot call it Atman, Conscience,
* Twenty-three centuries later Kant falling over this crux postulated his
“twelve categories,” or shall we say “emanations,” and thereby started revolving
once again the Sephirothic Wheel of Fortune.
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