♦The Sacred Truth of the Cause of Suffering♦
“_Now this, O recluses, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering.
Verily it originates in that craving thirst which causes the renewal of
becomings, is accompanied by sensual delight, and seeks satisfaction,
now here, now there; that is to say, the craving for the gratification
of the passions, or the craving for a future life, or the craving for
success in this present life._”
♦The Self-life the Cause: Misery the Effect♦
The self-life, then, is the cause of suffering.
The Self attains its desire only to lose it again, or in the very
attainment to find disappointment, and so suffering.
The Self fails of its desire, and again it suffers.
In either case, so surely as a Self desires, and grasps at that which it
desires, so surely will that Self have misery. For although each Self
imagines itself to be free, to be responsible to none save Self, there
is, even in separate existence, no such thing as freedom. The Causal
Law, which acts so graciously in the universe of perfect mercifulness
and truth, has the Self-life in its grip, and avenges the universe for
the wrong done to it.
Every desire, every forth-going for Self, every action, good or bad, is
a seed sown and will have its appropriate harvest; by so much increasing
the sum of the Self-life; and at the dissolution of the body it will
live on, taking to itself another body, and becoming the seed of
harvests to come.
It will be noted that this is not a doctrine of heredity, effects are
not transmitted with the physical being by parents. The true parent
is the selfish Self, which transmits through its actions--_Karma_,
as the Buddhist calls them--certain good or bad qualities, ideas,
characteristics, which take to themselves new and appropriate form at
the dissolution of the being which produced them.
Thus, a being and a character, the effect of certain previous causes,
sows, in desire and action, seeds which another must reap to-morrow.
As I now sow, another at my dissolution and the re-incarnation of my
_Karma_ (the sum of my Self-graspings), will reap. “The Buddha himself
cannot contradict this law, which is the Buddha of Buddha.” “Neither man
nor God can prevent the results.”