It is clear, without further need of demonstration, that with the Kamma
teaching of the Buddha there is given the ferment of an actual morality
as of an actual religion. A morality and a religion are _actual_ when
they are functions of cognition.
All morality rests upon selflessness. If selflessness is not to be
blind asceticism or equally blind training, it must have a motive.
This is supplied by the Kamma teaching.
For where I apprehend myself as a process that sustains itself through
itself, _i.e._ through its volitions, I know that in every moment I
myself fashion the next moment, and with this present life, the life
that shall follow it. In correct insight I become in the most literal
sense the architect of my fate.
From this, selflessness follows as an evident necessity.
All religion consists in the need of looking beyond this life, of
relating it to another, a higher. The Kamma teaching reveals to me that
it is the succeeding life to which this life “is related.”
From this, morality and religion follow as functions of cognition.
One perceives that such a teaching as this perforce involves profound
changes in the appraisement of life-values, and along with this,
changes in the relations of the individual to his environment, which
includes changes in his social relationships.
The perfumed brutality of our civilization has its root in false ideas
of the meaning and significance of life, from which results a false
appraisement of life-values. We take the symptoms for the things
themselves, and are drowned in their inexhaustibility without once
being able to win through to ourselves. That we are all steering a
wrong course must be finally clear to every thinking man. But since
none knows of any remedy this is sought _practically_ in a combat
with the symptoms--that is, one bails the water out of the sinking
craft and forgets to stop the leak; and _theoretically_ it is sought
in the setting up of all sorts of artificial ideals--that is, in
emotion-values.
Neither of these makeshifts is of any avail. Help can only come from
thinking, through the acquiring of a correct idea as to the worth of
our so-called life-values.
It is just here that the Buddha-thought comes in as teacher, as
educator, as revolutioniser of values--in fine, as the _gospel of
thought_, and gives a new turn to that terrible, blind “struggle for
existence,” to which as to some dread mania, we all are subject.
Buddhism is the doctrine of actuality, the Kamma teaching, the
outcome of thinking in terms of actuality. To render it accessible to
the thinking of the modern man, to make it possible for him to let
his glance rove free from out the mole-like existence of aims and
objects himself has turned up, away past the overthrown barriers of
a cramping ignorance--for this it is necessary that the non-actual
and the re-actual forms of world-theory, which, as faith and science
respectively, everywhere obstruct free outlook, should be swept clean
away, or at the very least confined strictly to their own proper
domain. Room must be made for actuality and for thinking in terms of
actuality.
That was the main task of this book.
But of such sort is truth that it will not suffer that way be made for
it by violent measures of any kind. One thing only here is permissible:
to point it out, patiently and repeatedly point it out. Its way it
makes of its own self.
“Over all gifts victorious is the gift of the truth.”