THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE
'Come to Me: I teach a doctrine which leads to deliverance from all
the miseries of life.'--_Saying of the Buddha._
To understand the teaching of Buddhism, it must be remembered that to
the Buddhist, as to the Brahmin, man's soul is eternal.
In other faiths and other philosophies this is not so. There the soul is
immortal; it cannot die, but each man's soul appeared newly on his
birth. Its beginning is very recent.
To the Buddhist the beginning as well as the end is out of our ken.
Where we came from we cannot know, but certainly the soul that appears
in each newborn babe is not a new thing. It has come from everlasting,
and the present life is merely a scene in the endless drama of
existence. A man's identity, the sum of good and of evil tendencies,
which is his soul, never dies, but endures for ever. Each body is but a
case wherein the soul is enshrined for the time.
And the state of that soul, whether good predominate in it or evil, is
purely dependent on that soul's thoughts and actions in time past.
Men are not born by chance wise or foolish, righteous or wicked, strong
or feeble. A man's condition in life is the absolute result of an
eternal law that as a man sows so shall he reap; that as he reaps so has
he sown.
Therefore, if you find a man's desires naturally given towards evil, it
is because he has in his past lives educated himself to evil. And if he
is righteous and charitable, long-suffering and full of sympathy, it is
because in his past existence he has cultivated these virtues; he has
followed goodness, and it has become a habit of his soul.
Thus is every man his own maker. He has no one to blame for his
imperfections but himself, no one to thank for his virtues but himself.
Within the unchangeable laws of righteousness each man is absolutely the
creator of himself and of his own destiny. It has lain, and it lies,
within each man's power to determine what manner of man he shall be.
Nay, it not only lies within his power to do so, but a man _must_
actually mould himself. There is no other way in which he can develop.
Every man has had an equal chance. If matters are somewhat unequal now,
there is no one to blame but himself. It is within his power to retrieve
it, not perhaps in this short life, but in the next, maybe, or the next.
Man is not made perfect all of a sudden, but takes time to grow, like
all valuable things. You might as well expect to raise a teak-tree in
your garden in a night as to make a righteous man in a day. And thus not
only is a man the sum of his passions, his acts and his thoughts, in
past time, but he is in his daily life determining his future--what sort
of man he shall be. Every act, every thought, has its effect, not only
upon the outer world, but upon the inner soul. If you follow after evil,
it becomes in time a habit of your soul. If you follow after good, every
good act is a beautifying touch to your own soul.
Man is as he has made himself; man will be as he makes himself. This is
a very simple theory, surely. It is not at all difficult to understand
the Buddhist standpoint in the matter. It is merely the theory of
evolution applied to the soul, with this difference: that in its later
stages it has become a deliberate and a conscious evolution, and not an
unconscious one.
And the deduction from this is also simple. It is true, says Buddhism,
that every man is the architect of himself, that he can make himself as
he chooses. Now, what every man desires is happiness. As a man can form
himself as he will, it is within his power to make himself happy, if he
only knows how. Let us therefore carefully consider what happiness is,
that we may attain it; what misery is, that we may avoid it.
It is a commonplace of many religions, and of many philosophies--nay,
it is the actual base upon which they have been built, that this is an
evil world.
Judaism, indeed, thought that the world was really a capital place, and
that it was worth while doing well in order to enjoy it. But most other
faiths thought very differently. Indeed, the very meaning of most
religions and philosophies has been that they should be refuges from the
wickedness and unhappiness of the world. According to them the world has
been a very weary world, full of wickedness and of deceit, of war and
strife, of untruth and of hate, of all sorts of evil.
The world has been wicked, and man has been unhappy in it.
'I do not know that any theory has usually been propounded to explain
why this is so. It has been accepted as a fact that man is unhappy,
accepted, I think, by most faiths over the world. Indeed, it is the
belief that has been, one thinks, the cause of faiths. Had the world
been happy, surely there had been no need of religions. In a summer sea,
where is the need of havens? It is a generally-accepted fact, accepted,
as I have said, without explanation. But the Buddhist has not been
contented to leave it so. He has thought that it is in the right
explanation of this cardinal fact that lies all truth. Life suffers from
a disease called misery. He would be free from it. Let us, then, says
the Buddhist, first discover the cause of this misery, and so only can
we understand how to cure it.' It is this explanation which is really
the distinguishing tenet of Buddhism, which differentiates it from all
other faiths and all philosophies.
The reason, says Buddhism, why men are unhappy is that they are alive.
Life and sorrow are inseparable--nay, they are one and the same thing.
The mere fact of being alive is a misery. When you have clear eyes and
discern the truth, you shall see this without a doubt, says the
Buddhist. For consider, What man has ever sat down and said: 'Now am I
in perfect happiness; just as I now am would I like to remain for ever
and for ever without change'? No man has ever done so. What men desire
is change. They weary of the present, and desire the future; and when
the future comes they find it no better than the past. Happiness lies in
yesterday and in to-morrow, but never in to-day. In youth we look
forward, in age we look back. What is change but the death of the
present? Life is change, and change is death, so says the Buddhist. Men
shudder at and fear death, and yet death and life are the same
thing--inseparable, indistinguishable, and one with sorrow. We men who
desire life are as men athirst and drinking of the sea. Every drop we
drink of the poisoned sea of existence urges on men surely to greater
thirst still. Yet we drink on blindly, and say that we are athirst.
This is the explanation of Buddhism. The world is unhappy because it is
alive, because it does not see that what it should strive for is not
life, not change and hurry and discontent and death, but peace--the
Great Peace. There is the goal to which a man should strive.
See now how different it is from the Christian theory. In Christianity
there are two lives--this and the next. The present is evil, because it
is under the empire of the devil--the world, the flesh, and the devil.
The next will be beautiful, because it is under the reign of God, and
the devil cannot intrude.
But Buddhism acknowledges only one life--an existence that has come from
the forever, that may extend to the forever. If this life is evil, then
is all life evil, and happiness can live but in peace, in surcease from
the troubles of this weary world. If, then, a man desire happiness--and
in all faiths that is the desired end--he must strive to attain peace.
This, again, is not a difficult idea to understand. It seems to me so
simple that, when once it has been listened to, it may be understood by
a child. I do not say believed and followed, but understood. Belief is a
different matter. 'The law is deep; it is difficult to know and to
believe it. It is very sublime, and can be comprehended only by means of
earnest meditation,' for Buddhism is not a religion of children, but of
men.
This is the doctrine that has caused Buddhism to be called pessimism.
Taught, as we have been taught, to believe that life and death are
antagonistic, that life in the world to come is beautiful, that death
is a horror, it seems to us terrible to think that it is indeed our very
life itself that is the evil to be eradicated, and that life and death
are the same. But to those that have seen the truth, and believed it, it
is not terrible, but beautiful. When you have cleansed your eyes from
the falseness of the flesh, and come face to face with truth, it is
beautiful. 'The law is sweet, filling the heart with joy.'
To the Buddhist, then, the end to be obtained is the Great Peace, the
mighty deliverance from all sorrow. He must strive after peace; on his
own efforts depends success or failure.
When the end and the agent have been determined, there remains but to
discover the means, the road whereby the end may be reached. How shall a
man so think and so act that he shall come at length unto the Great
Peace? And the answer of Buddhism to this question is here: good deeds
and good thoughts--these are the gate wherein alone you may enter into
the way. Be honourable and just, be kind and compassionate, truth-loving
and averse to wrong--this is the beginning of the road that leads unto
happiness. Do good to others, not in order that they may do good to you,
but because, by doing so, you do good to your own soul. Give alms, and
be charitable, for these things are necessary to a man. Above all, learn
love and sympathy. Try to feel as others feel, try to understand them,
try to sympathize with them, and love will come. Surely he was a
Buddhist at heart who wrote: 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.'
There is no balm to a man's heart like love, not only the love others
feel towards him, but that he feels towards others. Be in love with all
things, not only with your fellows, but with the whole world, with every
creature that walks the earth, with the birds in the air, with the
insects in the grass. All life is akin to man. Man's life is not apart
from other life, but of it, and if a man would make his heart perfect,
he must learn to sympathize with and understand all the great world
about him. But he must always remember that he himself comes first. To
make others just, you must yourself be just; to make others happy, you
must yourself be happy first; to be loved, you must first love. Consider
your own soul, to make it lovely. Such is the teaching of Buddha. But if
this were all, then would Buddhism be but a repetition of the
commonplaces of all religions, of all philosophies. In this teaching of
righteousness is nothing new. Many teachers have taught it, and all have
learnt in the end that righteousness is no sure road to happiness, to
peace. Buddhism goes farther than this. Honour and righteousness, truth
and love, are, it says, very beautiful things, but are only the
beginning of the way; they are but the gate. In themselves they will
never bring a man home to the Great Peace. Herein lies no salvation from
the troubles of the world. Far more is required of a man than to be
righteous. Holiness alone is not the gate to happiness, and all that
have tried have found it so. It alone will not give man surcease from
pain. When a man has so purified his heart by love, has so weaned
himself from wickedness by good acts and deeds, then he shall have eyes
to see the further way that he should go. Then shall appear to him the
truth that it is indeed life that is the evil to be avoided; that life
is sorrow, and that the man who would escape evil and sorrow must escape
from life itself--not in death. The death of this life is but the
commencement of another, just as, if you dam a stream in one direction,
it will burst forth in another. To take one's life now is to condemn
one's self to longer and more miserable life hereafter. The end of
misery lies in the Great Peace. A man must estrange himself from the
world, which is sorrow. Hating struggle and fight, he will learn to love
peace, and to so discipline his soul that the world shall appear to him
clearly to be the unrest which it is. Then, when his heart is fixed upon
the Great Peace, shall his soul come to it at last. Weary of the earth,
it shall come into the haven where there are no more storms, where there
is no more struggle, but where reigns unutterable peace. It is not
death, but the Great Peace.
'Ever pure, and mirror bright and even,
Life among the immortals glides away;
Moons are waning, generations changing,
Their celestial life flows everlasting,
Changeless 'midst a ruined world's decay.'
This is Nirvana, the end to which we must all strive, the only end that
there can be to the trouble of the world. Each man must realize this for
himself, each man will do so surely in time, and all will come into the
haven of rest. Surely this is a simple faith, the only belief that the
world has known that is free from mystery and dogma, from ceremony and
priestcraft; and to know that it is a beautiful faith you have but to
look at its believers and be sure. If a people be contented in their
faith, if they love it and exalt it, and are never ashamed of it, and if
it exalts them and makes them happy, what greater testimony can you have
than that?
It will seem that indeed I have compressed the teaching of this faith
into too small a space--this faith about which so many books have been
written, so much discussion has taken place. But I do not think it is
so. I cannot see that even in this short chapter I have left out
anything that is important in Buddhism. It is such a simple faith that
all may be said in a very few words. It would be, of course, possible to
refine on and gloze over certain points of the teaching. Where would be
the use? The real proof of the faith is in the results, in the deeds
that men do in its name. Discussion will not alter these one way or
another.