CONCLUSION
This is the end of my book. I have tried always as I wrote to remember
the principles that I laid down for myself in the first chapter. Whether
I have always done so I cannot say. It is so difficult, so very
difficult, to understand a people--any people--to separate their beliefs
from their assents, to discover the motives of their deeds, that I fear
I must often have failed.
My book is short. It would have been easy to make a book out of each
chapter, to write volumes on each great subject that I have touched on;
but I have not done so--I have always been as brief as I could.
I have tried always to illustrate only the central thought, and not the
innumerable divergencies, because only so can a great or strange thought
be made clear. Later, when the thought is known, then it is easy to
stray into the byways of thought, always remembering that they are
byways, wandering from a great centre.
For the Burman's life and belief is one great whole.
I thought before I began to write, and I have become more and more
certain of it as I have taken up subject after subject, that to all the
great differences of thought between them and us there is one key. And
this key is that they believe the world is governed by eternal laws,
that have never changed, that will never change, that are founded on
absolute righteousness; while we believe in a personal God, altering
laws, and changing moralities according to His will.
If I were to rewrite this book, I should do so from this standpoint of
eternal laws, making the book an illustration of the proposition.
Perhaps it is better as it is, in that I have discovered the key at the
end of my work instead of at the beginning. I did not write the book to
prove the proposition, but in writing the book this truth has become
apparent to me.
The more I have written, the clearer has this teaching become to me,
until now I wonder that I did not understand long ago--nay, that it has
not always been apparent to all men.
Surely it is the beginning of all wisdom.
Not until we had discarded Atlas and substituted gravity, until we had
forgotten Enceladus and learned the laws of heat, until we had rejected
Thor and his hammer and searched after the laws of electricity, could
science make any strides onward.
An irresponsible spirit playing with the world as his toy killed all
science.
But now science has learned a new wisdom, to look only at what it can
see, to leave vain imaginings to children and idealists, certain always
that the truth is inconceivably more beautiful than any dream.
Science with us has gained her freedom, but the soul is still in bonds.
Only in Buddhism has this soul-freedom been partly gained. How beautiful
this is, how full of great thoughts, how very different to the barren
materialism it has often been said to be, I have tried to show.
I believe myself that in this teaching of the laws of righteousness we
have the grandest conception, the greatest wisdom, the world has known.
I believe that in accepting this conception we are opening to ourselves
a new world of unimaginable progress, in justice, in charity, in
sympathy, and in love.
I believe that as our minds, when freed from their bonds, have grown
more and more rapidly to heights of thought before undreamed of, to
truths eternal, to beauty inexpressible, so shall our souls, when freed,
as our minds now are, rise to sublimities of which now we have no
conception.
Let each man but open his eyes and see, and his own soul shall teach him
marvellous things.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.