he is not sure if men will be able
to understand the law of causality and the chain of existence, on
which he himself meditated a whole night after his enlightenment, and
his discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement.
This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted
processes, in which the connection between one generation and
another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy
heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically traced.
The beginning of all is ignorance (of the four truths); from
ignorance proceed the "samkharas" or forms of production, from these
in turn consciousness, the senses, contact, sensation, thirst, and so
on to birth and the miseries of life. Suffering is destroyed by
tracing this sequence over again in a negative way, so that, the
first member of it being destroyed, each subsequent member is
destroyed in turn.

It is no wonder that the founder doubted whether this doctrine of
causation would be generally understood; for it is in fact an attempt
to reconcile two opposite views of the nature of the human person. In
the first place we find in early Buddhism the thought that there is
no such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up of
various bundles of attributes and sensations called _skandhas_, but
he himself is none of these. There is no persistent substratum of a
self under these activities and forms, any more than there is a
carriage in addition to the wheels, shafts, nails, etc., of which a
carriage is composed. The Buddhist is called on to give up the belief
in a permanent ego; only where the various parts come together is the
man there. This is the well-known denial of the soul in this
religion; the soul is nothing but the "name and form" of a chance
collocation of elements. It is hard to know where this doctrine came
from; Kern says it is derived from the science of dissection, others
compare it with the doctrine of Heraclitus, taught about the same
time in Greece, that all things are in constant flux, nothing
permanent. The last words of the Master assert that decay is
universal; and the doctrine of the skandhas is a corollary from that
principle; if all the elements of which the human person is made up
are in process of decay, then the self cannot be a substantial and
persistent thing. That doctrine, however, does not go well together
with the belief in the universality and inexorableness of suffering.
If the