o longer liable to be reborn in a state
of suffering, and am assured of eternal salvation."

Now it rests with a man's own acts to end his sufferings. The chain
of causation which ends with suffering begins with ignorance. The
ignorance which is meant is that of the four noble truths, of the way
of salvation. Let a man cease from ignorance, let him accept the
Noble Truths and the insight they convey into the cause of suffering,
then by ceasing to thirst, or to burn, or in our own language by
turning his mind away from all desire, believing that what he does
will be effective for his salvation, he sets up a chain of causation
in an opposite direction, and having destroyed ignorance he may rest
assured that he has destroyed suffering too and is in the right way.
The burden he has inherited he will not need to carry any farther,
but will, when he dies, lay down for ever.

When we look at the fourth Noble Truth, which tells what a man has to
do in order to obtain this salvation, we are at first surprised.
After the deep earnestness with which the nature of the disease and
the cause and cure of the disease have been stated, we expect that
stronger practical measures will be asked for than these eight forms
of moderation. Christianity speaks of cutting off the right hand,
plucking out the right eye, in order to cut off desire: and the
Brahmanic method of union with the Deity was, as we have seen, that
of the most extreme self-mortification united with contemplation.
This Brahmanic method, the _yoga_ by which the devotee sought to
escape from all the accidents of being and to make himself one with
the great Self, the Buddha had tried for six years; but he had given
it up for a year when the hour of his enlightenment struck, and he
explicitly condemns for others the path he had found unprofitable for
himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one
extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading,
sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to
mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding
these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the
Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The
way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution which
works inexorably in one life the result stored up in previous lives,
is that of a careful and unintermitted self-discipline, which does
not run to extremes, but practices,