ng and the way to make an end of it. He opens very practically,
and it may be noticed that abstruse as are many of his discourses they
generally go straight to the heart of some contemporary interest. Here
he says that self-indulgence is low and self-mortification crazy: that
both are profitless and neither is the religious life. That consists in
walking in the middle path, or noble eightfold path defined in a
celebrated formula as right views, right aspirations, right speech,
right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right
rapture. He then enunciates the four truths. The first declares that all
clinging to existence involves suffering. I shall have occasion to
examine later the pessimism which is often said to characterize Buddhism
and Indian thought generally. Here let it suffice to say that the first
truth must be taken in conjunction with the others. The teaching of the
Buddha is a teaching not so much of pessimism as of emancipation: but
emancipation implies the existence of evil from which men must be freed:
a happy world would not need it. Buddhism recognizes the evil of the
world but it is not on that account a religion of despair: the essence
of it is that it provides a remedy and an escape.

The second and third truths must be taken together and in connection
with the formula known as the chain of causation (paticcasamuppada).
Everything has a cause and produces an effect. If this is, that is: if
this is not, then that is not. This simple principle of uniform
causation is applied to the whole universe, gods and men, heaven, earth
and hell. Indian thought has always loved wide applications of
fundamental principles and here a law of the universe is propounded in a
form both simple and abstract. Everything exists in virtue of a cause
and does not exist if that cause is absent. Suffering has a cause and if
that cause can be detected and eliminated, suffering itself will be
eliminated. This cause of evil is Tanha, the thirst or craving for
existence, pleasure and success. And the cure is to remove it. It may
seem to the European that this is a proposal to cure the evils of life
by removing life itself but when in the fourth truth we come to the
course to be followed by the seeker after salvation--the eightfold
path--we find it neither extravagant nor morbid. We may imagine that an
Indian of that time asking different schools of thinkers for the way to
salvation would have been told by Brahma