listen to his argument, for clearly
the young woman has grown out of the girl and in ordinary language they
are the same person. Or again suppose that one man left a jar of milk
with another and the milk turned to curds. Would it be reasonable for
the first man to accuse the second of theft because the milk has
disappeared?

The caterpillar and butterfly might supply another illustration. It is
unfortunate that the higher intelligences offer no example of such
metamorphosis in which consciousness is apparently interrupted between
the two stages. Would an intelligent caterpillar take an interest in his
future welfare as a butterfly and stigmatize as vices indulgences
pleasant to his caterpillar senses and harmful only to the coming
butterfly, between whom and the caterpillar there is perhaps no
continuity of consciousness? We can imagine how strongly butterflies
would insist that the foundation of morality is that caterpillars should
realize that the butterflies' interests and their own are the same.

3

When the Buddha contemplated the samsara, the world of change and
transmigration in which there is nothing permanent, nothing satisfying,
nothing that can be called a self, he formulated his chief conclusions,
theoretical and practical, in four propositions known as the four
noble[435] truths, concerning suffering, the cause of suffering, the
extinction of suffering, and the path to the extinction of
suffering[436]. These truths are always represented as the essential and
indispensable part of Buddhism. Without them, says the Buddha more than
once, there can be no emancipation, and agreeably to this we find them
represented as having formed part of the teaching of previous
Buddhas[437] and consequently as being rediscovered rather than invented
by Gotama. He even compares himself to one who has found in the jungle
the site of an ancient city and caused it to be restored. It would
therefore not be surprising if they were found in pre-Buddhist writings,
and it has been pointed out that they are practically identical with the
four divisions of the Hindu science of medicine: roga, disease;
rogahetu, the cause of disease; arogya, absence of disease; bhaisajya,
medicine. A similar parallel between the language of medicine and moral
science can be found in the Yoga philosophy, and if the fourfold
division of medicine can be shown to be anterior to Buddhism[438], it
may well have suggested the mould in which the four truth