s were cast.
The comparison of life and passion to disease is frequent in Buddhist
writings and the Buddha is sometimes hailed as the King of Physicians.
It is a just compendium of his doctrine--so far as an illustration can be
a compendium--to say that human life is like a diseased body which
requires to be cured by a proper regimen. But the Buddha's claim to
originality is not thereby affected, for it rests upon just this, that
he was able to regard life and religion in this spirit and to put aside
the systems of ritual, speculation and self-mortification which were
being preached all round him.

The first truth is that existence involves suffering. It receives
emotional expression in a discourse in the Samyutta-Nikaya[439]. "The
world of transmigration, my disciples, has its beginning in eternity. No
origin can be perceived, from which beings start, and hampered by
ignorance, fettered by craving, stray and wander. Which think you are
more--the tears which you have shed as you strayed and wandered on this
long journey, grieving and weeping because you were bound to what you
hated and separated from what you loved--which are more, these tears, or
the waters in the four oceans? A mother's death, a son's death, a
daughter's death, loss of kinsmen, loss of property, sickness, all these
have you endured through long ages--and while you felt these losses and
strayed and wandered on this long journey, grieving and weeping because
you were bound to what you hated and separated from what you loved, the
tears that you shed are more than the water in the four oceans."

It is remarkable that such statements aroused no contradiction. The
Buddha was not an isolated and discontented philosopher, like
Schopenhauer in his hotel, but the leader of an exceptionally successful
religious movement in touch and sympathy with popular ideas. On many
points his assertions called forth discussion and contradiction but when
he said that all existence involves suffering no one disputed the
dictum: no one talked of the pleasures of life or used those arguments
which come so copiously to the healthy-minded modern essayist when he
devotes a page or two to disproving pessimism[440]. On this point the
views and temperament of the Buddha were clearly those of educated
India. The existence of this conviction and temperament in a large body
of intellectual men is as important as the belief in the value of life
and the love of activity for its own sake w