ir results are impermanent. It is, in fact, the
theoretical side of the will to live, which can find expression in a
treatise on metaphysics as well as in an act of procreation. An
Englishman according to his capacity and mental culture is satisfied
with some such rule of existence as having a good time, or playing the
game, or doing his duty, or working for some cause. The majority of
intelligent men are prepared to devote their lives to the service of the
British Empire: the fact that it must pass away as certainly as the
Empire of Babylon and that they are labouring for what is impermanent
does not disturb them and is hardly ever present to their minds. Those
Europeans who share with Asiatics some feeling of dissatisfaction with
the impermanent try to escape it by an unselfish morality and by holding
that life, which is unsatisfactory if regarded as a pursuit of
happiness, acquires a new and real value if lived for others. And from
this point of view the European moralist is apt to criticize the
Buddhist truths of suffering and the release from suffering as selfish.
But Buddhism is as full as or fuller than Christianity of love,
self-sacrifice and thought for others. It says that it is a fine thing
to be a man and have the power of helping others: that the best life is
that which is entirely unselfish and a continual sacrifice. But looking
at existence as a whole, and accepting the theory that the happiest and
best life is a life of self-sacrifice, it declines to consider as
satisfactory the world in which this principle holds good. Many of the
best Europeans would probably say that their ideal is not continual
personal enjoyment but activity which makes the world better. But this
ideal implies a background of evil just as much as does the Buddha's
teaching. If evil vanished, the ideal would vanish too.

There is one important negative aspect of the truth of suffering and
indeed of all the four truths. A view of human life which is common in
Christian and Mohammedan countries represents man as put in the world by
God, and human life as a service to be rendered to God. Whether it is
pleasant, worth living or not are hardly questions for God's servants.
There is no trace of such a view in the Buddha's teaching. It is
throughout assumed that man in judging human life by human standards is
not presumptuous or blind to higher issues. Life involves unhappiness:
that is a fact, a cardinal truth. That this unhappiness may be