d has set itself to
overcome the unholy urgings of ambition, the pleasure of selfish and
revengeful purposes, and the deeply-implanted delight in cruelty and
unkindness. Such conquest is the essential part of the Fourfold Path by
which the bliss of extinction may be attained. Let him cease to be
ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or
unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a
politician may slowly be extinguished. Life follows life, and each life
fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain
of previous existences. "Quisque suos patimur manes." The sin that most
easily besets us fixes the shape of our next incarnation, and, did not a
politician strictly follow the guidance of the Fourfold Path, the first
election after his death might see him re-appear as a sheep, a
cave-dweller, or a rat.

Never to have been born is best; never to be born again is the hope and
motive of all good men among the greater part of mankind. It is not only
the teaching of the most famous Buddha which has told them so. A
Preacher more familiar to us has said the same, and our Western churches
do but repeat an echo from the East. "I praised the dead who are already
dead more than the living who are yet alive," he wrote; "yea, better is
he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil
work that is done under the sun." Wherefore is light given to him that
is in misery? asked Job. From age to age the question has been asked by
far more than half the human race, and yet the human race continues,
miserable and unholy though it is.

But the widest expression of this common cry is found in Buddhism, and
therein is found also a doctrine of peace that seeks to answer it. From
the turmoil of the street and market-place, from the atomic vortex of
public meetings, ballot stations, and motors decked with flags, let us
turn to the "Psalms of the Sisters," those Buddhist nuns whose
utterances Mrs. Rhys Davids has edited for the Pali Text Society. In
this inextricable error of existence--this charnel-house of corrupting
bodies wherein the soul lies imprisoned too long--time and space do not
seriously matter. Let us turn from Haggerston and Battersea and the
Parliamentary squabbles of to-day, and visit the regions where the great
mountains were standing and the holy Ganges flowed within two or three
centuries before or after the birth of Christ. Somewhere about that