n adherents where marriage is not regarded
as detrimental to high thinking. But if one substitute for the
Buddhistic _karma_ the _karma_ of to-day, he may well believe that his
acts are to have effect hereafter, not as a complex but as individual
factors in determining the goodness of his descendants and indirectly
of his environment. Then there remains the attainment of purity,
kindness,[37] and wisdom, which last may be interpreted, in accordance
with the spirit of the Master, as seeing things in their
true relations, and the abandonment of whatever prevents such
attainment, namely, of lust, anger, and ignorance. But to be a true
Buddhist one must renounce, as lust, all desire of evil, of future
life, which brings evil; and must live without other hope than that of
extinguishing all desire and passion, believing that in so doing he
will at death be annihilated, that is, that he will have caused his
acts to cease to work for good or ill, and that, since being without a
soul he exists only in his acts, he will in their cessation also cease
to be.

At least one thing may be learned from Buddhism. It is possible to be
religious without being devout. True Buddhism is the only religion
which, discarding all animism, consists in character and wisdom. But
neither in sacrificial works, nor in kindness alone, nor in wisdom
alone, lies the highest. One must renounce all selfish desires and
live to build up a character of which the signs are purity, love for
all, and that courageous wisdom which is calm insight into truth. The
Buddhist worked out his own salvation without fear or trembling. To
these characteristics may be added that tolerance and freedom of
thought which are so dissimilar to the traits of many other religions.

So much may be learned from Buddhism, and it were much only to know
that such a religion existed twenty-four centuries ago. But in what,
from a wider point of view, lies the importance of the study of Hindu
religions? Not, we venture to think, in their face value for the
religious or philosophical life of the Occident, but in the
revelation, which is made by this study, of the origin and growth of
theistic ideas in one land; in the light these cast by analogy on the
origin of such ideas elsewhere; in the prodigious significance of the
religious factor
in the development of a race, as exhibited in this instance; in the
inspiring review of that development as it is seen through successive
ages in the loft