he doctrine of
Nirv[=a]na, to lie something of that altruism so conspicuous in the
insistence on kindness and conversion of others. It is to save from
sorrow this son of one's acts that one should seek to find the end.
But there is no soul to save.

We cannot insist too often on the fact that the religion of Buddha was
not less practical than human. He practiced, as he taught, that the
more one worked for others, was devoted to others, the less he cared
for himself, the less was he the victim of desire. Hence he says that
a true Nirv[=a]na may come even in one's own lifetime--the utter
surrender of one's self is Nirv[=a]na,[30] while the act of dying only
draws the curtain after the tragedy has ended. "Except," Buddha says,
"for birth, age, and death, there would be no need of Buddha."

A review of Buddha's system of metaphysics is, therefore, doubly
unnecessary for our present purpose.[31] In the first place we believe
that most of the categories and metaphysical niceties of Buddhism, as
handed down, are of secondary origin; and, were this not so, it is
still evident that they were but the unimportant, intellectual
appendage of a religion that was based on anything but metaphysical
subtleties. Buddha, like every other teacher of his time, had to have
a 'system,' though whether the system handed down as his reverts to
him it is impossible to say. But Buddha's recondite doctrine was only
for the wise. "It is hard to learn for an ordinary person," says
Buddha himself. But it was the ordinary person that Buddhism took to
its bosom. The reason can be only the one we have given. For the last
stage before Arhat-ship Buddha had ready a complicate system. But he
did not inflict it on the ordinary person.[32] It was not an essential
but the completing of his teaching; in his own eyes truth as
represented by the Four Great Truths was the real doctrine.

The religion of Buddha, for the mass of people, lies in the Four Great
Truths and their practical application to others, which implies
kindness and love of humanity. For Buddha, whatever may have been the
reluctance with which he began to preach, shows in all his teachings
and dealings with men an enduring patience under their rebuffs, a
brotherly sympathy with their weakness, and a divine pity for their
sorrows. Something, too, of divine anger with the pettiness and
meanness of the unworthy ones among his followers, as when, after
preaching with parable and exhortation to the