inal southern Buddhism,
as you know, is pessimistic. Man, so the Buddha and his earlier
followers taught, is naturally doomed to misery. This doom is so
pervasive and so fatal that you in vain would seek to escape from it
through any luxuries, or, so to speak, excesses, of good fortune. On
the throne or in the dungeon, wealthy or a beggar, man is always (so
the Buddhist insists) the prisoner of desire, a creature of longing,
consumed by the fires of passion--and therefore miserable. For man's
will is insatiable, and hence always disappointed. Now we are here not
in the least concerned with estimating this pessimism. This gloomy
ancient Indian view of existence may be as false as {14} you please.
Enough--millions of men have held it, and therefore have longed for
salvation. For if, as the early Buddhists held, the evil of human life
is thus pervasive and paramount, then the aim of escaping from such
fatal ill must be deeper and more important than any economic aim or
than any intent to satisfy this or that special desire. If man is
naturally doomed to misery, the escape from this natural doom must be
at once the hardest and the highest of human tasks. The older Buddhism
undertakes to accomplish this task by teaching the way to "the
extinction of desire" and by thus striking at "the root of all
misery." In Nirvana, those who have attained the goal have won their
way beyond all desire. They return not. They are free from the burden
of human existence. Such is one view of the need and the way of
salvation.

If we turn in a wholly different direction, we find Plato, in the
great myth of the "Phaedrus," in the arguments and myths of the
"Republic," and in various other famous passages, defining what he
regards as the true goal of the human soul, portraying how far we have
naturally come short of that goal, and pointing out a way of
salvation. And, in another age, Marcus Aurelius writes his "Thoughts"
in the interest of defining the end for which it is worth while to
live, the bondage and failure in which the foolish man actually lives,
and the way out of our foolishness.

But are the partisans of ways of salvation {15} confined to such
serious and unworldly souls as were the early Buddhists and the
ancient moralists? No; turn to modern times. Read the stanzas into
which Fitzgerald, in a highly modern spirit, very freely translated
the expressions of an old Persian poet--Omar Khayyam; or, again, read
the great programme of