TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 633
taking cognizance of suffering's spiritual and intellectual value; and,
considering the unpropitiousness of this start, it is remarkable and signi-
ficant that, in the next chapter of the history of Buddhism's spiritual
development, one sect of Buddhists should have discovered for them-
selves, by experience, that the evasion of suffering at any price was not a
spiritual objective whose pursuit was a spiritually satisfying way of life.

The spiritual fruit of this Christian lesson of Buddhist experience was,
as we have noticed in other contexts,1 the transfiguration of a philosophy
of escape into a religion of salvation through the rejection of the Hinaya-
nian arhat's self-centred ideal of getting rid of his suffering self by anaes-
thetizing his own consciousness and the adoption, instead, of the Maha-
yanian bodhisattva's self-sacrificing ideal of helping his fellow living
beings to make the arduous passage to the arhat's goal at the cost of
postponing his own entry into his rest.2 The bodhisattva's concern to
rid himself of himself counts with him for so much less than his compas-
sion for his kind that Love moves him to tarry, for an aeon if need be, in
an excruciating state of consciousness after he has won his own right of
entry into Nirvana by the perfect performance of an arhat's spiritual
exercises. The bodhisattva has it in his power to release himself from
suffering by crossing the threshold of Nirvana at any moment that he
might choose, and the one desire that still fetters him to the pains of
sentient life is the self-transcendent desire to put his own dearly bought
experience at his fellows' disposal by serving them as their psychopom-
pus.3 The transit from the Hinayana to the Mahayana is thus nothing
less than a spiritual revolution, and a Christian disciple of Buddhism
would not quarrel with the Mahayanian sect of Buddhists for calling the
ideal of the bodhisattva *the Great Way', and the ideal of the arhat 'the
Little Way', of interpreting the Buddha's teaching; for the bodhisattva's
ideal was an imitation of Christ that was not the less authentic for being
undesigned.4

The ideal of the bodhisattva was assuredly an example that the Wes-
tern World could not afford to disregard in a generation in which it was in
retreat towards the inviting shelter of a traditional form of Christianity;
for the characteristic virtue of a bodhisattva was his fortitude in with-
standing a perpetual temptation to desert his self-assigned post in a
world of painful action in order to take the short cut to oblivion that lay
perpetually open to him. In the latter half of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era such fortitude as this was the first spiritual necessity for
Western souls on the religious plane as well as on the political. In his
politics, as we have seen,3 Western Man's task in this chapter of Western
history was to school himself to 'living dangerously*, without yielding to
the temptation of trying to resolve the tension either by capitulating or by
committing aggression, in an OikovmenS that had been overtaken by the
invention of the atomic bomb before it had achieved political unity. In

i In V. v. 133-6 and 552; V. vi. 148 and 164, n. 3; and VIL vii. 733.

* Ps. xcv. ii. 3 See IX. viii. 628,

* See VII. vii. 733. The rise of the Mahayana is accounted for by a yearning, in
Buddhist souls, for the Christian graces of love and self-sacrifice for which a Primitive
Buddhist philosophy found no place.

s On pp. 525-9, above.