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A v\aW:.a 

'I' /THE 

RELIGION OF BURMA 

AND OTHER PAPERS 






BENNETT 

/* 

({ 

I ' 



THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE 

ADYAB, MADRAS, INDIA 
1929 



UNIVERSITY 
OF CHICAGO 
LIBRARY 



INTRODUCTORY 

THE author of these essays was a combination 
of two faculties which, in any high degree, are 
rarely found in one and the same mind. Early 
in life he had obtained a training in Chemistry 
and Physics, and soon found that he had a 
strong bent to those sciences, which, with 
opportunity m proportion to his ability, he 
would certainly have pursued with eagerness. 

Yet he was also a true poet. Not that he 
wrote much in metre, though his beautiful 
verses entitled The Word of tlie Buddha make 
one wonder that he did not write more. One 
can hardly turn a page of his prose essays 
without coming across some passage which is 
instinct with the imaginative expression that is 
the very essence of poetry. Like other poets, 
however, he had his growth, his culmination, 



VI 

and his decline, bis power being at its maximum 
from 1902 till 1912. 

Rightly indeed have the Buddhists of the 
Bast decided that these inspiring writings shall 
not be consigned to the oblivion which over- 
takes back-numbers of journals, but made 
accessible to the world in the form of a volume. 
For the whole of the powers of this remarkable 
man were devoted to one single object : to the 
exposition of the Dhamma in such a manner 
that it could be assimilated by the peoples of 
the "West. Not, indeed, that we could ever 
forget that the powers of the great Rhys 
Davids were devoted, with no less singleness 
of aim, to that same purpose ; nor forget that it 
was the work of Rhys Davids that made 
possible the work of Ananda Metteyya. But 
Rhys Davids was a scholar, and the scholar is 
not properly the advocate : indeed, if he be, 
his scholarship comes under suspicion, possibly 
even into peril. 



Vll 

Ananda Metteyya is frankly the advocate, 
and what an advocate ! Ages have passed since 
the Dhamma has been set forth with such 
power, and who can tell when it will be so set 
forth again ? 

When this volume reaches the western 
world, there will, of course, be criticism, two 
points of which it may be well to anticipate. 
One is on a matter of style ; for it may be 
admitted that our author's sentences are often 
involved and hyperparenthetic, his metaphors 
occasionally somewhat redundant. 

The other is a little more serious, for it 
involves a question of scholarship. Has he, like 
so many western expositors, introduced into his 
expositions modern ideas of his own? That 
indeed, in itself, is a perfectly legitimate 
proceeding. Any man is free to construct 
what seems to him an ideal system, by 
combining ancient ideas with modern ones. 
What is illegitimate is to call the combination 



vm 

by a single, usually an ancient, name. No wit 
cannot be denied that our author thus applies 
the term "Buddhism," and scholarship may 
here and there find him guilty. Indeed, it is 
difficult to avoid a suspicion that some of the 
compilers of the Pitakas would be mightily 

r SC,R<PTUtf-<, J 

astonished, could they see the towering 
structures which he, with a chemistry and 
physics whereof they never dreamed, with 
a literary power which they rarely wielded, 
and a poetic imagination to which they seldom 
if ever rose, has built up around their phrases ! 
And if so, what are we to say ? Dismiss it 
all as unscholarly and unreliable? Hardly. 
We may indeed, in the name of sound scholar- 
ship, refuse to call the whole content of these 
essays by the name of " Buddhism ". We may 
say that they are a compound of certain ideas 
of ancient Pali Buddhism with certain ideas of 
modern origin. But what if the need of the 
West to-day be just such a compound ? Then, 



IX 



if it bring a fresh light into our lives, let us be 
grateful to the genius of Ananda Metteyya. 

Whether it be adequate to the whole of our 
needs that is another question. Finality, 
surely, is incredible. Are there not, moreover, 
deep-seated needs, yearnings unspeakable, 
which no system ever yet devised by man is 
adequate to meet ? This is not the place for a 
discussion of them, but to commend to readers, 
both in Bast and West, the contents of this 
remarkable volume. 

A BUDDBIST 



B 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Portrait of the Author Frontispiece 

Introductory v 

The Religion of Burma . . . . .1 

The Three Signata 112 

Bight Understanding ...... 178 

The Culture of Mind 235 

The Miraculous Element in Buddhism . . . 282 
The Rule of the Inner Kingdom .... 311 
Devotion in Buddhism ...... 341 

Buddhist Self-Culture 385 

Kamma 409 

Appendix : 

The Late Mr. Allan Bennett . . . . 433 
Buddha-hood as an Office 437 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 



THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM 

THE national, and in former times the state- 
supported, religion of Burma is Buddhism of an 
exceptionally pure type. This religion, at the 
time of the census of 1901, was accepted by 
9,184,121 persons, amounting to 88*6 per cent 
of the total population, inclusive of a large 
proportion of alien races, as well as the savage 
or semi-civilised tribes (Chins, Kachins, Karens, 
etc.) inhabiting the remoter parts of the 
country. Buddhism of the national type may, 
in fact, claim the adhesion of practically the 
whole of the two chief civilised races inhabiting 
the country the true Burmese, constituting 
the bulk of the civilised population of Upper 



2 THE KELIGION OF BURMA 

Burma, and the Mon or Talaing race, for the 
most part resident in Lower Burma. It is 
further predominant in the Shan States, and 
has of late years made considerable pro- 
gress amongst the semi-civilised Karens. 
Buddhism of the type prevalent in China 
(which differs widely from the local type, as- 
will shortly appear) is followed by the large 
and important Chinese community, including 
both immigrants direct from China and the 
offspring of their marriages with Burmese wives. 
The religion of Burma is commonly classified 
by occidental scholars as belonging to the 
" Southern " school of Buddhism. In fact, how* 
ever, the terms " Northern " and " Southern," 
as applied to the different types of Buddhism, 
are misleading, historically since all schools 
of Buddhist thought alike took their rise 
in India, and even in China and Japan have 
undergone later but minor modifications 
and also as a matter of fact. For whilst, in 



THE EELIGION OF BUKMA 3 

speaking of the so-called " Southern " school- 
predominant in Burma, Ceylon, and Siara we 
have to deal with a single and definite body of 
doctrine and ethics, we find no such unanimity 
in the " Northern " Buddhist countries China, 
Japan, Tibet, Corea, and a large area in north- 
ern and eastern Asia in general. There is, in 
fact, no one " Northern " Buddhism, but a 
great number of widely differing sects, bodies 
agreeing only in the absolute fundamentals of the 
Buddhist doctrine, and in claiming The Buddha 
as the Founder of their respective creeds. 

Another classification which has been put 
forward by western scholars in the attempt to 
define the Buddhist schools now prevalent 
is that of the Vehicles, Northern Buddhism 
being defined as Mahayana or the Greater 
Vehicle, and Southern Buddhism as Hinayana 
or the Lesser Vehicle. These terms are, indeed, 
of Buddhist (and, as might be deduced, of 
Northern) origin, but, whatever distinction may 



4 THE RELIGION . OF BURMA 

have been originally involved in these terms, it 
certainly is not the same difference as that now 
prevalent .between the Southern and the 
Northern schools, so far as we can tell by com- 
paring the works of Ashvaghosha with those in 
Pali and their commentaries ; or judging from 
the accounts the Chinese pilgrims to India have 
bequeathed to us, concerning the doctrines 
and the distribution of followers of either sect. 
The native, and the correct, designation of 
the pure form of Buddhism now prevalent in 
Burma, Ceylon, and Siam is Themvdda, " The 
Tradition of the Elders" or, as we might 
justly render it, the Traditional, Original, or 
Orthodox School. It unfortunately happened 
that European scholarship, during the last 
most remarkable century characterised by so 
general a widening of the mental horizon, came 
first into contact, not with the pure and simple 
Buddhism of the Theravada School, but with the 
divers teachings and Scriptures of the various 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 5 

Northern sectaries ; and the earlier work of 

occidental scholars in the field of Buddhism was 

directed for the most part to the study and 

translation of the multitudinous Scriptures 

in Samskrt, Chinese, Tibetan, and so forth 

of the various sections of the Northern 

Church. The effect was much the same 

as if a body of non-Christian scholars, setting 

out to investigate the nature and origins of 

Christianity, had first encountered, not the 

genuine sources of that religion, the Canonical 

Scriptures of the New Testament, but the 

later, garbled, and miracle4eeming writings 

of mediaeval monks. Buddhism came thus to 

be first presented to the western mind as an 

oriental mysticism of the most extravagant 

type ; its Founder no historical personage, but 

an imaginary divinity evolved from solar 

myths. So tenacious is the human mind 

to first impressions, that later, when the Pali 

Scriptures of the Theravada School, with 



6 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

their commentaries, came to the knowledge 
of western scholars, there were many who 
still maintained the earlier and inaccurate 
views, supporting these, in face of the new 
additions to their knowledge of Buddhism, 
by the astounding supposition that the Pali 
literature was the production of Buddha- 
ghosha and other Buddhist divines who lived 
some thousand years after the date ascribed 
to the Founder of the Eeligion. 

Happily, however, further evidence was 
brought to light by the discovery in India of 
the celebrated Inscriptions of Asoka -inscrip- 
tions written in a character that no Singhalese 
monk of the tenth century of the Buddhist 
era could have read, even had he been aware 
of their existence ; the contents of these 
Edicts, written in a language practically the 
same as the Pali used in the Scriptures of 
Theravada Buddhism s demonstrated beyond all 
doubt the authenticity of the Pali Canon and its 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 7 

commentaries, and of the Singhalese Chronicles. 
Later archaeological discoveries in India 
brought further startling confirmations, even 
Vs^ to the very names of Buddhist missionary 
monks who, the Chronicles and Commentaries 
stated, had gone forth from the third Great 
Council of the Eeligion, together with details 
as to the actual districts in which their mission- 
ary labors had been pursued. The great 
mass of evidence from these discoveries, and 
from other non-Buddhist sources, as well as 
the strong internal evidence of the unique Pali 
literature itself, enable us now to assert that be- 
yond all reasonable doubting in the Theravada 
Buddhism now prevalent in Burma we 
have, practically unchanged after twenty-five 
centuries, the pure and original Eeligion pro- 
pounded by The Buddha; and that in the 
Pali Pitakas the Canonical Scriptures of that 
Eeligion- we have the veritable Teaching of 
The Master 5 preserved in the language He 



8 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

spoke, and for the most part couched in the 
actual words He employed in the course of His 
religious mission. 

In order that the reader may understand 
the intense devotion of such a people as the 
Burmese a people young in racial develop- 
ment, eager, active, impatient of all restraint 
to this Buddhist religion, whose key-note 
is self-restraint and " Selflessness " in life; 
and that the significance to modern civilisation 
of the preservation amongst a Mongolian 
people of this greatest product of Aryan 
thought may be rendered clear, it is necessary 
that we should first consider the circum- 
stances and the environment in which it arose. 
Wherever, in actual fact, the original home and 
cradle of the great Aryan race was situate, we can 
have but little doubt that, at some very remote 
period in its history, that race divided into 
two great streams of emigration, each prob- 
ably consisting of many a successive tidal 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 9 

wave. Of these two streams, one spread north 
and westwards, populating Europe ; the other 
south and perhaps eastwards into Persia and the 
modern Afghanistan, ultimately penetrating 
the great barrier- wall of the Himalayas, and 
passing through the valleys of Kashmir into 
India proper, taking up its final resting-place 
in the vast and fertile Gangetic plain. As it 
progressed in its conquest of India, everywhere 
displacing more or less completely the indigen- 
ous inhabitants by dint of its superior civilisa- 
tion and its higher mental growth, the Indian 
branch of that race found itself in an environ- 
ment very different from that of the north-and- 
westward-tending stream. Brought earlier 
to maturity under the warm Indian skies; 
findhig, in that genial and productive climate,, 
opportunities for leisure and reflection such as 
were denied in the severer conditions of life in 
the temperate zone, the Indian Aryans had 
reached, before the era of The Buddha, to 



10 THE RELIGION OP BUBMA 

a state of intellectual progress such as even 
now their northward-wending kinsfolk of the 
European stream are but approaching. The 
climatic conditions of the Gangetic valley, 
indeed, tended to the promotion of such 
mental, rather than material, growth ; and so 
it was that the Indian Aryans, though falling 
far short of the material prosperity of Greek 
and Roman civilisations, yet indefinitely tran- 
scended these in philosophy, in religion 9 in 
comprehension of those deeper lessons of life 
which can only be approached when civilisation 
has attained to a more or less complete eman- 
cipation from the primary necessities of life. 
Food, warmth, and clothing all came easier or 
were less needed in India than in Europe ; 
whilst leisure which is the first essential of 
deep and earnest thinking was the privilege 
even of the poorest. Thus came about the 
high degree of mental progress mentioned ; 
and whilst, even to the instructed western 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 11 

reader, acquainted for the most part only with 
the smaller realm of Latin, Hellenic, and 
Hebraic culture, the statement may appear 
doubtful or impossible, in Pali literature 
which we are considering we find ample dem- 
onstration that such high mental progress 
was a fact. In the Pali Pitakas are lists, 
for instance, of the divers schools of thought 
and systems of philosophy which were extant 
in India in The Buddha's time ; lists the 
most significant and interesting to the Euro- 
pean reader, who may find amongst them 
the equivalent of every latest development 
of modern thought, the very replica of all 
our most " advanced " philosophies, from 
the crudest of materialisms to the most 
transcendental, purely idealistic views of life. 

The chief difference between the civilisa- 
tions of eastern and western Aryans, due to 
their differing environment, reached of neces- 
sity into every department of human polity ; 



12 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

the same typical divergence manifesting in 
every realm of life. For the western, of hard 
necessity, material progress, material science, 
material development, came first and foremost. 
It was only when the application of science 
came, during the past century, to add immense- 
ly to the material welfare of the "West, that even 
the worldly sciences found manifold adher- 
ents and made speedy progress. Theretofore 
the man who gave his life to science was either 
a wizard, an anathema, or an idle dreamer in 
the popular estimation ; the great man of the 
West was he who oiuned the most, who exercised 
the most authority over the goods and persons 
of his fellow-men. In Aryan India all was 
different ; spiritual progress, spiritual science 
these held the foremost place, even in popu- 
lar estimation ; the chief concern of life was 
with the things that lay beyond it ; and the 
truly great man in the popular imagination 
was not he who held the most in this world, 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 18 

but he who knew the most of the other 
world. 

And if the clear and lucid-Aryan mind- 
perhaps the greatest, and without a doubt 
the most active and most earnest mental 
instrument humanity has yet evolved upon 
our earth if that keen engine of research 
has lately, in the western world, made 
strides so marvellous in the conquest of the 
material world, it had not done less in India in 
The Buddha's days in conquest of the wider 
realm of spiritual knowledge, the Kingdom 
of Truth, the Empire of the deeper things 
of life. Our western world has only within 
the last decade produced its first attempt to 
study and to classify those deeper realms of 
life to which the mind, in special states of 
exaltation, can gain access." 8 In India, not the 

1 The reference is to The Varieties of Religious Experience, by 
Prof. William James. The Author, however, was unfortunately 
admittedly unacquainted with the Buddhist aspect of his subject ; 
and, consequently his work for the most part is concerned with 
Christian religious experience, and its classification, alone. 



14 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

mere three earlier stages of spiritual experience 
dealt with in Professor James's work but 
eight such stages had been so thoroughly 
investigated, had so far become the common 
knowledge of all who studied these matters, 
that their nature is dismissed with a mere 
stereotyped collection of phrases most tan- 
talising to the modern student, as premising a 
knowledge of their details which he does not 
possess. To these Eight Realms of Thought 
each in succession transcending the last one, as 
the clear lucid realm of waking life transcends 
in vivid sequent consciousness the world of 
dreams The Buddha added yet another : that 
" State beyond All Life," which now we call 
Mbbana. 

The reason for the intense devotion of the 
Burmese to their religion, on the one hand, 
and on the other the significance and value of 
that religion in itself, will now be clear to the 
reader. That devotion and that significance and 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 15 

value arise from the fact that in the religion of 
Burma, preserved albeit in the minds of a Mon- 
golian race, till recently secluded by the natural 
barriers of sea and hill, we have the final and 
the greatest product of Aryan religious thought,, 
the ultimate outcome of centuries of religious 
training and experience, the result achieved 
by generations immemorial of Aryan thinkers 
under circumstances as favorable for success in 
this direction as the conditions of western life 
have been favorable to the development of 
modern science. The parallel, indeed, between 
the two extends much further than mere 
similarity of conditions extends to the very 
fundamental principles of the two great bodies 
of knowledge. In both, the whole grand 
edifice of thought rests upon the discovery of 
the Principle of Causation ; in both, the natural 
concept of the immature mind the thought 
arising from the earlier reign of Animism, that 
all phenomena are the outcome of the activity 



16 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

of some living, if spiritual, being or beings is 
set aside, and we enter the ordered kingdom of 
the Reign of Law ; and we may truly say that 
what Newton did for modern science in his 
stupendous discovery of the Law of Gravitation, 
thatj twenty-five centuries ago. The Buddha 
accomplished for the science of the deeper 
things of life the science, rather, of Life 
itself in His discovery and enunciation of the 
universal Law of Karma. A religion without 
a God, denying the animistic conception of a 
subtle and immortal spirit tenanting the body 
of man, which yet can give, not faith, but 
reasoned hope for future progress and ultimate 
-supreme attainment ; empty of prayer, yet 
.giving to its followers the solace prayer so 
surely brings ; void of all dogma, yet offering 
to the fullest extent the sense of surety which 
dogma brings to those who can accept it ; a 
religion founded on observation and attainment, 
whose results are always open to any who may 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 17 

duly carry out the requisite preliminaries; 
asking of its followers not Faith, but Under- 
standing -such is the astonishing spectacle 
afforded the student by the religion of Burma, 
a spectacle not, perhaps, without keen signifi- 
cance for that other western stream of Aryan 
life, now, by dint of mental growth, come 
well-nigh to parting with all its earlier 
beliefs. 

The religion of Burma thus appeals to its 
adherents in each of the great departments of 
human mental activity ; in the domain of 
intellect by the clarity and reasoned logic of 
its doctrines ; in the realm of emotional life 
by the heart-moving story of its Founder's 
search after Truth, His compassion for all that 
suffer, and His Attainment ; and, not less 
even than these high influences, by the exalted 
altruism of its deeper teachings. If you were 
to ask of a Bur man the reason for his passionate 
devotion to his religion, the reply that he 



18 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

would give would be " because it is so beautiful 
and true " ; and this reply gives us the key- 
note of the whole teaching of the Buddhist 
Sacred Books. For, in these, in the ancient 
language which The Master spoke and which 
has come to hold in Burma much the same 
position that Latin held in Europe in the 
Middle Ages, we find no word equivalent to 
our " Buddhism " at all. The native word is 
Dhamma (Skt. Dharma), meaning, in this 
connection, both " Truth " and " Law," and 
the common phrase used in Pali to cover 
the entire body of the religion, may be trans- 
lated " This Truth and Discipline," a phrase 
which at least more nearly approximates to 
the nature of the religion than does our modern 
" Buddhism ". Whatever is true the truth 
concerning the deeper things of life that, for 
the " Buddhist," is part of his religion ; and in 
fact, whilst indeed He gave a new and a special 
significance to many a technical term then 



THE RELIGION OF BDEMA 19 

prevalent amongst His fellow-countrymen. The 
Buddha handed on, in His " Truth and Disci- 
pline," many a thought and many a detail of 
spiritual practice and attainment which had 
been won by Indian saints and sages long 
before the era of His work and life. 

From the synopsis already given of the 
general character of Buddhism, the reader 
will well understand that in this religion 
there is nothing to correspond to the definite 
creeds and sacraments familiar to western 
minds. But there is a formula whichalways 
understanding that in itself there lies no special 
saving power has come to be regarded as 
marking the formal entry of a person into the 
numbers of the lay-disciples of The Buddha; 
the recitation of which thus, in a sense, may be 
regarded as the equivalent of the Christian 
baptism, or to the public enunciation of one of 
the various Christian creeds. This formula is 
known in Pali as the Ti-sarana or Threefold 



20 THE BELIGION OF BURMA 

Refuge -formula ; it runs : " Buddharh saranam 
gacchami, Dhammam saranam gacchami. Sail- 
gharh saranam gacchami " " I go to the 
Buddha as my Refuge (or, as my Guide), I go 
to the Truth as my Refuge, I go to the Order 
as my Refuge"- the whole formulary being 
thrice recited. This recitation marks the 
beginning of every religious function in Burma> 
from the offering of a few flowers by a child 
at the local sanctuary to the public acceptation^ 
at the hands of a Chapter of the Order of the 
higher degree of Ordination into the Monastic 
Brotherhood, on the part of an adult novice. 
Having now given, in these introductory pages y 
a general idea of the nature, significance, and 
origin of the religion, we may most conveniently 
classify its details under the three headings 
of the Members of that Ti-ratana, that Three- 
fold Precious Treasure, wherein the Buddhist 
seeks, as we have seen, his Refuge and his 
Guide in life the Treasure of the Enlightened 



THE EELIGION OP BUBMA 21 

One, the Exalted Lord, the Buddha; the 
Treasure of the Most Excellent Law, the 
Truth or Dhamma- ; the Treasure of the 
Holy Brotherhood, the Community of the 
Sangha. One might briefly sum up the Holy 
Three The Teacher, The Teaching, and The 
Taught. 

II 

THE BUDDHA 

The word Buddha, from the Indo-Aryan 
root- word Buddh, to be awake, aware, and 
hence to know, signifies the Awakened, or 
the Illuminated, or Enlightened One; it 
is thus not a name, but a title, the desig- 
nation of an office or state of attainment. 
Correctly speaking, it is to the office, rather 
than to the holder of it, that reference is made 
in the above-cited Formula of the Threefold 



22 THE RELIGION 1 OF BURMA 

Refuge; but, in just the same way as a 
British subject, speaking at the present time, 
might use the term "The King," meaning 
George V, so the Buddhist, in common usage, 
speaks of " The Buddha " as meaning the 
particular Indian Sage who founded the 
present Buddhist Religion. Buddhist escha- 
tology informs us that alike in this world 
as in others (for Buddhism teaches the exist- 
ence of innumerable inhabited worlds besides 
our own), there arises, from time to time, a 
man who, by dint of long search after Truth, 
sought for the sake of the salvation of suffering 
beings, attains by his own effort to Supreme 
Enlightenment, to Sammasambodhi or Very 
Buddhahood ; and, having so attained, He 
announces to all mankind "The Way," by 
following which they likewise may attain to 
this same Goal of Perfected Wisdom and 
Compassion. Those who, following the " Truth 
and Discipline " set forth by a Very Buddha^ 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 23 

reach in this life to the same ultimate Goal 
of Perfected Being are termed, not Buddhas, 
but Arahans, meaning the Exalted or Honored 
Ones ; whilst yet a third class, who win again 
by their own effort, protracted through many 
lives, to the Goal of Perfection, finding the 
Way for themselves, instead of following the 
Way taught by a Very Buddha are termed 
Pacceka-Buddhas (Skt. Pratyeka-Buddha, 
meaning, enlightened by self -effort). These 
differ from a Very Buddha in this that not having 
sought the Truth for the sake of others, but 
only for their own deliverance, they lack the 
special " Iddhi of the Dhamma " the Power 
of the Truth which enables a Very Buddha 
so to frame words as will best move the hearts 
of His fellow-beings and bring them also to 
seek out the " Way of Peace ". Buddhism 
teaches, in a specially modified sense which we 
shall presently consider, the Doctrine of Trans- 
migration teaches, that is, that every living 



24 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

being both has lived before this present birth, 
and will continue in existence hereafter ; and, in 
accordance with its root-conception of Causation, 
it makes the state of each birth causally depend- 
ent on the acts of those which preceded it. 
The qualifications, therefore, for the subsequent 
attainment of the status of a Very Buddha 
are, first, an immense and all-dominating 
compassion for the suffering involved in 
life, and the desire to find some Truth so 
great that by its application beings may 
achieve eternal relief ,from the suffering of 
repeated transmigration ; secondly, the practice, 
with this end in view, of certain Ten High 
Virtues 1 (Dasa Paramita, in Pali) perfecting 
himself in these through the devotion and 
self-sacrifice of many following lives ; thirdly, 
the self-destined Buddha, thus suffused 

1 The ten are : Dana, Charity ; Sila, Morality ; Nekkhamma, 
Benunciation ; Panna, Wisdom ; Viriya, Strenuousness j Khanti, 
Patience; Sacca, Truthfulness j Adhitthana, Eesolution ; Metta s 
Loving-kindness ; and Upekha, Resignation, or aloofness from the 
world's desires. 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 25 

with Pity past all measuring, aspiring to 
attainment of the Supreme Enlightenment for 
that suffering's relief, must solemnly devote 
himself to this stupendous task in the presence 
of a Very Buddha, and must thereafter practise 
the Ten High Virtues through manifold 
successive lives, until the necessary " Power 
of the Truth" is won. 

One who possesses these qualifications and 
has so definitely decided that, instead of seek- 
ing out the Truth for himself, so reaching 
Nibbana and passing " Beyond " all life, he 
will continue suffering rebirth after rebirth, 
in order that he may become a Very Buddha, 
is termed a Bodhisatta, or Buddha-To-Be, 
from the era of his self-devotion to this task 
until his attainment of Very Buddhahood. 
He, who for this our own world is now known 
as The Buddha, thus perfected Himself in the 
Ten High Virtues for five hundred and fifty 
successive lives, in any one of which He might 



26 THE BELIGION OF BURMA 

so high already was the nature and degree 
of His spiritual attainment in even the first 
of them- have won to Arahanship, have 
attained Nibbana and so secured His own 
immediate and everlasting Peace, had He not 
thus devoted Himself, at the expense of His 
own spiritual progress and attainment, to life 
after life of self-renunciation, of arduous 
practice of the High Perfections, so that He 
might in the end throw wide the Way of Peace 
to all. 1 

1 All these details as to the previous existence of the Buddha, 
His renunciation, as Bodhisatta, of His own immediate spiritual 
welfare for the sake of others, and so forth, are, it may appear, of 
the nature of dogmas of ew-cathedra statements of facts beyond the 
possibility of demonstration. This, however, is not the case ; they 
are, primarily, facts ascertained by the insight of The Buddha, and 
placed on record by His disciples ; accepted, indeed, " on faith," by 
His present followers, though it is a reasoned belief rather than 
mere blind faith reasoned, that is, from the circumstance that 
wherever we can test the truth of a statement of The Buddha (as 
in the case of the two first of the Four Noble Truths) we find His 
statements absolutely true. But the point is, first, that belief in 
these details is not necessary to the Buddhist ; a man might be 
truly a Buddhist in our sense without accepting them at all ; and, 
secondly, the chief fact to which our attention is directed in con- 
nection with them is the nature of the ideal they portray. That ideal 
Selflessness, renunciation of self-interest for others' sake is 
Buddhism, and is essential. 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 27 

Passing from these traditional details as to 
the previous lives of the Bodhisatta to the 
historical facts concerning His last existence,, 
we find that He, who was presently to receive 
the adoration of more followers than any other 
of the great teachers of humanity, was born in 
Northern India in the earlier half of the sixth 
century before Christ, as son of Suddhodana^ 
the King or Chief of an aristocratic and proud 
Aryan clan known as the Sakyas, " the Capable 
Ones". The limitations of the present essay 
as to space, and the wide extent of the ground 
that must yet be covered if we are to give even 
a mere outline of what the religion of Burma 
teaches and implies, make it impossible that 
we should give more than the barest outline of 
the story of this Life which has changed the 
history of Asia, and may yet change the desti- 
nies of all the world. Those who seek further 
acquaintance with that story and much indeed 
of the wonderful hold of Buddhism on its 



28 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

followers' minds is due directly to its inspiring 
and heart-moving circumstances, so that clear 
insight into the Burmese character can scarce 
be had without this knowledge may find it in 
The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold ; in The 
Soul of a ^People by Fielding Hall; Bigandet's 
Life and Teaching of Gaudama the Buddha ; and 
in several other current works. Here we 
confine ourselves to the briefest possible outline. 
Born the son of King Suddhodana and 
Queen Mayadevi, the birth-name of Sid- 
dhattha, " The All-Prospering," was given to 
the illustrious subject of this sketch. Marked 
out from His very nativity as of world-changing 
destiny for the Brahmanas of His father's court 
had announced that either He would become a 
CdkkavaHin, a world-ruling Emperor, or else, 
renouncing earthly conquest, home and king- 
dom, He would attain to the Supreme Enlighten- 
ment, to Universal Empire in the far more 
glorious Kingdom of Truth the young 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Prince, commonly known in after-life by His 
clan-name of Gotama, was from His cradle 
surrounded with all the pomp and luxury and 
circumstance that an oriental court of those 
days could bestow. The worldly heart of His 
royal father, moved by that selfsame spirit of 
contempt for the realities of life which makes a 
changing of their native religion, at dictate 
of " high interests of State," possible even for 
modern royalties, desired for his Son no spirit- 
ual empire, but only the worldly kingship won 
at the cost of the suffering of thousands ; and 
dreamed of the Prince as adding kingdom unto 
kingdom, till all the earth should own His 
sway. Kemembering the prophecy of the 
greatest among the sages who had prophesied 
the Prince's future glory, that of the two paths 
of life but one the path of spiritual achieve- 
ment lay truly open for the Prince to tread ; 
remembering, also, how that sage had told 
him further that his Son would be inspired 



30 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

to leave the world when He should learn how 
sickness, suffering, and death were .common 
heritage of all that live, the King ordained 
that the young Prince should be brought up in a 
palace from which all sight and mention of these 
evils should be banished ; thinking thus to hide 
from Him all motive to compassion, until He 
should have entered past all doubting into the 
course of earthly conquest and of human rule. 
So, shielded from all knowledge of the wide 
world's suffering, surrounded by young and 
lovely playfellows, all eager to secure that 
never a careless word should whisper, in 
His heart, of misery without those guarded 
palace-walls ; girt by a never-ending stream of 
pleasure and instruction in the sports and 
duties of His royal caste, the little Prince grew 
-up from youth to manhood, nor ever dreamed 
of pain, sickness, and sorrow, of old age or 
drear decay or death. Yet even so begirt by 
all that fair conspiracy of silence and of 



THE EELIG10N OF BURMA 31 

worldly love, those round Him noted signs that 
filled the King's too worldly heart with fear. 
Often, he learned, the Prince would fall, de- 
spite all effort of His young companions, into 
deep reverie and silent hours of thought. So 
} when, grown presently to manhood's age, he 
loved and wedded the daughter of a neighboring 
monarch, the Princess Yasodhara, Suddhodana 
rejoiced, thinking that here, in earthly love, 
a fetter stronger than all his palace-guards 
could forge was found. Wedded at nineteen, 
for ten long years no offspring came to Him, 
and the King greatly grieved thereat, lacking 
this second chain of worldly love wherewith to 
bind his Son. 

But vain at last were all the King's pre- 
cautions, as vain at last are all the plans and 
schemes of worldly policy and compromise, 
seeing that all things change, that Death is 
Lord and guerdon of all life. What the present 
might not tell Him, all His selfless past lay 



32 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

ready to reveal ; and the story tells us, with all 
the pomp and circumstance of oriental 
imagery, how Truth at last came homeward 
to the Prince's heart. Even there amidst that 
guarded palace-garden, in the sunlight scented 
with the fairest' flowers of life, the Love that 
would not be denied, the Truth that would not 
be concealed, practised and sought through all 
those previous lives of self-renunciation for the 
world, told Him how all that lives is subject to 
Borrow : to Despair, to Sickness, to Old Age 
and Death. For Him the Veil that hides from 
us the memory of the bygone life and garnered 
wisdom was for a moment lifted ; for Him a 
Vision, seen'H. by no other eyes, appeared; a 
Voice that none else might hear spoke from 
the immemorial past ; and, even as He rode in 
His chariot with His chief comrade, Truth 
the bitter truth about the world came home> 

Men of those days in India had realised how 
no one could follow in the path of worldly 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 38 

compromise, and at the same time win the 
inner hidden Kingdom of Spiritual Truth and 
Life. So it had become the custom, when a 
man had heard the call of the religious life, 
that he should leave all home and friends 
and every circumstance of worldly welfare 
and, clad in the orange robe of the religious, 
wander about the earth, even as he was 
wandering through the deeper reaches of the 
mind's wide kingdom, begging his daily food 
from the charity of the poorest of his fellow - 
men. Sickness, Old Age, and Death, each in 
His vision appeared, personified before the 
Prince's wondering, pitying gaze ; and last of 
all there stood before Him the simulacrum 
of one of these ascetic Wanderers ; whereat 
the bygone sleeping memory stirred within 
His heart, and He saw and understood 
what it behoved Him then to do. Could 
Truth live in a palace, or the anodyne for all 
this mass of Suffering be found amidst that 



34 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

acme of the worldly life He then was living ? 
Nay, surely ; and then and there the Prince 
resolved that even that, night He would go 
forth, a homeless Wanderer, to seek the Way 
of Liberation for the healing of the sorrow 
of the "world. 

And then, just when the King's last 
hope had really crumbled into dust, then, 
as He returned, silent and thoughtful from 
that last chariot-drive, they brought Him 
the news Suddhodana so long had look- 
ed for, news that there was born to Him 
a child, a son. Hanging upon His words, 
the attendants, little comprehending, heard 
him murmur : " This is, indeed, another Fetter I 
must break " and so, thereafter, they named His 
son as Hahula, The Fetter ; and later, when he had 
become one of his exalted Father's followers, he 
bore that name, even in the Brotherhood itself. 

That night, when all lay sleeping, the Prince, 
summoning His faithful charioteer, rode forth 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 35 

from home and kingdom, from wife and child, 
from luxury and love ; and, at the boundary of 
His father's little kingdom, cast aside His 
royal dress and went away, clad in the 
Wanderer's Yellow Eobe, never again to see 
the faces He had loved until Supreme En- 
lightenment had widened for His heart the 
boundaries of Love's Empire, till they included 
the infinitude of every being that has life. He, 
bred upon the lap of luxury, henceforth was to 
live on such poor food as charity might offer ; 
brought up in a palace, henceforth the earth 
must be His couch ; no longer Prince, He 
dwelt among earth's humblest, but earth's 
holiest ; for He had done what was truly great. 
He had set aside the path of compromise with 
worldly wisdom and the estimation of His royal 
kinsfolk; had cast aside that shadow of pos- 
session which worldly men deem real, for the 
Heart's Light within, the true kingdom of 
spiritual possession. 



36 THE RELIGION OF BURMA. 

And yet, so far, it was but for a dream, a 
hope, tliat He had made this Great Kenuncia- 
tion. 1 In His heart there lay no store of inner 
knowledge such as might seem to offer rec- 
ompense for all He cast aside ; it was but a 
hope that shone before Him, and not unseldom, 
we may be sure, a hope that seemed well-nigh 
despairing. Surely somewhere, somehow, a 
sovereign remedy for all life's pain must hide I 

For six long years He sought it that hope 
so near as all, and yet so hard to find. Men 
then believed that Wisdom might be won only 
by starving, torturing the body ; they thought, 
like the ascetics of all climes and ages, that 
Insight might be gained only by treating as an 
enemy, the body of this life. As has been said, 

i It is to this event of " The Going-forth from Home "His 
Pa&bajja that the Buddhist world in general gives the title of 
"The Great Renunciation", But more truly, perhaps, may that 
term be applied to some still greater episode of the interior, the 
spiritual life of the Exalted Lord, perhaps to His decision, after 
the Supreme Attainment, to declare the Liberating Truth for the 
Healing of All Life instead of entering the Peace at once, or, 
perhaps, to some event even beyond our possibilities of thinking. 



THE EELIGION OF BURMA 37 

the religious of India in that time won to 
depths of spiritual attainment far beyond 
aught that the West-Aryan yet has learned ; 
they knew the way, by intense inward contem- 
plation, to wake up from this our waking state 
as a man wakes out of dreams ; to enter realm 

* 

after realm of spiritual attainment, depth after 
depth of being's mystery, so that whilst the 
earthly body lay entranced, the mind wandered 
free through heights and depths of ecstasy, of 
being so intense that our thought can never com- 
pass it, just as in dreams we cannot grasp the 
clearer vivid consciousness of waking life. 
What the wise then knew, quickly the erst- 
while Prince now gathered, passing from sage 
to sage, learning their methods, and practising 
alike their modes of inward ecstasy and their 
austerities, until at last there lived no sage, no 
Holy One amongst them, all, who had won 
further into Being's depths than He ; or any 
Wanderer so famed, even there in India, where 



38 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

asceticism long had reached to the very ultimate 
of human endurance, for the awful rigor of 
His penances, the strictness of His vigils and 
His fasts. 

To the very heights of Being He attained- 
to that supreme, that ultimate of conscious 
Being, known in India as the Brahman or the 
Paramatman ; the uttermost of Selfhood, the 
Light of Life whereto all this Universe is as it 
were but a shadow ; this living, breathing, 
manifold existence but the wavering darkness 
of Its multiscient Light. To that Supremest 
Cosmic Consciousness He won, and yet turned 
back to earth in what approached despair, 
As indeed all others who thus had reached 
that Higher Self of all the Universe, had also 
seen, in the light of the wide-reaching under- 
standing that that attainment of itself involves, 
so He saw that even here was no Finality, ,no 
Endless Peace such as He had sought for the 
Liberation of All Life. There too, howsoever 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 39 

exalted, howsoever subtle and supreme that 
Ultimate of Life might be -there too reigned 
Selfhood ; and there, thence, Desire ; even as 
one of India's ancient sages sang: "In the 
beginning Desire arose in That, wliich was the 
Germ,, the Origin of Mind." Subtle and high as 
It might be, It still lay under the fell bondage 
of Desire ; and, as the Rshis taught, that 
Brahman, desiring, had emanated all this 
Universe in Its creative thought, and when at 
last, after the " Age of Brahma " all living 
things had once again, through paths of 
suffering life innumerable, won back to that 
Supreme of Being, even then, after the vast 
period of rest in the " Night of Brahma," 
once more the uudestroyed Desire must 
spring; once more a new, another torture- 
teeming Universe come forth and so on to 
eternity. 

But it was just from this same awful Cycle 
of Unending Life inalienably involved in Pain, 



40 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

that He, now grown so wise, sought refuge 
and a Way of Liberationa final Peace, a Goal 
secure, not destined to be lost again, was the 
one remedy for all this pain-filled self-repeat- 
ing life. Finding that in these spiritual 
attainments of the Rshis, and in the dread 
austerities they practised, lay -not that sure 
Peace He hoped to win, He turned away alike 
from system and from practices ; and then it 
was that the little body of disciples, five in 
number, who had so far followed Him -hoping 
to win guerdon of their service when He should 
gain the Ultimate Enlightenment deserted 
Him in that hour of disappointment and despair. 
He, who had so starved His body as never 
another saint in India, once more took food 
sufficient for proper nourishment of His frame ; 
and so these five, daring, as ever the little- 
minded dare, to judge their Master's conduct, 
left Him, thinking that now He never 
would attain. 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 41 

But ever the darkest hour precedes the dawii, 
and so it was with the Bodhisatta. We may 
well see how, at that self-righteous judgment 
and desertion, His thoughts must have well- 
nigh a moment wavered, must have turned back 
to all that real-seeming life that He had cast 
away for this. When His disciples left 
Him in petty scorn, because He not only 
perceived that the ascetic practice of six long 
torturing years was all an error, a mistake 
that no Way of Liberation ever could open up 
that way but also had the moral courage then 
and there to leave a practice He had seen was 
useless ; weakened by long fast and vigil, 
wearied as even the greatest must weary of 
the littleness of life, the futility of all our 
utmost striving ; then, we may well conceive 
how even that compassionate Heart must once 
again have turned to the thought of all the 
worldly welfare He had left behind. Father 
and wife and child, old faces and beloved 



42 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

companions of His youth ; the throne that waited 
still and prayed for Him ; the visible reality of 
kingship He had left behind ; how these things 
must all have called to Him now, deserted, 
discredited, abandoned, because even in defeat 
He would not for a moment follow on a path 
that once He saw could not lead to the G-oal 
He sought ! Not for Himself, but for helping 
mankind, the suffering, pain -filled world, 
had He abandoned all these things : and yet, 
at fancied rumor of a temporary defeat, those 
who to Him represented the world for which 
He had so arduously striven, left Him 
discredited, alone ! The Books relate, once 
more in oriental trope and imagery, how this 
last terrible temptation 'came to Him ; how 
Mara the Tempter of men's hearts, the Spirit 
of Worldiness that lives in each of us, 
marshalled his hosts for conflict the last great 
battle for the mastery between the good and 
evil of that incomparable mind. There in the 



THE BELIGION OF BURMA 43 

solitary jungle came the conflict, as, seated 
beneath the Tree thereafter sacred to His 
memory, He passed in review the painful 
struggle of those six arduous years. 
Had he not tried it all> proved every 
path by personal effort, won to the very 
highest State of Being of which the ancient 
saints had sung ? He was profoundly acquaint- 
ed with states of being so high and wonderful 
that men might spend whole lives in seeking 
them, and yet could not attain ; the ancient 
saints said this was all ; that beyond That 
Brahman was -no further progress' It 3 the 
Ultimate of Life and yet, even in That was 
still a bondage, even that Heart of Being still 
was subject to the Law of Change, subject, 
since Desire still reigned in It. Desire ! Eron* 
height to depth of life Desire was King ; and 
the root of this Desire lay hidden and protected 
in the very citadel of Self, of Life ! If from 
that all-dominant Desire, even in the Ultimate 



44 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

of Life, the Self Supreme a Selfhood widened 
till its boundaries embraced even the whole of 
life was no escape, how should there be ever 
a deliverance out of suffering ; seeing that 
Sorrow's Cause lies in Desire, in Self-desire 
alone ? What use, indeed, to give up all the 
goods of life, to cast aside the world in search 
of Liberation for All Life, if so one but 
exchanged the lower bondage for the higher ; 
the gross desires of worldly life, the petty 
kingdom of the lower selfhood, for that all- 
immanent and all-including Selfhood of the 
Brahman if so one but exchanged the suffer- 
ing of years for that of aeons ; if even Brahman 
still was Selfhood, subject still to that grim 
Law whereby pain follows every thought for 
self ? 

So, to the Bodhisatta seated solitary beneath 
the Tree, now termed the Bodhi-tree or Tree 
of Wisdom, came home the Great Tempta- 
tion, the conflict with Mara the Wicked 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 45 

and his host, the powers of evil dramatised 
to vivid Selfhood in His mind : the final 
struggle in that great mind -empire for the 
mastery betwixt the powers of evil and of 
good. In the end (as always in the end) 
the nobler triumphed ; the evil perished never 
to rise within that Heart again. Even as 
He seated Himself beneath the Tree of 
Wisdom, the Bodhisatta made the Great Be- 
solve : " Never ivill I arise from this place, 
though this My frame shall perish of starvation 
not though the blood within these veins shall 
cease to flow, till I have won Enlightenment 
Supreme" When at last the final dire 
temptation the image of the weeping wife 
calling Him back to glory and to love was 
vanquished and had fled, then, before that 
searching mental Vision sprang open the sealed 
doorways of a new, another Pathway, a Path, 
the very name of which had died out of the 
memory of earth's holiest ; the Path which 



46 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

leads to Liberation from all thraldom ; the 
Way of Selflessness which reaches to Life's 
Further Shore. Through the long sequent 
line of many a bygone and forgotten life He 
looked back to that time wherein, meeting 
Dipankara, the Very Buddha of an age well- 
nigh unthinkably remote. He, then named 
Sumedha, an ascetic Wanderer already come 
near to the fulfilment of all holiness, had 
turned back from the Path that Dipankara, the 
Blessed One, had opened to His followers ; 
and then, before that holy Exalted One, had 
taken the Great Resolve Himself to become 
a Very Buddha for the salvation of the worlds. 
Through it all He now, in the light of the 
new great Dawn that was upon Him, traced 
the clear causal line of this high Path of Peace. 
Not through the well-known Way of Indian 
saints and sages, mounting from height to 
height of being, yet ever bound by chains 
of subtler-growing Selfhood, stretched this 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 47 

high Path, so new and yet so old ; not through 
the successive planes of consciousness ; but 
through the Way of Selflessness that Path 
extended, outcome of acts innumerable of 
self-renunciation, its motive power Compassion 
pity for suffering life grown great and 
strong, till it embraced all things that live. 
As one whose mind had opened to perception 
of a fourth spatial dimension might under- 
stand, the way to it lay equally from high 
or low, from up or down, in three-dimen- 
sional space, so now He saw how this new Path 
led equally from highest as from lowest realms 
of conscious life. Wherever in the All of 
conscious life there reigns no thought of self, 
there lies that Path of Peace ; so hard to win, 
and yet so nigh to all. Looking deeper yet in 
that profoundest meditation, He saw behind 
the causal sequences of all those lives the 
power that moved them all the twelve-linked 
Cycle of Causation Nescience, Ignorance, 



48 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Not-Understanding, giving birth through an 
inevitable sequence to conscious Life, to 
Change, to Death, and so to Life once more ; 
and here again His growing Insight showed 
Him how Self the Enemy lay at the root of 
all this cycle of self-repeating change ; how, 
when the thought and hope of self died, 
with it, too, died the power of Life's Law, 
the power which brings about birth and death. 
And so, finishing the Path, He came to 
where its end is ? in a State beyond All Life, 
wherein the triple fires of Nescience Craving, 
and Hatred, and the Delusion of the Self no 
more can burn ; to That which is the Goal 
and Hope of Life, the State of Peace that 
reigns where self is dead. Fruition of all life, 
and yet Beyond and Other than all life, it 
grows but from the ashes of the self outburnt ; 
as from the seed's decay and utter dissolution, 
from the mire and darkness of the earth, 
springs forth the flower to sunlight and the 



THE RELIGION OF BTJBMA 4$ 

wide-extending air. Freed from all mental 
"^bondages, Conqueror of Self, Master of the 
Hidden Mysteries of Pain and Birth and Death :> 
a Very Buddha, Utterly Enlightened, with the 
great Knowledge in His Heart whereby whoso 
should follow it should likewise win Mbbana's 
Peace : so He attained His Aim, His Hope, 
His Goal : so won the Healing Truth that 
salves the fever of this life enselfed ; saw, 
yet beyond all life, a new, another, and a 
final Light. 

So, with the dawning sun that saw the end 
of that great night's Temptation and Attain- 
ment; 80^ with the vaster, ultra-cosmic dawn 
of Utter Wisdom in His Heart, once more the 
Way of Peace stood open to the world. Millions 
unnumbered since that day have followed in 
the Way He showed; and even now, when 
half five thousand years have well-nigh sped, 
millions still seek it, -still turn to it as Hope, 
and Light of Life, and Goal. Over this land of 

4, 



50 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

Burma, where these words are written, it still 
reigns supreme ; its message written over 
all the land in shrine and monastery and 
temple ; written still deeper in the hearts and 
lives of women and of men. Forty long years 
after that supreme Illumination, The Master 
lived and taught His growing band of follow- 
ers ; passing at last Himself from life for ever, 
into the Silence, the Utter Peace whereunto 

* 

He had shown the Way. 

All that long ministry of Love and Wisdom 
we must needs pass over; and if it shall 
appear that too much space has even now been 
given to these earlier, striving, searching years 
rather than to the longer period when their 
fruits were garnering, the answer is that in 
these earlier years the secret of The Master's 
power over Burmese hearts lies hid. Become 
a Very Buddha, won to Full Enlightenment, 
freed from the Chains of Selfhood, Master and 
Teacher of the Gods and men, His personality 



THE EELIGION OF BURMA 51 

submerged in His all-dominating Office, men's 
hearts refuse to think of Him so Holy and so 
High. But when, like all of us, He knew not ; 
when, for pity of the pain of all that lives. 
He gave up all that men hold dear to follow 
what the worldly deem a shadow ; when He 
made mistakes, as in those six long years of 
vain self-torture, and learning their vanity, 
was forsaken by His disciples in that He could 
no longer follow what He saw to be untrue : 
then, there, the hearts of men can echo in 
response to Him, then the thought of Him can 
thrill our lives to greater nobleness ; stirring 
our life's depths until we long yet ah! how 
vainly long to grow a little nearer to His 
likeness, to live a little nearer to the life He 
lived! 

Only one thing more can here be told of 
that great life : a fact which cannot be omitted 
here, for without its deep significance the 
whole incomparable history of Buddhism could 



52 THE 'RELIGION'' 'OF "BURMA 

not be understood. It is the fact that, when 
He passed away. His near disciples, looking 
back on all those years of constant teaching 
and example, could say of Him : " So passed 
away the Great, the Loving Teacher } who never 
spake an angry or a cruel word." Only that s 
and yet what blessing for humanity has not 
been hidden in that brief pregnant summary 
of a lifegreater than any life amongst the 
myriads of the sons of men ! A Teacher of 
Religion, the Founder of a great religion, 
who lived amongst His fellows, these holding 
views and following creeds the most divers ; 
who lived and taught for forty years the 
new Truth He had found, the Truth where^ 
with He burned to help His fellow-men ^ 
and yet, who never spoke an angry or 
a cruel word I Think, you that read, what 
potency of truth lies hidden in that little 
sentence. Forty years' ministry of teaching, 
and never an angry word no word of blame 



THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 53 

or harsh denunciation of the worldly of His 

time; no threatenings of hell for those who 

would not follow in the way He taught ! It 

is because His followers could truly say that 

of His life, that, in such contrast to all other 

of the world's great faiths, Buddhists : this day 

can boast that on their Creed's behalf has never 

one drop of blood been shed, never a persecution 

waged, never a "Holy War " been prosecuted ; 

although to-day five hundred million human 

beings have taken refuge in His Name, His 

Truth. To the Buddhist, that fact, did it 

stand alone, were proof beyond traversing 

of His religion's truth. For men who fcnow, 

no longer fight or angrily denounce each other ; 

where Wisdom is, there is perfect tolerance. 

The things for which men war are false by that 

same proof that where hatred and denunciation 

reign, there Truth is not. Think of the bitter 

wordy warfare of the logomachic pseudo-science 

of the Middle Ages in Europe, of the 



54 THE EELIGION OE BURMA 

interminable controversies which raged between 
the different bodies of scholastics then ; contrast 
this with the relative peace of modern science 
at least where fundamental matters are- 
concerned and at once this attitude is obvious, 
Over acknowledged fads such as the Law of 
Gravitation nowadays appears no vainest or 
most foolish man ever has lifted hand in wrath 
against his fellows ; it is the fancies that men 
fight for; in defence of vain and false 
imaginations that they hate, oppose, and fight. 
After even this brief account of that first 
of the " Three Jewels " or K-efuges, The 
Buddha, the nature of the Second Member of 
the Buddhist Triad will in part already seem 
clear. In His last message to the world, 
The Master said to His disciples : " Do not 
tiling after I am gone ( Our Teacher is no- 
longer 'With us. 3 The_ TT^Sk Jh^JL .haveJaugM, 

J5 and so it has 



been to this day. The Master's life and The 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 55 

Master's Teaching, these are but parts 
reciprocal of one great Truth ; that life was 
the Truth in terms of human action ; that 
Truth is but the Way whereby we seek to 
follow Him. Therefore it is that in this article 
so much space has been given to the story of 
The Buddha ; with that His Teaching at once 
grows clear and luminous; without it much 
must needs be little understood. 

Ill 

THE DHAMMA 

The Dhamma (Skt. Dharma), the second of 
the Three Great Refuges, is then the Teaching 
which The Master left us in His stead. 
Derived from a root- word meaning " to mani- 
festly exist," "to palpably appear," we may 
transcribe it as The Truth, as has been done in 
these pages ; or as The Law, the causal 



56 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

sequence of the deeper things of life. As 
a Law carries out a series of phenomena, or 
as clear Truth alone can carry us over the 
trackless waters of life's ocean to the Goal 
Unseen beyond, so also has the root Dhar the 
secondary meaning of "that which bears, or 
carries 9 or conveys ". 

All Buddhist Truth was summed up by a 
great disciple of The Master in a single 
stanza : To abstain from all evil ; To fulfil all 
Good; And to purify the Heart This is the 
TeacMng of the Biiddhas. The first term, To 
abstain from all evil, sums up the whole 
body of Buddhist practical ethics on its negative 
side; it is summarised in the word Stta, 
meaning Harmony or Virtue ; and it includes 
all the ordinances of The Master as to 
those things His followers should avoid. In 
practice it becomes the Five Great Precepts 
five commandments binding on every Buddhist, 
which commonly are recited in the ancient 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 5? 

language of the Sacred Texts, the Magadhi, 
after the Refuge-formula detailed above. The 
Five are : Not to take life ; Not to take 
property ; Not to commit impurity ; Not to 
lie or slander or use harsh speech ; and Not to 
use intoxicating liquors. These Five Precepts 
are absolutely binding on every humblest 
follower of The Master; they constitute the 
essential minimum of Buddhist ethics, and he 
who constantly violates any one of them is no 
Buddhist, however loud his proclamation of his 
faith may be. Buddhism is Understanding 
Truth, and hence since what we really under- 
stand, we do (as we understand " fire burns," 
and so abstain from touching burning coals) 
it is to act accordingly. It is understood 
that men are human, fallible-^-that a man may 
break any or even all of these Five Precepts 
now and then ; but if, considering (as the 
Buddhist is taught constantly to do) his 
conduct, he finds he has so erred, he still can 



58 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

set things right by 'actual repentance, by using 
his every effort to abstain from a like mistake 
in future.. 

To this irreducible minimum of the Five 
Precepts, the pious Buddhist layman frequently 
of his own accord sets himself to observe three 
more : Not to take food after noon (as such 
is held to conduce to sloth and to impurity) ; 
Not to use high or broad seats or couches 
(which in the East, where the floor is the 
common sitting-place, betokens pride and 
luxury) ; Not to use personal adornments, scents, 
and unguents, and to abstain from witnessing 
dancing, shows, and plays. These Bight 
Precepts- regarded, as to the three last of 
them, as binding only for the day on which 
they are assumed are commonly taken on the 
Buddhist " Sabbath," a movable fast-day or 
feast-day, dependent on the changes of the moon, 
and so following roughly at intervals of a 
week. 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

On these Uposatha days, especially during the 
period of the " Buddhist Lent " (three months, 
roughly July, August, September, the time 
of the rains in the birthplace of Buddhism, the 
Grangetie valley), men, women, and children,, 
and especially the elders, leave off work, and 
repair to the neighborhood of the local 
Monastery, where there is nearly always a 
separate rest-house for their accommodation. 
Here, during the morning, the women 
prepare the day's one meal for Monks and 
Novices, as well as for themselves and families,, 
wait on the Monks before meal-time, and 
" take the Refuges and the Precepts," Five 
or Eight according to their wish. In general 
it is the elders of both sexes who elect to 
take the extra three Precepts, whilst the 
younger generation take but the usual Five, 
and so can have their ordinary evening meal- 
After the chief meal of the day -which for 
Monks and Novices and those among the laity 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

who have taken the Eight Precepts must be 
iinished before middayall generally repair 
to the Monastery itself, and listen to an ex- 
position of the Dhamma by some senior Member 
-of the Order ; thereafter returning to the 
rest-house, they spend the remainder of the 
day in meditation and the practice of their 
various devotions. Not uncommonly since 
the psychology of Buddhism is a favorite study 
in Burma, even with the laity they pass a 
part of the time in discussion of the preaching 
they have heard, or of some special point in 
the profound Abhidhamma, the portion of the 
Scriptures devoted to the consideration of the 
processes of Thought and of Life ; or, as we 
might translate the term, the Psychology of 
Buddhism. 

Of the further extensions of SUa, Virtue 3 this 
first caption of the Law the ten Precepts of 
the Novice and the 227 Rules which regulate 
the conduct of the Monk^further mention will 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 61 

be made in the discussion of the Third Great 
Treasure, the Sangha-Ratana, or Treasure of the 
Brotherhood. Here we need only call attention 
to the underlying principle of all these various 
commandments : they all involve the beginnings 
of self -restraint ; they are all imposed and have 
their rationale in that the commission of the 
actions forbidden involves the infliction of pain, 
of loss and suffering of some sort on others. 
Thus, from the very beginnings of his teaching* 
from the very commencement of his life, the 
Buddhist-born is trained up to self-restraint, 
to the giving up of acts that would inflict loss 
or suffering on other lives. Thus early in the 
Law appears that Doctrine of Selflessness in 
practice, which, as we shall later see, crowns 
the whole edifice of Buddhist Teaching. 

The second term of our threefold Dhamma* 
text, To fulfil all Good, sums up the next great 
chapter of Buddhist practice. This is termed 
Dana, Charity in every sense of the word, and 



62 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

it includes the whole of what we may term the 
active side of morality, just as Sila covers and 
includes the negative aspects. It is as though 
the religion begins with the very lowest type 
of man that base and ignorant type which is 
accessible to fear alone by telling him : " This 
life is not all ; nothing that is, but must in some 
form .be again ; out of this present life you 
must surely die, and just as surely take rebirth. 
See how unevenly are apportioned the lots of 
living things ; some bound into low and loath- 
some forms of insects and of animals ; and, even 
amongst mankind, some great and prosperous 
and noble, others poor and wretched and 
debased. None can escape from death, and 
death is but the porfcal of another life. Just 
as the thistle-seed gives rise to thistles only and 
the good rice to rice alone, so is it with the lives 
of men and animals, for through all life 
Oausation reigns supreme. If then, you would 
avoid these low, base, wretched, and ignoble 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 63 

lives or others yet the sages wot of, lives 

i 

filled with horror and remorse and pain for 
evil deeds wrought in the past then you must 
practise Sila, Virtue, true morality ; that is the 
one method of escape from all that threaten- 
ing mass of pain." 

But to the man who albeit from the basest 
of all motives, fear practises even the mere 
Five Precepts, there comes an inward growth 
which makes of him a nobler, hence happier 
man. For 'all that, Sila is really self-renuncia- 
tion; and when, growing thus wiser, the 
humblest follower of The Master comes to the 
second stage of growth, then the Law speaks a 
new, a greater message : the message of Dana, 
Charity and Love. " It is not enough," it says, 
6t only to secure your freedom from the lower, 
pain -filled lives ; there is a greater hope than 
this. If, in addition to mere abstention from 
the evil, you will fulfil and practise Good ; if 
you will feed the holy poor those who are 



64 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

sick and weak and old ; if you will give of 
your substance to the world about you, taking 
thought for others' sorrows, helping to relieve 
what suffering can be relieved by generous gift 
of wealth and food and care ; then again will the 
Great Law act in its inevitable sequences. By 
avoiding evil, you escape from base and evil 
lives ; by practising Charity you further ensure 
to yourself lives full of happiness and joy; 
lives full of earthly bliss, or, higher yet than 
you can think of, lives of the bright, the 
Heaven-dwelling-Ones the denizens of holier^ 
happier spheres than this our world." And so 
that man, still for no high, exalted motive, 
but yet for one not all so base as fear -so that 

V 

man, out of self-interest^ thinking : " Thus will 
I, giving now a little of my wealth, secure 
unbounded riches in the lives to come," sets out 
in practice of this second task; he gives of his 
goods, his wealth, his help, his care to those 
less fortunate in life than he ; he relieves the 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 65 

destitute, is father to the fatherless, gives 
shelter to the homeless and unhappy ; using his 
worldly wealth no more for self's sole sake, 
but for the aiding of the weak and poor. 

And here again the Law of Life acts and 
reacts upon the heart of him who gives for 
such is the essence : of Love, which, like a 
magnet, grows but the stronger the more it is 
employed in imparting its magnetism to other 
bars of steel. Starting to, give for love of 
self, of self alone, the very contact with the 
lives and needs of others widen the erstwhile 
petty limits of man's self -hood. Giving to the 
poor, the weak, the desolate ; giving to the 
holy those who have/ renounced all that the 
world holds dear for the sake of Truth and love 
of all -giving to these, ithe confines of his own 
heart's life grow wider ; to include their hopes, 
their sorrows; so that the kingdom of his 
mind, the inner purpose of his being, extends, 
enlarges, and grows nobler each succeeding. 



66 THE EELIGION OP BUftMA 

day. This is the second, deeper Truth the 
Dhamma has to leach us ; how, like a flame of 
fire. Love kindles Love, grows by mere act of 
loving; and nowhere in the world is that great 
Truth more understood and so more followed 
than in this Golden Chersonese. Never was 
there a people more generous, more full of 
charity than this ; it has been the wonder of 
every author who has truly gained an insight 
into the hearts and lives of this most fascinating 
race. All the land is covered with tokens of 
their charity, from the golden glory of the vast 
fabric of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda at Rangoon- 
gilded all over at intervals of a few years, at a 
cost of lakhs of rupees, by voluntary offerings 
of the people to the village well, or Monastery,, 
or rest-house for chance travellers ; down ta 
the little stand containing a few vessels of 
clear cool water, which even the poorest can 
set up by the roadside and keep daily plenished 
for the benefit of thirsty passers-by. 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 67 

In a land where Charity holds so high a 
place, not in the talk, but in the conduct of it& 
daughters and its sons, such poverty as India 
and all western countries experience, is utterly 
unknown. True, in a sense, the vast majority 
of the peasantry are poor poor, that is, as 
judged by the European standard of living, 
, with its manifold and unceasing " wants.". 
But of the poverty that is cruel, harsh, base, 
and sordid ; the poverty of an Indian village 
or a London slum, there is naught at all. The 
poverty that shames and curses western 
nations, that breeds crime and cruelty, that 
starves even little children to death, such is 
unknown in Burma ; and it will remain unknown 
for just so long as they shall hold fast to their 
Love-teaching religion. There is always food 
to be obtained, if not in the layman's house, 
then in the Monastery ; and the doors of the 
Monastery travellers' rest-house stand ever 
open to the poorest wanderer, be he a layman 



68 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

or a Monk. True it is that in much of the 
ceaseless tide of Burmese -charity is somewhat 
of wastefulness; pagoda added to pagoda, 
shrine built by the very side of shrine, great 
meals prepared, too great by far for their 
recipients, the Monks and Monastery -boys and 
.wandering lay-devotees, to eat, so that when 
all have fed, the very dogs can scarce finish 
.the remains; but the Burman would justly 
answer criticism on this point by saying that 
one cannot have too much of what is truly 
good ; and he does not merely talk of charity, 
he lives it in the smallest detail of his daily 

-* 

life; With growing national wisdom for the 
Burmese as yet are but a youthful race, nll_ed 
with youth's joy in life, having the failings as 

-.:._ <J l_ _/..... ' __ v3..__ ,.., 3 _ 

well as the virtues and enthusiasm of youth 
with greater ^experie nee, with their quick 
assimilation of the . new _coD^tioftS. of Jif e^and 
the resultant wider understanding, the Burmese 
will grow, not less, but more wisely charitable. 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA. 69 

As it is, this second Teaching of their Law, 
their Truth, is so lived up to by them as to 
have become the common marvel of all who 
have seen it, all who have realised what 
it means. 

Thirdly, and lastly, in our Text we read : 
To purify the Mind ; and here we enter into that 
domain which differentiates Buddhism from all 
other religions; the realm of its Teaching as 
to the nature, content, and the Goal of Life ; 
the viewpoint of its entire structure. Here it 
is that we pass forthwith into a region so far 
alien, so strange to occidental views of life, 
that most of the modern writers on the subject 
the bulk of them, unhappily, men who 
believed themselves opponents of Buddhism 
(which is tantamount to saying that they had not 
, achieved its meaning) have gone utterly astray. 
All other world-religions, even the wonderful 
philosophies, Vedanta, Sankhya, and others, 
elaborated by the Indian sages, have, following 



70 THE' RELIGION OF BUBMA 

the obvious in life, centred their Universe in 
the concept of the Self just as, in the old: 
Ptolemaic astronomy, moon, sun, and planet, 
and the firmament of stars beyond, all centred 
in and circled round the stable wide expanse of 
the earth. The lesser self of man, the immortal 
soul that tenanted this body of flesh, that 
after life must leave it, "as a man sets aside 
his worn-out clothes " ; that, and the greater 
Self, the Soul Supreme of the Godhead 
whether the thought of it were, limited and 
personal like that of the ancient Hebrews, or 
subtle and well-nigh impersonal like the highest 
transcendental concept of the Indian saints 
those are the two ideas : ideas in fact inter- 
dependent and complementary, wherein all 
other creeds have centred their hope, their 
universe, and their goal. 

And both, in this Buddhist Truth, are not 
merely absent, but actually denied. Just as 
to the men of the Middle Ages to whom 



THE EBLIGION OF BURMA 71 

Copernicus first propounded the doctrine, that 
the earth in fact was not the centre of the 
Universe, that there is in truth no centre, but 
only a constant, ordered flux of change, soon 
to be reduced to definite law by Newton's great 
discovery : just as to those who, in geocentric 
times, first heard this new doctrine of the 
non-centred Universe, the very thought of 
it seemed monstrous and absurd, against the 
constant evidence of sense (for did they not daily 
see the rise of sun and moon and stars, and their 
wide circling round the earth ?) so, to those 
nurtured on the self-centred creeds and world- 
views outside Buddhism, appears at first the 
non- self -centred doctrine of The Buddha's Law. 
Let not the student here imagine we are 
concerned merely with a dogma, with a view 
of life important but in men's imagination or 
belief. In the Anatta Doctrine, or, as it might 
be rendered, the Teaching of Selflessness, we 
have the statement of a fact so profound, so 



72 THE KBLIGION OF BURMA 

true, that every action of the man who holds 
it must needs be modified from what he 
otherwise would have done. On it depends 
the whole of Buddhist Teaching, the three- 
fold practice of its ethics, Morality 3 Charity, 
and Samddhi, or Eight Culture of the Mind ; to 
it, once more, is due that perfect Buddhist 
tolerance and freedom from all persecuting or 
denouncing spirit. Not least significant of all, 
it is the conception towards which the philosophy 
of modern science is steadily bearing the West 
Aryans ; established already in the domain of 
physics, it now is finding ever wider and deeper 
acceptance amongst the foremost thinkers of 
the modern world. 

Briefly stated, this fundamental principle on 
which The Buddha's Truth depends is to the 
effect that there exists, in the light of the 
Highest Wisdom, no Self, and hence no not* 
Self (in the old metaphysical, antinomian sense 
of the term) at all. " Whether high or loiv, great 



THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

* 

or small, gross or subtle, mean or exalted " to 
quote an oft-repeated passage of the Pali canon, 
"there- is no Self at all" and this astounding 
proposition is the chief concept of the final, 
Third Stage of the Buddhist practice : Samddhi 
or Mental Concentration so directed as to lead 
to Panna f) the Higher Wisdom or Insight. Put 
in other words, the meaning of this Doctrine 
of Anatta is, that Life in deepest truth is One 
that the conception of the " I " and the " not-I," 
or " the Universe," as contrasted or separated 
entities is founded on a misapprehension far 
greater and much farther reaching than was 
the old delusion of the geocentric astronomy. 
All Life is One. There is neither in the heart 
of man nor in the heart of heaven any one 
separate and immortal being an existence- 
other and apart from aught in all the worlds. 
This One, this All of Life, so far as we are 
here concerned with it, is subject to Three 
Great Signata or Characteristic Signs or 



74 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Marks : it is Impermanent, and Subject to 
Suffering, and without a Self, or separate 
Soul. 

How the Universe first came to be ; what 
was its origin, the First Cause (to use a phrase 
the Buddhist would deem self -destructive, 
because involving a contradiction in very terms, 
a Cause being really a link in a series which 
is endless like a circle) ; who or what " made " 
it, and all such futile questionings as these 
were answered by The Buddha with the sole 
appropriate reply : with what the Buddhist 
Scriptures term " the Noble Silence of the 
Wise ". The truth is, that to such question- 
ings there is no answer ; our world indeed had 
its beginning it is detailed in an ancient 
Buddhist work in terms singularly like those 
of the modern nebular theory but not the 
Universe ; and, as The Master once explained, 
such questions do not tend to help us ; they 
have no answers, or what answers one might 



TEE RELIGION OF BURMA 75 

frame to them bring us no nearer to our object, 
to the End of Sorrow, to the Goal and the 
Fruition of all Life. Thus The Buddha to His 
interlocutor upon these subjects : 

It ,is as if a man, wounded in battle by a poisoned 
arrow, should say to his friends, -when they came with a 
physician and an antidote, and besought that he should 
let the doctor salve that poisoned wound, or ever the 
poison won into his veins : " But no, I will not have 
the dart drawn out, or the healing salve applied, till I 
have learned whether the man who shot the arrow was 
short or tall, fair or dark, noble or base." That man 
would die, Malankyaputta, ere ever one of all these 
useless questionings could be replied to. 

How true, and how appropriate to these 
problems as to the " Origin of Sin," of Life, 
of all the Universe ; and yet alas for the 
fatuity of human reason it is just about such 
useless and vain problems that men have spilt 
more blood, have waged more cruel wars and 
persecutions than over any other cause of 
human disputation I 

So it is that we find, in the more "doctrinal" 
part of the Dhamma, only that " Noble Silence 



76 THE BEEIGION OP BUBMA 

of the Wise" where all such problems are 
concerned. But it must not hence be imagined 
that Buddhism resembles the modern Agnosti- 
cism beyond the limits of this simple fact. 
Buddhism is a Gnosis ; it has a positive, an 
active, as well as a negative or passive side in 
doctrinal affairs. Looking back, as the full 
Insight He had won enabled Him to do, over 
the long succession of His lives, the Teacher saw 
how through them all there reigned one ordered 

if 

Law, the Law of Kamma (Skt. Karma) or of 
Action, the Law of the Doing of a being and its 
consequences on him and the rest of life. What 
gravitation is to mass its fundamental pro- 
perty, not turned aside from acting, though 
other forces indeed may suspend the visible 
manifestation of its action for a while all that, 
and more, is this Kamma to the conscious Life. 
It is the Law of Causation operating in the 
sphere of the Mind, that is to say, of Life : it is 
alike our Character (since our present mental 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 77 

make-up is the outcome of our whole long line of 
lives) and our Destiny (since, in the Buddhist 
view, Mind, maker and fashioner of all that is, 
as it were .dramatises itself as our environment, 
according to the sum of all our bygone tender 
cies) ; and. yet again, seeing that it is in the 
very nature of Causation that like effect should 

V 

follow on a given class of action, it takes the 
place held by the Deity in Theistic creeds- 
bringing happiness in the train of good, and pain 
in the wake of evil acts. We are our Kamma, 
in fact ; and just as the mind, in a nightmare 
following on some over-indulgence in food, 
dramatises part of itself as the demon that 
pursues or haunts us, another part as the 
seeming " I " which is pursued, and yet 
another still as the environment the World 
and Space and Time wherein the " evil Kamma " 
of that indulgence operates so is it with the 
wider stage*play of the visible world about us 
in the waking life, 



78 THE RELIGION OF .BURMA 

But here the occidental reader, trained in 
mental schools of various ego-centric faiths and 
views, will naturally pause. How then, it 
will be asked, how then, if indeed there be no 
self, no soul that on our death moves onwards* 
clothed in some cloak of subtle substance, or 
taking some new body in the flesh how can 
the Buddhist talk of " earlier " or " later ? 
lives ; or how explain the fact that often, in 
the Buddhist Scriptures, the Tathagata Him- 
self concluded some tale of bygone lives with the 
words : " That very person was Myself" ; if indeed 
there be no soul, no self, who speaks, thinks,, 
acts, and suffers, who dies and takes rebirth 
according to the tenor of his deeds ? To make the 
answer clear, recourse must be had to an analogy. 

Two men are standing by the shores of 
an ocean, its waters heaped in undulations 
by the power of the winds. Both see the 
same phenomenon, but one is uninstructed,. 
a man of clear intelligence, of the type termed 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

"common-sense " ; the other learned in modern 
physics, conversant with the scientific aspect 
of the phenomenon before him. The un* 
instructed man will say : " There, on the horizon, 
is a mass of water, piled up in a wave ; thi& 
mass of water so moulded by the winds, travels 
towards us over the ocean, and breaks at last 
here at our feet." But the instructed man 
will answer : " Not so, friend. What you see 
is but a seeming, a wrong interpretation of the 
facts your sight conveys to you ; there is in all 
this wave-birth, wave-life, wave-motion, and 
wave-death, no single mass of water that so 
moves over the sea at all. Bach wave in truth 
is in a sense one thing ; but it is a child of 
Force, and not of Substance. Ail that is really 
happening is that force is being transmitted by 
these manifold waves; the water is moving,, 
but with no motion of translation over the 
ocean's depths ; it is but rising and falling as 
the real wave the collocation of hydraulic 



80 . THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

forces which give to it a temporary, but even 
so an ever-changing identity passes onward, 
in the end to break here at our feet. 55 

We know, of course, that the instructed man 
is right, and this is just the understanding of 
the Buddhist as to the Transmigration, the 
passing-over of each wave of life. All Life 
is One, as are all the ocean's waters ; what goes 
on, not only from death to the new birth, but 
from hour to hour and moment to moment of 
our lives, is that the temporary collocation of 
life-forces called a being, resultant from the 
powers playing on that one life-wave, (the winds 
of Nescience, Avijja: Craving and Hate and 
Self -delusion, both in the past and now ; 
interaction with other life- waves, and many 
other modifying forces) is passing onward 
over life's wide ocean, presently, perchance^ to 
break upon Life's Further Shore, Nibbanjj, 
the Great Peace and Rest. Gazing with the 
far-reaching Inner Vision which the Holy and 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 81 

the High can gain and use, both The Buddha 
and the other Indian sages of olden time saw 
this phenomenon of the sequent lives. But to 
the earlier sages, as to the uninstructed man of 
"common-sense," there seemed (as apparently 
their vision told them) to be but one changeless 
mass of being, separate from every other " soul," 
that, keeping its one self -hood through eternity, 
passed from the far horizons of life over its 
restless surface to the Goal. To The Buddha, 
seeing yet deeper, searching right to the 
Causation and the manner of it all, there 
was no immortal and enduring spiritual 
substance or persona only a collocation 
of life's fluxing forces, changing not 
only at death and birth, the trough and 
crest of each successive wave, but every 
instant of its life. So to His deeper 
Insight, as to that of the modern physicist, 
there was no self, no separate mass of life at 
all ; and what, for convenience of speech and 

6 



82 TBE BELIGION OP BURMA 

as a designation, we term our self a " way of 
counting" as the Scriptures well define it - 
that is in very truth only an ever-changing 
Collocation of the elements of life, bound 
together by the power of Tendencies set 
going by this very dream of " I " and "Mine". 
Otherwise regarded, we may summarise the 
body of the Buddhist doctrine under the 
headings of the formula used by The Master in 
His first lesson to the world, given to those 
same Five Disciples who had deserted Him in 
that sad hour when all seemed lost. That 
formula is known as the Doctrine of the 
Middle Way : the "Way that leans neither to 
the extreme of Austerity, as practised by the 
Indian sages ; nor to the extreme of Worldly 
Life, given over altogether to the pleasures of 
the senses. It consists of Four Aryan or 
Noble Truths. First the Truth of Sorrow : 
How all this individualised life, involved as 
we have seen in Change and consequent Pain 



THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 83 

and Self-delusion, is inseparable from Suffering ; 
since either we have, and (changing in our 
Kamma's ceaseless changef ulness) we lose, 
some cherished object ; or else we have not 
what we desire, and so again comes Pain. 
The modern student of biology may get an 
insight into this First Truth if he considers the 
humblest origins of life, remembers how the 
lowest organisms move and act only in response 
to irritation as the modern term accurately 
and significantly puts it.- The Second Truth is 
Sorrow's Cause : How all suffering springs only 
from Desire desire to win for the sake of 
self-hood, for the sake, in very truth, of an 
illusion. Truth the Third is Sorrow's Ceasing : 
How, by the culture of the Mind to see the truth 
in all things ; by constant deep endeavour to 
weed out the old " self's " ill tendencies, to 
sow new seeds of Virtue and of Love, comes 
Panna, "Wisdom, Insight in the light of which 
the darkness of self-born desire can dwell no 



84 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

more. Truth the Fourth is termed the Path- 
Truth : How, even in our very heart of hearts, 
there lies a Path, a Way which leads from 
suffering life to Peace ; an Eightfold Way 
whereof the members compose a threefold inner 
training restraint of Body (action), of Word 
(speech), and of Mind (thought). 

Of that Noble Way the parts are these : (1) 
Right Views- meaning the Understanding that 
there is no self in truth, for Life is One, and 
One alone ; the Understanding that this One Life 
is pervaded in all its parts by the three charac- 
teristic signs Impermanency, Subjection to 
Suffering, and Absence of real Self -hood ; and 
the Understanding how this life, and the 
motion of its innumerable parts is subject 
throughout to the causal Law of Kamma, 
which we can see in action every time 
we think logically and in sequence. 1 (2) 

1 Kamma, it must be understood, is no dogma or hypothetical 
principle ; it is, obviously and palpably, to one who understands the 
teaching, all the time working in the daily thought-chains of our 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 85 

Right Aspiration the earnest desire to help 
reduce the suffering of life, and, by self-re^ 
straint and self -reform, to bring the Great Peace 
nearer unto all the world. (3) Right Speech 
loving and kindly and true* (4) Right Action 
avoiding evil deeds and practising charity in 
all our way 8* (5) Right Livelihood following 
a mode of obtaining our daily bread which 
inflicts no harm or hurt on any living thing. 
(6) Right Effort the constant endeavor to 
suppress our evil tendencies and to cultivate 
the thoughts, words, and acts which lead to 
good, further classified ai the Fourfold Great 

lives. But for the fact that Kamma, Mind- or Life-Causation, is 
the fundamental Law f Life, we could not for two consecutive 
seconds remember our past, or frame an intelligible sentence in the 
mind ; and as to the Buddhist teaching that this Kamma, at a 
being's death, causes an immediate rebirth to occur (a rebirth, 
according to Buddhist phrase, which " Is not he, and yet is not 
other than he "), that is merely a logical extension of the constantly 
perceived Law on the basis of the principle of the Conservation 
of Energy. A man exists now : an immensely complex bundle of 
mental forces ; these must have been set going, since all things are 
caused, and the nature of Causation is that like breeds .like ; there- 
fore the present mental make-up of a man must have had its 
origin in mental causes set in motion in a similar life. And the 
same argument applies to rebirth in the future. 



86 THK RELIGION OF BUBMA 

Btruggle : (a) the inhibition of old evil tenden- 
cies ; (b) the inhibition of the acquirement 
of new evil habits and ways; (c) the careful 
constant cultivation, by dint of special mental 
practices, of good habits, noble and helpful 
thoughts (such as Love, Sympathy, Compassion, 
Charity,) already formed ; and (d) the assiduous 
cultivation of such good qualities and habits 
of thought and life as are not already a part 
of our mental habitude. (7) Right Watchful- 
ness the continued observation of all we speak, 
think, do, following out in each the operation 
of the Causal Sequences, classifying each as 
" Good " (tending to reduce life's suffering), 
"Indifferent" (free from taint of Craving, 
Hatred, and Self-delusion, and so producing 
no new causal sequences at all), or " Evil " 
(tainted by one or other of these last three 
Modes of Nescience, and thus tending to set 
in motion causal sequences adding to the 
suffering of life). Besides this observation of 



THE BELIGION OF BURMA 87 

all our mental operations, and the discrimina- 
tion as to their moral value, with the determina* 
tion to cultivate the good in future and to 
avoid the evil. Right Watchfulness includes the 
constant application to each and all of them 
of the Doctrine of Selflessnessthe practitioner 
thinking and observing, as regards each 
phenomenon, of Action, Speech, and Thought, 
of every mental modification that constitutes 
his life, without exception" This is not I, 
this is not Mine, there is no Self herein" (8) 
Right Concentration the practice, according 
to the rules laid down in the books, of those 
high methods of Mental Culture which lead 
to the " Awakening " in the .higher realms of 
conscious life ; all directed to the entering and 
following of the Path of Peace, and the final 
Attainment of Arahanship, of Liberation from 
Graving, Hatred, and Self-delusion. 

Such is the briefest of surveys of the third 
stage of the Buddhist practice the stage of 



88 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Mental Culture ; one from which we have been 
compelled, for want of space, to omit all but 
the most fundamental details. To the man 
who, by the practice of Virtue and Charity, 
has come to adolescence in his mental and 
moral growth, the Most Excellent Law here 
brings its final message. "By Virtue and 
by Charity," it says, "we avoid ill lives 
and win to good ones; but, seeing that all 
things pass to Change and Death, not even 
the good Kamma so made can last for ever. 
So long as we remain subject to Life and to 
Causation's Law we remain also subject to 
Death, to the wearing out of good as well as 
of evil Kamma. He who is truly wise seeks 
to deliver that fraction of the One Life which at 
the moment is manifested as himself from this 
subjection ; he seeks to realise tlie Final Purpose 
of all this changing, suffering cycle of existence 
and rebirth. Beyond the highest Heaven 
beyond aught that in this dream of life we 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 89 

even can conceive there reigns a State of 
Peace wherein there is no Change for ever- 
more ; wherein is no more Suffering ; the Goal 
and the Fruition of Life, the Incomparable 
Security of Nibbana. If you can win to that, you 
bring all life a little nearer to its Groal ; to win 
to it you have to realise the final Truth the 
truth that there is no Self at all that this 
certain-seeming self -hood is but a delusion, 
direst of all the bondages of Mind, of Life. 
Enter, then, on this Way of Peace : enter 
it by self-restraint, by self-renunciation^ 
Live, work, strive, no more for self But for 
pity of all life : so, by reforming what appears 
"yourself," you may in very truth help to 
relieve the suffering of all life; and bring 
your little wave on life's great ever-surging 
ocean at last to break upon " Nibbana's Further 
"Shore". 



90 THE RELIGION OF BUBMA 



THE SANGHA 

The third of the Refuges is Sangha-Eatana, 
the Treasure of the Brotherhoods-mat cornmu- 

/ ~ .-.~,-.-^ ------ ,-:, .-X' 

nity of Monks or " Homeless Ones " which 
The Master founded for those who wished 
to enter on a way of life far more conr 
ducive to swift progress on the Path than 
^ver the purely worldly life could be. 
Besides this function, it has another: that of 
maintaining the racial recollection of the Truth 
The Master found and taught ; the passing-on 
of the Dhamma; the teaching of the laity. 
From what has gone before it will be under- 
stood that the Buddhist BhiKklw or Monk in 
no sense is the equivalent of the priest of the 
Theistic creeds ; in a religion in which there 
is no Deity, wherein Causation reigns supreme, 
and no petitipnal prayer or ritual can bring a 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 91 

man one jot the nearer to the Goal, there 
is no place for the " priest "-that is, for 
the intermediary between the layman and 
his Q-od. Each man's own acts alone affect 
his future ; * and no charms or rites or prayers 
can in the least alter the inevitable sequence 
of Causation's Law. But, as we have seen, 
Charity is an essential practice in applied 
Buddhism ; and seeing that, in a truly Buddhist 

1 So far, of course, as he makes any sort of (Mind-born) Doing, 
or Kamma, his own, by dint of mental functioning ; that is, by dint 
of living it. This view does then of course by no means exclude 
the possibility of one man's actions affecting another's Kamma. For 
example, we may hear of the life and Teaching of The Buddha j if 
we choose to assimilate what we can of that Teaching, and choose to 
folloiv what we can of the example of that great life, then our 
Kamma may become, even in a single life, so profoundly modified 
as to seem almost a different Kamnia altogether. And such 
modification of a man's Kamma by his religious teachers, his 
loved ones, his friends, enemies all who contact his life is 
constant and considerable j it is analogous, in the wave-simile, to 
the effect of surrounding waves ; except, of course, that in the 
intelligent, conscious life of man the element of choice comes in. 
Again, Kamma is far from being the sole arbiter of a man's 
Destinies : some sorts of Suffering (as a congenital disease) may, 
for example, be due to Kamma acting from past lives j but others 
may again arise from any of seven other causes : as, Heredity, 
Environment, the Seasons, and so forth. Thus the phrase must be 
regarded as, for the present moment, conditionally or only mainly 
true : it would only become absolute did we add the words " in the 
long run". 



92 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

land like Burma, there are none who starve 
for want of food, it might be difficult to find 
suitable recipients for the large and constant 
charity of the Buddhist, this function is fulfilled 
by the Members of the Order, who are abso- 
lutely dependent on the laity for each day's food, 
for their robes, monasteries, books, medicines, 
and in general for their entire support. The 
layman's object in giving charity is to " make 
Merit," to pile up, as it were, good Kamma 
to his credit in the bank of life ; so that he 
may come to better and nobler states of exist- 
ence, may win to lives in which the entering 
of the hard Path of Selflessness, now impossible 
for him by reason of his manifold desires, 
may be found easier. Buddhist teaching also 
indicates that the effect of charity in producing 
powerful Merit depends on many things besides 
the mere value of the gift. It depends, for 
example, on the motive in the giver's mind; on 
the extent to which it involves a real act of 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 93 

abnegation to him ; and, finally, besides yet other 
considerations, very largely on the moral status 
of the recipient. Other things being equal, the 
holier the recipient, the greater the Merit of 
the person helped, the greater will be the fruits 
of an act of charity, in the way of potent 
Merit, to the man who gives. 

Thus, on the one hand, to him who finds 
himself so far advanced as now to need to 
devote all his time to the practice of Mental 
Culture, the Brotherhood affords a state of life 
in which all those worldly cares which are so 
harmful to the needed peace of mind are 
absent ; he has no more, once in the Order, to 
take thought as to how he shall secure his daily 
bread. And on the other hand, to the layman, 
desiring to practise the highest active virtue of 
his creed, the Brotherhood, by reason of the 
special holiness of the lives its Members lead, 
is s as the Buddhist phrase has it, " an 
incomparable Field of Merit "a field which 



94 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

will yield a richer harvest for the sowing of 
charity's good seed than well-nigh any other 
in the world. 

The Brotherhood .- 1 consists of two classes- 
the Novices and the fully ordained Monks. The 
Novices have Ten Precepts to observe (the 



1 That is, using the term in its widest sense, as including every 
person who, under our Buddha's Dispensation, has adopted the 
" Homeless Life," received the Pablajja, or " World-renouncing *' 
Ordination, and who wears the Yellow Robe. Technically , fully- 
ordained (Upasampanna) Monks, or Bhikkhus, only .axe "real" 
Members of the Order whilst, again, in the highest (and the most 
restricted) sense in which the word Sangha may be used-^-that 
involved when we speak of the Sangha-Ratana, the " Treasure of 
the Brotherhood " to which the Buddhist turns as his Refuge and 
his Guide it is no more even the majority of the living Bhikkhus ; 
it then consists of that far rarer Great Brotherhood of those loho 
have entered uyjon the Path : the Holy Ones, alike of the past and 
present, who, under our Master's Dispensation, have attained to one 
or other of the Four (or, according to another classification, one 
hundred and eight) Stages of the Way to the Incomparable 
Security. In this last sense, our Sangha-Ratana recalls the 
"Communion of the Saints" of the Christian creed. Thus 
looking on its Third Member, we might regard the whole Refuge- 
Formula as a species, of conjugation of the idea of Attainment 
Enlightenment, Awakening in respect of the three Modes of 
Time. It is as though the Buddhist asserts : (1) In the Past, One 
the Exalted Lord attained and passed-utterly-away. (2) In 
the Present, in His Place we have Him living in His Dhamma 
through which we may noiv 'attain. (3) In the Future, even u r e 
may yet attain as the Communion of the Holy Ones, the Sangha- 
Ratana, ever exists to aid and to attest. 



THE RELIGION OP BORMA 95 

Bight Precepts before given, one of which here 
is divided into two, thus making nine of what 
were given as eight ; and in addition a precept 
as to abstaining from the acceptance or use of 
money, or of gold or silver in any form). Any 
male above seven years of age may be ordained 
as a Sftman&ra, or Novice; and in general 
practice in Burma, every boy so enters the 
Monastery and undergoes its discipline at some 
age between seven and twenty. Any Bhikkhu 
can ordain a Samanera, but only with the 
consent of his parents or guardians if a child ; 
and, once ordained, the Novice can leave the 
Order at will at any time. He wears the 
Yellow Robe, takes food like the Monks, only 
before noon ; and may own no property except 
such as is allowed to the Monks themselves* 
A Burmese lad is generally put into the 
Novitiate by his parents for a period of a few 
months, or a year or so ; and thus well-nigh 
every man in the country has lived some time 



96 THE EBLIGIQN OP BURMA 

in the Monastic Order, a fact on which the 
immense esteem in which the Monk is held 
largely depends. Every- man has lived in 
immediate contact with the Brotherhood, and 
is personally acquainted both with the high 
standard of purity and holiness and of learning 
therein maintained ; he also has practical 
experience of the restraints so hard to a 
young and eager people like the Burmese- 
involved in the monastic life. In the Monastery, 
the Novice acts as attendant to the Monks 
maintains order, draws water for drinking and 
bathing purposes, sweeps out the Monastery 
before dawn, sees that the sanded " walking- 
place " is clear of lives or leaves, and so forth. 
Besides these attendant's duties he learns from 
some resident Monk the special duties of his 
station, studies his religion from the Sacred 
Books, and joins the Monks at their united 
devotions, generally twice a day, at dawn and 
eventide. Before the establishment of secular 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 97 

schools by the British Government, the entire 
education of the male population of the country 
was in the hands of the Monks ; and, apart from 
the period of the Novitiate (designed more 
especially with a view to instruction in 
religion), a large number of Burmese boys 
still obtain their whole education in the village 
Monastery. 

In commemoration of the Great Renunciation, 
the entry of a boy into the Novitiate is 
frequently made the occasion of one of those 
public festivals which delight the play-, 
movement-, and color-loving Burmese heart. 
Even poor parents will often save money for 
some time (a very hard task for the generous 
and, indeed, thriftless Burman) in order to give 
their sons a lavish Shin-pyu. (making a Holy 
One), as the festival is called; and the Shin- 
pyu of a rich man's son is often a very grand 
affair. Personifying the Prince Siddhattha, 
the boy is dressed in regal robes and crowned; 

7 



98 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

and, after receiving all his friends in state, the 
little Prince rides round the village, mounted, 
if possible, on a white horse, in memory 
of white Kanthaka, the Bodhisatta's steed. 
A procession is formed, and amidst a great 
display of royal canopies and insignia, hired 
for the occasion from some theatrical company, 
it marches to the air of stirring music round 
the village to the Monastery walls. Here the 
Princeling must dismount and music must 
stop, for the little mystery-play has reached 
the point corresponding to the arrival of the 
Bodhisatta at the River Anoma, when He put 
off His royal robes and donned the ascetic's 
garb. Entering the compound, the lad bathes 
and is clad in a temporary plain white robe ; 
and, so attired, makes his request, in the 
ancient Pali formula, that the ordaining Monk 
will, " Out of Compassion, and for the sake of the 
Attainment of NMana's Peace," grant to him 
the Yellow Robe. The Monk, assenting, gives 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 99 

him the parcel of Three Kobes, placed ready 
to his hand. The lad retires and robes himself 
in these, after having his head shaved ; he 
then returns to the Monastery, where the 
ceremony of Ordination is completed by 
his recitation of the vow to observe the Ten 
Precepts of a Novice. 

Full Membership in the Brotherhood may 
only be conferred upon a male, 1 of twenty 
years and upwards, who must be free from 
debt, the king's service, and certain specified 
diseases and deformities. It can only be 



1 Men only can now receive the (Jpasampada or Full Ordina- 
tion. Originally The Buddha founded a Bhikkhuni-Sangha, or 
Sisterhood of Nuns, as well as the Bhikkhu-Sangha or Fraternity of 
Monks ; and some of His most eminent disciples were members of 
this Community, which had its own Vinaya Bule, and its own 
Ordination, separate from that of the Brotherhood. This 
Bhikkhuni-Sangha, however, owing to the corruptions creeping 
into Buddhism in India the fast-growing power of the Brahmanical 
caste which caused this, and the increasing seclusion of women, 
which was one of the results of the priestly dominance perished in 
India, and indeed elsewhere also (since at one time there were 
Nuns as well as Monks in Ceylon) some five hundred years after 
the Nirvana of the Buddha (about the first century of the Christian 
rn) ; as, indeed, the Master Himself had prophesied would be 
the case. 



100 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

conferred in practice by a Thema, Senior 
Monk, that is, one of at least ten years' stand- 
ing in the Order ; and he can only perform the 
ceremony in the presence of a technical Sanglia 
^a Chapter composed of not less than ten 
fully-ordained Monks. The office of Ordina- 
tion, as used in The Buddha's time, is read out 
by the Thera, in the presence of the assembled 
Chapter, in ancient Pali. It is customary in 
Burma, likewise, to go through it in the 
vernacular, since so miich Pali is not likely 
to be known to the Novice desiring Ordination, 
The Thera who confers the Ordination is 
thereafter known as the Upajjhdya or spiritual 
Superior of the new Monk, to whom likewise 
an Acariya or Instructor is allotted. For five 
years the Monk remains in Nissaya, or 
" dependence " on Superior and Instructor ; 
thereafter he is permitted to dwell in a 
Monastery apart from such dependence ; but 
not till he has acquired ten full years of 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 101 

seniority in the Brotherhood does he become 
himself a Them, an Elder. Thereafter he can 
himself, in the presence of a valid Chapter as 
detailed, confer the Full Ordination, take 
pupils, and generally act as the head of a 
community of Monks. 

The Pali title for the Monk is fihiklchu, 
literally "the Mendicant," but in Burma this 
word is seldom employed outside the Order ; 
the laity term their Bhikkhus Hpon~gyi s or " the 
Great Glory," and they are treated with the 
utmost deference and consideration. The 
younger Monks of a Monastery, accompanied 
by the Novices and the " Sons of the 
Monastery" (boys, that is, who are placed 
for their schooling at the Monastery, but 
who do not take Orders as Novices, and 
so can feed after noon) commonly go in 
silent procession, early each morning, round 
their village to beg their daily supply of food. 
jBach Monk and Novice carries a large earthen 



102 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

or iron bowl, sometimes, for convenience, 
slung in a string satchel over one shoulder ; 
whilst the Sons of the Monastery bear each 
a large platter, or a pair of these, slung from 
the ends of a bamboo carried on the shoulder 
in the immemorial manner of the Far East, on 
which are placed various cups and dishes for 
the curries or seasonings to be taken with the 
rice. As the procession comes to each door 
it halts a moment, when the householder, or 
more commonly one of his womenfolk, (who 
has been up long before dawn cooking the 
day's supply of food), comes out and places a 
spoonful of plain rice in the begging-bowl 
of each Monk and Novice ; and, if any curry- 
stuff is to be given, this is placed in one of 
the dishes carried by the boys. If that day 
there is no offering to be made, the householder 
comes forth and begs the Monks to pass on- 
wards. The whole round is conducted, on the 
part of Monks and Novices, in unbroken silence ; 



THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 10B 

and, when each house has been visited, or 
when in towns sufficient food for the day's 
consumption of all at the Monastery has been 
secured, the procession returns to the Monas^ 
tery. Here the food, commonly re-heated by 
the Sons of the Monastery, is taken before noon. 
The bulk of the day is passed by the Monks in 
teaching their scholars, in studying the Pali 
language and the Scriptures; in writing with 
an iron stylus copies of some sacred Scriptures 
;qn the immemorial palm-leaf, which till lately 
formed the chief writing material of the Bast, 
and such-like simple, pious work. Some few 
Monks, further, devote themselves mainly to the 
practice of Bhdvana or Meditation the intent 
contemplation of some object physical or 
mental, with a view to the attainment of one 
or other of those higher states of consciousness 
of which mention has been made, and which 
form a very large subject by themselves, 
impossible here to deal with. 



104 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

The Monk has to observe 227 coded Precepts ; 
the whole course of his conduct being further 
regulated by multitudinous rules laid down 
by The Master as occasion arose. Of the three 
great divisions of the *Ti-Pitaka, the " Three 
Baskets " or Collections of the Buddhist 
Dhamma, one, comprising five extensive works, 
to which, outside the actual Canonical Rule, is 
appended a still larger commentary -literature, 
is devoted solely to the Monastic Rule. There 
are Four Deadly Sins, each involving ipso facto 
expulsion from the Order : the breaking of 
the Precept of absolute Chastity binding on 
Monks and Novices alike ; the taking by fraud 
or violence of aught not given to him ; the 
taking of life (here it is only the taking of 
human life which involves actual expulsion, 
though taking even the life of an animal would 
be regarded as a grievous offence against the 
Rule); and, lastly, the laying claim falsely 
to the Attainment of Arahanship or to the 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 105 

possession of any superior, superhuman powers 
at all. This last is, with its minor theses, a most 
salutary rule, and has served, even for the 
long period of twenty-five centuries, to main- 
tain the Dhamma of The Buddha free from all 
changes ; it has made impossible, for Theravada 
Buddhism, any additional " revelations " result- 
ant from some Monk's proclaiming, for example, 
that he had had a vision of The Master com- 
manding such and such an alteration in the 
" Truth and Discipline " to be made. 

The Monk may own but Bight Possessions 
his three Yellow Robes, his Begging-Bowl 
(which forms also his dish), his Girdle, his 
Water-strainer (used to filter his drinking- 
water, lest he should destroy the life even of an 
insect), a Razor to shave with (the head of the 
Monk is commonly completely shaven, the 
members of a" Monastery doing this service for 
one another), and a Needle with which to 
repair his Robes. 



106 THE KELTGION OF BURMA 

The Monks of Burma are held in the highest 
esteem bj the people, an esteem which the 
purity of their conduct and the high excellence 
of their lives fully justifies. In Upper Burma 
especially, (where the manners and customs of 
the people have not yet been so far demoralised 
by western civilisation as in Lower Burma, 
where the British occupation has been much 
longer), the deference shown them is most 
marked ; a Burmese layman there will never 
address a Monk except in an attitude of 
obeisance ; whilst all over Burma the Monk has 
actually an entire set of words to denote 
respect, used for his daily actions; thus he 
does not, as we might translate, " walk," but 

. - - * 

*'-'&/$' proceeds," he "pronounces " instead of 
;E ? - merely "speaks," and so on. 

i c j I fj A' 

"*/ The Brotherhood of Burma dates back to the 
"most ancient times, although local wars and 

<.!&:; >. 

r other disturbances have on several occasions so 
>to?oreduced its numbers as to necessitate an 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 107" 

application to Siam or Ceylon for fully-ordainedv 
Monks to restore the impaired Parampara or 
Apostolic Succession (of the Ordination). Some 
two hundred and fifty years after The Buddha's 
demise there arose in India a great Emperor 
named Aspka (the royal author of the Edicts 
already referred to), who became a convert to- 
Buddhism and a most enthusiastic patron alike 
of the Teaching and the Brotherhood. Under 

. S^'^f 

his patronage, the then SAngha^BS^a. t or 
Hierarch, summoned a Great Council of the 
Order the third that had been held and 
from this Council, after a revision of the Canon,, 
missionary Monks were sent forth to various 
distant lands. Amongst these were two, the 
Theras Sona and Uttara, who came to 
Lower Burma, landing at what is now the 
town of Thaton, then a seaport, though now 
some twenty miles inland. This was the 
beginning of Buddhism in Burma. Into 
Upper Burma,, it seems likely there later 

"*""fty SHI.V fTRfiMtt" /N PUG A." 3>iwrt&Ti r/Mi'M'^ 



108 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

penetrated some sort of degenerate Buddhism' 
probably one of the much later Tantrika, 
magic-working sects which sprang up in India 
during the period of the Buddhist decline, and 
which had entered Burma from Tibet through 
the mountain-barrier in the north. This 
degraded form was, however, put an end to by 
the Burmese king Anoratha, who, incensed at 
the insulting refusal of the then king of Lower 
Burma, whose capital was at Thaton, to give 

fl ' * ' O 

him copies of the Pali Sacred Books, attacked 
:and sacked Thaton, and carried away to Upper 
Burma, to his capital city, Pagan, the persons 
of the defeated king and his family, as well as 
every copy that could be found of the coveted 
Sacred Books. Thereafter, moved by the 
study of their contents to atone somewhat for 
his evil action in fighting, he became, like a 
second Asoka, a staunch adherent of the purer 
Buddhism, and made the latter alone the 
state religion; the Ari or Priests of the 



THE RELIGION OF BURMA 109' 

degenerate faith then prevalent in his domains 
being given the alternative of becoming lay 
officials of his government, or of entering the 
orthodox Sarigha, which was thus for the first 
time established in Burma proper. 

Finally we may add but this, that, so long 
as the Burmese people remain, as now 5 devoted 
to their Brotherhood and the beautiful Teaching 
which that Brotherhood not all unworthily 
enshrines, so long (and no longer) will they 
retain those great characteristics which have 
endeared them to every western author wha 
has really entered into their lives and under- 
stood the meaning of their remarkable charity, 
their hospitality, and freedom from dire,, 
sordid poverty. Buddhism is well able, by 
reason alike of its beauty and its obvious 
truth, to hold its own in the hearts of the 
people ; and, whilst the contact with western 
civilisation has produced in certain directions 
a lamentable effect on the old high standard of 



. i|,-ft , , f ^|J^.'f *-'.? ft * 

-j- \ f*-- ' 

.Jk J\ ...,', 



.,. 



110 THE RELIGION OP BUBMA 

Buddhist morality, 1 there are already signs on 
every hand that the religion is now in the 
process of receiving, not a diminution, but a 
very active augmentation of its former strength. 
There are many evidences of the progress of 
this new Buddhist Revival : the appearance of 
great Monks, like the well-known Ledi Say ad aw, 
who, remaining no longer hidden in their 
Monasteries, go forth among the people and 
intensely stir them to better their ways; all 
over the land, again, there are new societies, 
forming for various religions purposes in the 
new spirit of the age. Even the subject 
of religious education, too long neglected, save 
by the merest handful of far-seeing women 2 

1 The most terrible and the most inexcusable instance of this 
deterioration lies in the introduction of alcohol. The use of this 
curse was practically unknown in the days of Burmese independence ; 
whilst now there is a spirit shop in almost every village of Lower 

U.8.Burma (British^ occupation, Jift years) and this state is slowly 
. a pp roacn i n g fa Upper Burma (on|yjw_enty^-five years' occupation). 

2 Nowhere in the world, perhaps^ is the status of woman so free 
-as in Burma; a fact to which is doubtless due the high degree of 
activity and intelligence possessed by the Burmese women. Two 
-out of the three Bijddjvist schools in the populous city of Rangoon 

V. fl.V.Se 



THE RELIGION OP BURMA 111 

and men, is now beginning to secure attention. 
Not the least sign of allj perhaps, is the fact 
that the Burmese are beginning to awake to 
the ancient missionary spirit of their Faith. 
Perhaps a thousand years after the last 
attempt in this direction, a Buddhist Mission 
was, in 1908 O.E., sent out to England ; which, 
despite the exceedingly small scale of its 
operations (consisting as it did of but a single 
Bhikkhu and a few devoted laity), yet 
succeeded in establishing in that country a 
small but earnest body of accepted members 
of the Buddhist laity. 



(and for long the only two) were started and have been maintained. 
at no small expense by the far-seeing charity and wisdom of a 
Burmese lady, Mrs. Llla Ouug. The bulk, further, of the petty 
trade of the country is in the women's hands ; and there are few 
Burmese peasant women who do not supplement the family income, 
often very largely by personally making and selling such wares as 
clothes and scarves. Formerly, indeed, every woman was an 
expert at the loom, and the hjind-logrn, was in every well-to-do 
household ; nc^ unhappily, cheap Manchester goods hare well- 
nis?h killed that industry. . - ' 



(I 
}\\ cui' '( 



THE THREE SIGNATA 

IN the ancient epic literature of Aryan 
India, the tale is told how once the wise and 
virtuous king Yudhisthira, the ideal pattern 
and exemplar, for that literature, of the man 
who follows y Dharma 9 who, at whatever cost 
)0 -self, unswervingly obeys the call of Duty 
and of Truth, when called upon to tell what 
fact in life appeared to him most passing 
marvellous, made answer: " Man's belief in an 

4 

immortal life." Seeing on every hand but 
Death as certain goal and crown of lifej seeing 
it, whether in man's fratricidal warfare, or 
in the grimmer> ceaseless strife whereunto 
Nature dooms each sentient living thing; 
seeing, in his own human world, father and 
mother j wife and child, friend and foe, great 
and mean, the wise and. holy as the" weak and 



THE THREE SIGNATA 113 

base, dying around him upon every side each 
man still acts and lives as though himself were 
deathless, as though this universal power of 
death must somehow pass and leave him all 
unscathed. Death hems him in on every side, 
its terrors compass him about each day and 
hour ; the teachings of the wise and great and 
holy of each land and age unceasingly reiterate 
the awful fact of its supreme, all-dominating 
might; so trivial in its immediate causation 
that a scratch, a thorn, a stumble by the way 
may yet invoke it ; so imminent, it may be, in 
respect of days, that none of us dare say: 
" To-morrow," nay : " Next hour I shall surely 
live." Yet each man still lives as though 
all time yet lay before him ; still rejoices in 
the petty pleasures of this threatened life; 
plans for his future ; casts all his energies of 
life upon the die of worldly living ; still loves 
and hates; works all his days for wealth, no 
penny of which he can take with him in the 

8 



114 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

end ; battles with all his powers for this or 
that of this vanishing dream-life's fancied 
benefits ; and, save for the thoughtful few, he 
never realises that close imminence of the end 
of all of it; nor understands that his own 
position is in truth but little safer than that of 
the death -sentenced criminal, before whom lie 
but hours ere he must look his last on earth 
and sky. 

Why is this forgetfulness, this lack of 
understanding ? By reason of Desire, by dint 
of man's joy in life, his craving for yet more 
and more of it at whatsoever cost ; because, 
as ever with the uninstructed, thoughtless man, 
he follows his emotions and desires rather than 
the more clear-seeing guidance of intelligence; 
he dreams of himself as steadfastly enduring, 
thinks he must live, though all the Universe 
might pass ; he craves for yet more of life so 
fever-thirstily, that all this ceaseless agony 
of death surrounding him is impotent to teach 



THE THREE SIGNATA 115 

him that he, too, must die. True, as a formula 
of words, he knows and will admit the truth 
of it ; but as a fact, as real understanding, as 
realised within his heart of hearts, not so. 
Who, did he understand, could live the petty 
life of following the world's desires ; grasp 
after this or that poor toy in this swift-fleeting 
life ; give way to passion here, or hate or 
cheat or otherwise bring suffering to his fellow- 
sufferers there did he but understand that 
truth, so pitiably plain : " Like all of these my 
brothers, I am doomed to die. To-day, to- 
morrow, in another year or years, and all this 

., . ._ * .....,./ . . .U ......... .*..- .-.._.,.._ 

life that now seems all to me must, in a single 
moment, after some minutes, hours, or_day_s 
oJL_ago>ny, pass from me evermore" ? Who, 
that had grasped it, still could live the petty, 
pleasure-seeking life of worldly aspiration and 
inane futility? None, surely, who once had 
seen ; and yet, as Yudhisthira marvelled 
untold centuries ago, despite life's daily 



116 THE EBLIGION OP BURMA. 

re-enacted tragedy, most of mankind, their 
insight utterly blinded by Desire's dark clouds, 
still deem themselves immortal and still live 
as though this little life were all ; or, yet more 
pitiable still, dream of themselves continuing 
to eternity, finding about them those that here 
they loved, repeating throughout all the 
interminable asons the petty details of things 
they loved on earth; a life (so utterly in 
contrast to all life we know of) from which all 
pains are banished, wherein the petty pleasures 
of our life alone endure. 

Some few, indeed, have seen further : one 
such I well remember now. Once, in a distant 
town, attending a funeral with other Monks, 
I found a little bamboo-monastery built by 
the burning-place ; so near that one might 
watch, from its windows, the passing to the 
elements of what had once been living woman, 
man, or child. Only one Monk was permanently 
dwelling there, an old, old man, whose face, 



THE THREE SIGNATA 117 

despite his age, still shone with that strong 
inward light that may be sometimes seen in 
human eyes : the light that speaks of life nobly 
and greatly lived , that tells of glimpses of the 
Truth, of the Light beyond All Life whereof it is 
sign-manual and reflection. And so, courtesies 
made, I asked that Thera how it came to pass 
that he lived there, hard by the burning-ground ; 
so far away from town or village ; so dangerous, 
one might think, by reason of infection ; s0 
sad a dwelling-place, by daily wont of that last 
mournful scene of human life. 

In reply, the Thera told me a little of 
the story of his life how, as a boy and youth, 
eager and active and full of the desire for life, 
he had been burdened with a hasty, passionate 
nature, quick to take offence ; and how, when 
such was given him, his whole mind would be 
so filled with wrath and hatred that no other 
nobler thought could find admission to his 
heart. Then, one day, in such access of 



118 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

anger, somehow a new thought did come : he 
asked himself what good this anger did him, 

- *-.,.. . ,. ---- ^^~. --- , ~ - ^ -------- ------ . f 

and to what end it might develop, if he should 

"" "" ---.- - ^- -.- -. - ...... ^^ ,., __. - ~^ ^ -L-- -.._.- _-_i-.-.i-- 

Jet it grow unchecked ? Taking his trouble to 

~r- ^, .,-.-,- . _, 1_J - ^-.i- .- *.-*._-. ^,,^>,_^-_ .... {__} 

a learned Thera for advice, he was answered 
in terms of the Master's Teaching in the 
Dhammapada : "The many 1 do not understand 
that are here must die ' : those who know 



this, for them all hatreds cease." 

Sometimes according to the nature and 
Kamma of each one of us, it happens that a 
few brief words, more especially when these 
have come out of the mouth of some great 
spiritual Teacher like The Buddha, strike upon 
our minds with a new and vivid sense of reality : 
seem gifted with an interior vital meaning that 
suddenly illuminates our mind, like a lamp 
brought into a darkened room. Before, with- 
out the lighted lamp, the darkness of the room 

1 "The many "in the original Pare, " Others "; that is, the 
unthinking, unenlightened multitude ; as contrasted with the 
thoughtful and enlightened few those who understand. 



THE THREE SIGNA'FA 119 

seemed almost tangible ; we felt as if surrounded 
by a wall in all directions ; we moved forward 
hesitatingly, groping our way through the 
darkness, and that even when by the light of 
day the room is perfectly familiar. But strike 
a light in it ; bring in the lighted lamp, and 
immediately our hesitance, our feeling of restric- 
tion, melts away ; seeing, our path across the 
room at once is clear to us ; the natural sense 
of freedom to move here and there returns. 
Just so is it when this mental experience occurs 
to us. In some strange way the words that so 
remarkably appeal to us seem to have kindled 
a clear light in the groping darkness of our 
mental chamber; our minds appear to have 
perceived a new, a deeper truth behind those 
words ; in the light of this interior illumination 
our path through life, hitherto shrouded in 
darkness, all at once grows clear and luminous : 
and, from interior darkness and mental groping, 
arguing about it and about, we pass into a new 



120 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

mental state of seeing clearly, understanding 
keenly and correctly what now is best for us 
to do. 

So it was with this young man, when his 
teacher recited to him that Saying of The 
Buddha. He was a layman, but at once he 
left the world behind him, and, having entered 
the Order, he spent his days, whenever possible, 
in or near by the burning-ground, so that, by 
dint of multiplying those &ankhcim& } those 

MORTAL 

Mental Elements which were related to the 
consciousness of death, he might at length, in 
the deep Buddhist meaning of the word, come 
to understand : " We all here must die." So 
simple a lesson is that, that it is very hard ta 
learn ; for the simpler a thing is, the greater 
and more difficult is it really to grasp it ; and, 
besides, in the case of this particular lesson, the 
element of Ignorance, of Not-understanding in 
our minds, cries out against the very thought 
of it. It is so difficult to learn that which our 



THE THREE SIGNATA 121 

minds, that which the greater bulk of our 
mental elements, do not wish to learn ; and so 
most men never understand at all that simple 
fact : " We all must die." 

But, by the falling of the water-drops, little 
by little the filter-jar grows full to over- 
flowing : that is the great secret of all mental 
mastery, the fact which makes even self-renun- 
ciation grow possible, nay, acceptable and 
glorious at last. And so, to this young Monk,, 
little by little the lesson came home ; it 
grew daily in his mind to deeper and more 
solemn certainty ; it shone daily brighter in his- 
heart of hearts, revealing many a darkness- 
hidden Truth. In his new life as Monk, the 
manifold occasions to anger which the world's 
life presents and multiplies were, in the first 
place, largely absent ; yet a few remained ;. 
and sometimes, even as Monk, he would find 
the old bad tendency to swift anger flame up 
in his heart at this or that trivial occasion of 



122 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

offence. Bat, with the anger, by dint of the 
associating faculty of the mind, came, too, the 
thought he had prescribed to cure his 
wrathf ulness : with each access of hatred there 
<;ame the vision of that oft-repeated final 
mourning scene. With the thought of it, 
his heart would grow hot with self-reproach, 
with shame: "He who knows this, for him 
all hatreds cease" And also he remembered 
One of whom His followers, at His death, 
could say : " So passed away the Great, the 
Loving Teacher, who never spake an angry 
ivord"- 

Thus, with the passing years and growth of 
wisdom and true Insight, passed, for that Monk, 
the tendency to anger with which he had been 
born. As time went on, and he grew in the 
esteem of the laity, his supporters, seeing how 
he frequented the burning-ground, built him 
an abode hard by. Then, when I met him, he 
was very old, very high in the esteem of all 



TBE THREE SIGNATA 128 

men in that district men believed him to have 
seen somewhat of that high Path whose seeing 
is so difficult ; and, for my part, I could well 
believe it to be so. 

For there was not only that rare sense of the 
interior Light, the sense of Vision in the 
Thera's countenance : there was this simple 
story of a well-lived life. That man had seen 
a Truth, which is very rare and difficult in this 
sad world; he had really seen, because at 
once he had acted accordingly ; and no man 
sees any Truth in actual fact who does not then 
and there commence to live anew. All the rest 
is talk. 

I thought : Suppose that all of that 
man's life had brought no other Vision, no 
further fruit than that one Seeing of the Truth, 
how fortunate- was he, thanks to the Holy One 
whose words so changed his life. For how 

C-J 

many of the sons of men live life after life in 
this or other worlds, in vain ? I thought of the 



124 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

many men in my own country, where the 
Homeless Life is held in low esteem because 
men do not understand the full value of true 
self-restraint who would look upon that 
monkish life as lost, as useless to the world and 
to himself, because, forsooth, it lacked the lesser 
lessons that the care of wife and child can 
teach a man. It seemed to me that, had 
he learned that one Truth alone, had his life 
a little only served to teach it to his fellows, 
it were a life greater by far than most men 
can hope to live. To see one Truth and by 
example teach it : How greater far a life, how 
nobler far a service to humanity, than most 
men are privileged to live, to give ! 

But few there are with either Insight ta 
perceive one Truth or strength to live accord- 
ingly ; and still, as in the king Yudhisthira's 
days, men, seeing Death round them upon 
every side, can yet believe themselves immortal 
or act as if they did. Had the great Indian 



THE THREE 8IGNATA 125 

Mng achieved fche greatest of all blessings, for 
one so wise as he had he heard the Teaching 
of our Master he would not have marvelled 
only that men should deem themselves 
immortal in a world of death, he would have 
seen a threefold wonder greater still than that. 
How so would his thought have run living 
in a world where everything is in transition? 
most men still believe themselves exempt from 
this sure law of life, each dreaming that some- 
thing in him still is deathless, changeless, 
permanent. How, living in a world so full of 
suffering, most men still think : " Somehow will 
1 at least escape from pain ; some time I shall 
achieve a life of pleasure only." How, living 
in a world whereof the Life in deepest truth is 
One -a world in which there is no separate 
Self or Soul at all, but only a ceaseless flux of 
life's elements from this one of its momentary 
collocations to that other each man,still looks 
upon himself as one, as a life separate from all 



126 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

other lives to all eternity ; his self, his soul 
or Atta or whatever he may call it, upon one 
side, and all the mass of universal life upon 
the other ; Self contra Life ; so he thinks and, 
sorrow of the world that springs from it ! so 
he acts accordingly throughout his swift-com- 
pleting days ! 

e^ For this is our Master's Teaching of the 
-* Tlhre.e^ ...Bianata : the three great Marks or 
Characteristics whereby all life is determined. 
" Whether Buddhas arise or ivhether They do 
not arise " that is, whether the life in any 
given world-system evolves so far as to include, 
at any given time, reasoning beings so far 
advanced in wisdom as, by their own Insight, 
to be able to perceive this universal Truth, or 
no -"Whether Buddhas arise or whether They do 
not arise, it still remains true that all the Ele- 

A ments of Life are Transitory, . . . of S_ 



. , . and devoid of Sjsifjbood" So 
runs the Scripture, and in this threefold 



THE THESE SIGNATA 127 

Doctrine of the Signata lies the foundation of the 
whole Buddhist outlook upon life, the key-note, 
as it were, of the Buddhist philosophy or 
theory of existence ; and, what in our Teaching 
is synonymous with this, the foundation of the 
whole great fabric of Buddhist ethics ; since,. 
to the true follower of our Master, to under- 
stand and to live accordingly are only the two 
sides the static and dynamic aspects of the 
one Truth The Master won and lived and 
taught. 

Not only is the Doctrine of the Three Signata 
thus the very essence of our Buddhist Truth,, 
theory and practice ; it is also the chief feature 
which distinguishes Buddhism from all other 
existent religious systems; it constitutes, to- 
gether with the discovery and enunciation of the 
Law of Kamma, and the Teaching as to 
the existence of a State beyond All Life, 
Nibbana, the especial contribution which 
The Buddha made to the sum-total of 



128 THE RELIGION OP BUEMA 

religious Truth as known in His day. Our 
Dhamma, indeed, may be said to mark the 
-ultimate and supreme achievement in the 
world of religious investigation and knowledge ; 
it inherited from generations immemorial of 
Jndian saints and sages the whole fruit of 
Indo-Aryan religious experience and develop- 
ment ; in these three great Teachings 
Nibbana, the 'Doctrine of the Three Signata, and 
the Law of KammaihQ Buddha added all 
that remained lacking to the final perfection of 
the Truth, so far as words are able to express 
ihe way to Truth's Attainment ; and thus our 
present subject may be regarded as in a very 
-special and peculiar sense a Buddhist doctrine, 
one which we find in no other great religion of 
the world at all. Universal Causation, the Law 
of Kamma, applied as rigidly to Life, to Mind, 
.as modern science has applied it in the realm of 
physics ; setting aside finally even the subtlest 
iremnant of the old, animistic view of life the 



THE THREE SIGNATA 129 

belief, natural to the uninstructed mind, that 
all this Universe was the outcome of the activity 
of some great spiritual Being or Beings ; the 
Doctrine of the Three Signata, the characterisa- 
tion of all possible forms of life as Transitory, 
Suffering, Unreal in their seeming Self -hood ; 
and, lastly, the discovery and enunciation of a 
State beyond All Life, Nibbana, the Uncondi- 
tioned Peace s the unthinkably vast Goal 
towards which, through fancied self-hood and 
through suffering, all life is slowly wending, 
a state 1 which was final, the Utter Peace, from 
which there should be no returning evermore 
these three Teachings constitute the distinctive!^ 
Buddhist element, as contrasted with all those 
elements of religious truth and practice in our 
Dhamma which were known in the Indo-Aryan 

1 Differing herein from the probably later, and derived, Hindu 
Nirvana or Moksha or union with Brahma, in that this last was not 
eternal, seeing that after the "night of Brahma" was over, the 
whole weary round of the projection of universal life into a 
suffering manifold system of worlds must be commenced agairi^ 
and so on to eternity. 

9 



130 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

world before the day of the Supreme 
Enlightenment. 

One further peculiarity of the Doctrine of 
the Three Signata is that, through the recent 
marvellous developments of physical science, the 
western thinking world is now day by day 
receiving further demonstration of precisely 
these same linked-together characteristics of 
sentient and non-sentient life. That fact has 
a great importance, as bearing on the possible, 
or probable, future extension of our Dhamma 
in the West ; for in the thought of the cultured 
classes in all western lands the teachings of 
science have by now well-nigh possessed them- 
selves of the position formerly held by the 
old-time theologies. What that means, in 
brief, is, that given time enough for the effects 
of heredity, and of human mental inertia, to 

/ ' j 

have fully worked themselves out (and that, in 
the present progressive and transitional state 
of occidental thought, no long time either) 



THE THREE S1GNATA 131 

it will become impossible for any great religion 
to retain even a nominal hold on the (ever more 
numerous) thinking classes, the fundamental 
teachings of which, as to the nature of life, are 
opposed to the knowledge derived from 
scientific study and investigation. But, since 
this Doctrine of the Three Signata, as well as 
the equally fundamental, equally important 
conception of Causation, is, as has been said, 
exclusively Buddhist, 1 we can clearly foresee 
that, given at most a century or two, it will be 
impossible that any existent religion save 
Buddhism only should survive, even nominally, 
in the cultured western world. Buddhism, 
and it alone amongst the world-religions, is 
founded on Causation's Law, destitute of the 
last faintest trace of animistic thought ; it, and it 

i In their actual Buddhist form ; for the Hindu conception of 
Karma, although again, as with the idea and term Nirvana, 
probably derived from Buddhist sources, has in its modern form, 
departed widely from the original, having become a simple system 
of rewards and punishments to the Jwatmas or immortal selves* of 
which Hinduism teaches. 



132 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

alone, teaches this threefold nature of the 
universal life; both of these ideas are becoming 
every day more deeply realised as the result of 
progress in the great world of physical science. 
The recognition of Truths so great precludes 
once the old inertia has worn off its effects the 
acceptation of any view of life which is oppos- 
ed to these great Truths ; thus, it seems 
inevitable that Buddhism only of the world- 
religions can survive in face of the daily- 
extending conquests of the world of scientific 
thought and action ; it alone can form the accept- 
able guide in the things of the higher, the interior 
life, for the women and men of coming genera- 
tions of that western Branch of the great Aryan 
Race which of late, through the applications of 
that same science which is so profoundly altering 
all its old-time thoughts and views, has inherited 
the leadership of the nations of the world. 

Having thus taken a general view of the 
nature, importance, and significance to the 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 133 

modern world of the Buddhist Doctrine of the 
Three Signata, let us now pass on to the 
consideration of each of its three theses in detail. 
AwiG& } Dukkha, ^.%ai^-~Impjrmanent, full of 
Suffering, void of Self-hoo^Jn raality : such are 

... .. -,-. .-. ' fj X .._.. _. . ,^-.~.,---. w ;,-,-... ^ 

the three words wherein this doctrine is 
comprised ; and, whilst each presents its own, 
and in a sense, separate, aspect of the truth 
about life, yet the three are in reality so 
linked together that it is often impossible, in 
discussing one, to avoid the introduction of 
another of the three ideas. Each, moreover, 
stands in an especial relation to one of the 
Three Modes of Nescience (frvjjja) Lobha, or 
Craving, Dosa, or Hatred, and Mgha, Self- 
delusion. Bach of these is especially opposed 
to the corresponding Signatum, which is not 
only its opposite in theory, but its antidote in 
practice the means of overcoming it in actual 
life thus ever do theory and practice go 
hand in hand in this our Buddhist Truth. 



184 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

These Three Modes of Nescience are, as 
we might put it, the three fundamental forms 
of Not-understanding typical of the natural, 
the unenlightened mind. In such, Avijja, 
Nescience, manifests, first, in the wrong view 
that life, or at the least some portion of its 
content, is Niccam, Changeless, stable, enduring 
to all eternity. Of course and here at once 

b 

we come to that inextricable linkage of the 
Three Modes and Signs already noted it is 
his self which the unenlightened man thus 
regards as in the first and most important 
sense a changeless being. Secondarily, and 
indeed as a development of this misconception, 
thus still truly falling rather in the domain 
of the Third Sign and Mode, the thought of 
Changelessness is attached to the man's 
conception of his God whether that idea, 
as with the lowest American Indian savage, 
is conceived of as a mere material fetish, 
his " medicine " ; or whether, with the 



THE THREE SIGNATA 135 

highly-advanced and subtle -minded philosopher, 
that crude conception of the Greater Self -hood 
bas widened to the thought of an infinite God- 
bead, conceived as having made or emanated all 
tbis universal life. But, quitting for the present 
this primary object whereunto the natural 
man applies his attribute of Changelessness 
in the highest, most essential degree, we find 
he further attributes permanence to all those 
objects which to him, howsoever developed 

according to his Kanima, represent the Goods 

*# " 

of life. To tbe pure worldling, wealth and 
the objects of his passions, wife and child, 
place and power and all he can possess, take 
on, more or less according to the extent of 
Nescience's First Mode in his mind, this aspect 
of things changeless and eternal. Though he 
be utterly destitute in actual life, the man in 
whom this Lobha is uppermost will grasp at 

cJ^^aj- rr . 

any idea involving even future possession of 
these " Goods " of life : here, indeed, and riow, 



136 THE EELIGION OP BURMA 

he may be a slave, but somehow, somewhen, 
perhaps by some propitiation of the Greater 
Self-hood, of his God-idea, he will win a life 
wherein all wealth, all power, all objects of 
his lusts will be his own for evermore ; he will 
wear a veritable golden crown and live in a 
palace built of precious stones, to take the very 
material concept of a seer of that strange, 
wealth-loving race, the Jewish a race so 
generally given to the life of sense, so crudely 
materialistic, but which here and there, now 
and again, brings forth a character of rarest 
philosophy or highest spirituality, like some 
fragrant rose grafted upon the thorny briar-tree. 
With a higher type of mind, the natural man 
will still thirst for fancied, changeless " Goods ' ' 
possessions but, with his higher mental 
growth, the object of his craving will be 
subtler, higher, nobler. No more desiring 
ownership of the other sex merely for gratifica- 
tion of his passions, he will seek his wife 



THE TflEEE SIGNATA 137 

in hopes of finding a mental and spiritual 
companionship. Craving no more for worldly 
wealth, he will still be eager for the fruits of 
fame, he will have the nobler ambition to be 
renowned for some great work amongst his 
fellow-men. But, however far he may have 
grown beyond his humbler brother of the 
purely worldly type, however nobler may 
be the objects of his desire, there will still be 
for him some good thing to be sought and lived 
for ; to that, as ever, his mind will attribute 
this " Changelessness ". Is he an architect ? 
He will talk of " building to eternity ". Is 
he a lawyer or member of the law-making,, 
ruling caste? He will indite his legal deeds 
or acts "Forever, so long as the Throne- 
shall endure." Is he a soldier ? He will 
speak great words about the Flag that 
he has served "Flying as long as the sun 
shall rise upon this land". An author or an 
artist? He will speak of the immortality of 



138 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

ills "work". And so on always, and with all 

men. Some things, to each, seem good in life, 

make life worth living : things gross or subtle, 

low or high, as is the nature of the man who 

thinks. To those things always, that is, to his 

possession, his ownership of them (or, growing 

more developed, perhaps not only directly his, 

but his Caste, his Country, his Religion), 

-always to those things will the natural man 

attribute Niccam, Changelessness. Because they 

are " Groods " in his eyes, therefore they 

must be eternal and unchanging; because 

he conceives these "Goods" as changeless 

-does he thirst for their possession. What 

man will crave for aught he understands is 

fleeting as the winds, gone in a little from his 

life for evermore ? None, that is sane, assuredly ; 

and thus it is that men, having this wrong view 

as to the existence of things Permanent, 

'Changeless, in this life or in another, fall into 

Lobha, the Passion of Possession, the Craving 



THE THREE SIGNATA 139 

Thirst to have and to own, which constitutes 
the First Mode of Nescience. 

The Truth, the great Truth, that the 
incomparable Insight of our Master won for 
us (so far as we can understand it) is that 
in fact there is nowhere in life, in this world 
or another, above, around, below, any single 
thing that is not at this very moment changing 
passing, even as we think of it, from Birth, 
through Life, to Death. Man builds his pyra- 
mids, his shrines to all eternity ; and ere the 
stones be fast cemented, already the invisible 
work of dissolution has begun. A little time, 
long-seeming, perad venture, if you measure by 
the short span of man's generations, yet as 
naught when meted out by the vaster unit-scale 
of geologic age, a little time, and lo ! a pile 
of dust ploughed o^er by incurious peasants, a 
broken shaft or . two, a stone inscribed with 
characters that none can read! ".Forever 
and always, so long as the Throne khall 



J 

99 



140 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

endure," the legislator writes ; so wrote they 
in such words, before the " King of Kings, 
the " Lord of the Two Crowns," in ancient 
Egypt and Chaldsea; and to-day, after a 
hundred dynasties have gloried in power and 
waned and died, our children gaze upon the 
crumbling mummy that once was Rameses the 
Great. " So long as the sun shall shine upon 
this land our Eagles shall rule over it," cried 
the Roman generals ; but where on earth 
to-day endures one vestige of Rome's iron 
might? To-day, in little-altered words, our 
generals boast it, to-morrow (if haply men 
shall grow no wiser in the meantime than to 
slay each other like the brutes), to-morrow 
the same words will be proclaimed by men 
not-understanding of a nation yet unborn* 
Empires of man with all their pomp and boast 
of world-extending domination rise, and move 
a little, and are no more ; another and 
another comes, and each has learned no lesson 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 141 

from its predecessors ; each makes that fatuous 
boast of everlasting life and power. Swiftly, 
as one with the geonian Vision of the Gods 
might see it, swiftly they follow on another's 
steps through Time's unending halls ; and the 
names of them, the memory of their little 
fleeting greatness upon earth, have perished 
from the knowledge of the wisest. We, too, are 
hurrying in their footsteps, swept onwards by 
the winds of Nescience, whither we cannot 
see; only this we know, a little while, and 
naught that is of us shall still endure ! 

Men prate of the Eternal Hills, that could 
we see with that seonian vision would seem to 
spring up whilst we watched like some swift- 
growing vegetation, to rise in their height and 
adamantine strength, and in the eventide, 
-cut by the softness of the waters, the dust of 
them, cast wide amongst a hundred lowly 
valleys, would lie before our eyes, another 
fertile delta won for man's habitation "from 



142 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

the seas ; of the Eternal Stars, the changeless 
Heavens, that to the seer were as whirling 
dust-streams, as light-motes shuddering in the 
winds of universal life. And, passing ever 
onwards as our time-sense and our vision 
widened, we should see the unthinkably vast 
geons whereof our Scriptures tell us the ages 
wherein a "great ten -thousand- world - 
system " springs into being, thrills for a little 
while with life and then is goneslip by into 
eternity without cessation ; and ever, as our 
Insight deepened, ever swifter and swifter with- 
out any end. Chaos would waken, shuddering 
with torture, into life, to Cosmos for a 
moment's seeming; the unfathomable depths 
of empty-seeming spatial darkness flash to an 
instant's trembling life ; the Vast Emptiness 
be filled with hurrying stars and galaxies past 
thinking, gleam for a little while and then 
be lost in gloom forever; and through the 
whole of it, life hastening through the gates 



THE THREE S1GNATA 143 

of Pain to Death; a horror of living past 
conceiving, full of the Pain of Being, darkened 
by Not-understanding ; thrilling with Hope in 
youth, and ever ageing in Despair ! No where 
stability, nowhere cessation, nowhere an 
instant's slackening of that mad race of life ; 
from the ephemeron, the insect of an hour's 
endurance, to the age-long existence of a great 
world-system, only Change, and hastening 
onwards, the wail of birth, of life's endurance 
and of Death ! Nothing endures, neither the 
greatest of man's works nor the firm-seeming 
earth ; swept onwards ever by the winds of 
life, the very heavens with all their galaxies 
of stars themselves are hurrying to never-ending 
Change. That is the Truth our Master's 
Insight won in place of man's false hope, his 
vain belief in Changelessness ; and that, too, 
when one can truly grasp it, is- the sure 
antidote for Lobhd, Craving, the primal Mode 
of Nescience. Know that see how in life 



144 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

there is nothing one moment changeless, truly 
stable and the Craving Thirst for this or that 
of life's imagined " Goods " will pass for ever 
from the heart ; for only, truly, by reason 
of his desire-born thought, these things 
that man so longs to have and to hold seem 
permanent. 

This is one of the principal directions 
along which all our modern science is leading 
the western Aryan Race in lines closely parallel 
to Buddhist thought. The early pseudo-science 
of Europe, based not on facts, upon experi- 
mental work, but on mere fancies on what 
men thought must be the fact or upon so-called 
revelation was, by the natural Nescience of 
man's mind, penetrated through and through 
with ideas and dogmas as to the permanence 
of this and that. First the Greater Self-hood 
of the Godhead ; next the lesser self, the soul 
of man ; and, following these, the fixity of the 
earth, about which, in the old Ptolemaic 



THE THBBB SIGNATA 145 

system of those days, the moon, sun, planets, 
and the crystal sphere of heaven all circled 
in eternal revolutions ; and so on throughout 
the range of human knowledge or pseudo- 
knowledge of those days, all that man deemed 
good was eternal. 

The first great blow was struck against 
the old delusions, the first step made towards 
our modern science, when undaunted by fear 
of the consequences, Copernicus put forward 
the theory of celestial mechanism which now 
bears his name and is the foundation of our 
modern astronomy, the theory that the earth 
was no stable, firm, enduring centre of the 
Universe, but itself a minor planet circling 
round an immensely distant star. Despite the 
persecution of the Churchmen, who well saw 
how the ideas involved in Coper nicaii 
astronomy must, if accepted, ultimately over- 
come the teachings of their Church and of tjie 

Bible ; despite the fact that the Copernican 
10 



146 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

system demanded so immense a widening of 
men's conceptions of the Universe, with 

r 

corresponding diminution of their views as to 
their own hitherto supreme importance on the 
earth ; despite the great difficulty, at that time, 
of explaining why, if the earth were but a 
globe, a planet, all unattached objects did not 
fall off the underside of it ; despite all these 
difficulties and the fact that so far it lacked a 
proof, the inherent likelihood of this new 
theory of astronomy the ease with which, by 
it, the peculiarly looped apparent orbits of the 
outer planets were accounted for, won for it 
a rapid acceptation at the hands of the great 
astronomers of the day. A little later Kepler, 
throwing aside another of the old dogmatisms of 
the scholastics, that the heavenly bodies could 
only move in orbits either circular or forming 
a system of circular curves, took the next 
step. He, after years of immense labor spent 
on his predecessor's observations of the positions 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 147 

of the heavenly bodies, proved conclusively 
that the planetary motions could all be accounted 
for on the supposition that their orbits were 
elliptical, with their primary situated in one 
of the foci of the ellipse. Again in a few 
decades, followed the supreme achievement 
which cleared away the last remaining difficulty 
of the Copernican theory, when Newton, once 
more as the fruit of a mathematical labor 
simply stupendous with the existing methods, 
brought forward his great discovery of the 
universal Law of Gravitation, and proved the 
truth of the Law of Inverse Squares as applied 
to the orbit of the moon, from the known data 
of its parallax, its motions, and the velocity 
of falling bodies on the earth. 

The second Sign or Characteristic of all 
Life is Dukkha : how all existence, changeful 
as we have already seen, is fraught inalienably 
with Pain. Here again we see how these 
Signata are interwoven and interdependent. 



148 THE RELIGION OE BURMA 

Just as the natural man desires such "Goods" 
of life as he imagines to be permanent, so it is 
the very fact of its Im permanency that is 
largely responsible for this second feature 
of life's Painfulness. Looking at the matter 
from the higher standpoint of our very 
advanced, fi ve-khandha'd, rational type of 
being, from the view-point of mankind. The 
Master well exhibited and summarised this 
connection in His First Sermon, the " Estab- 
lishment of the Kingdom of Truth ". He 
pointed out how, having some cherished 
object, the Impermanence of all things present- 
ly results in its destruction, and so comes 
Suffering. 

- Leaving the highly developed domain of 
conscious, thinking life, and . descending 
to the lower end of the scale of sentient 
things, we can further gain a valuable 
insight into this Truth about Suffering if we 
consider the result of modern investigation into 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 149 

the lowest forms of life. In the realm 
where life such as we know is, as it were, but 
in the making, it has been shown how every 
motion of the simple organisms involved takes 
place only in response to what has been well- 
named irritation. That irritation may be 
applied from without, or it may arise, as it 
were automatically, from within, in con- 
sequence of the wastage of tissue, the break- 
ing-down of the complex living structure 
that continues as long as life exists. It is as 
though life in these low organisms were always 
on the point of going outlapsing backward, 
so to speak, into the mineral kingdom. 
But the organism can feel in some dim way 
and this power of feeling, this ability to suffer 
pain, to respond as a whole to irritation, is the 
fundamental fact which underlies the Sign of 
Life we Buddhists term the Pain-Truth. For 
the living, lowly organism, as for the more 
advanced, there is no rest : ceaselessly, 



150 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

remorselessly, living matter finds itself forced to 
make new efforts, new attempts to adjust itself 
to its changing environment. Ceaselessly, in 
the constant flux of life, the outpouring of 
molecules from the collection which we call the 
amoeba or the coccus, reaches a point where 
the stability of the whole somatic life the 
card-house, as it were, of the whole complex 
living structure is threatened with dissolution ; 
the tremendously complex living molecule is, 
as it were, in danger of toppling over or of 
caving in, unless new molecules be brought in 
from outside. The result of that is Pain, or 
.rather in this connection, perhaps the scientific 
terms, Irritation or Stimulus, are preferable, 
as less anthropomorphic ; but both are included 
in the Buddhist concept ofwDukkha, which 
ranges even below the level that we regard as 
the limit of sentient life. In response to that 
irritation the whole organism begins to move 
the amoeba beneath our microscope flows 



THE THREE SIGNATA 151 

forwards, there is no better word for it, like a 
little lump of living jelly. As it goes, it 
encounters the various objects with which 
the water-drop it lives in is littered ; contact 
therewith again produces Duhlcha upon the 
delicate surface of the tiny organism; and 
by the time it has become, so to speak, 
conscious of this new source of irritation, the 
living jelly of the amoeba has surrounded it, 
altogether embedded it in its living substance. 
This it may do, indifferently and without 
discrimination (owing to its low place in the 
scale of life) whether the object be a pain- 
causing speck of gravel or a nourishing diatom 
or desmid. If the former, however, the 
amoeba presumably by dint of the growth, 
in place of diminution, of its perception of 
pain- presently flows away, rejecting it; if 
the latter, the living jelly in contact with it 
begins to break up into proteolytic ferments, 
so digesting it. For this amoeba, lowest k\iown 



152 THE RELIGION OF BTJBMA 

of organisms, has no differentiation of its 
substance into specialised organs; whatever 
part of its cell-wall comes in contact with 
nourishing material becomes, for the time being, 
its stomach, digesting its new scraps of food. 
And thus the amoeba lives, in a ceaseless flux 
of being, unremittingly goaded on, as it were, 
by irritation, internal or external and that is 
the prototype of all sentient life. 
. Nor is it only in what we are accustomed to 

*/ 

regard as "living " matter that this responsive- 
ness to irritation manifests. Even in the 
mineral kingdom the rudiments of such 
responsiveness are clear, differing from those 
of the domain of actual " life " only by their 
relative simplicity, as we might expect from 
their relatively less complex structure. Really, 
we might almost regard all the motions of matter 
as being in some sense a rudimentary manifesta- 
tion of an attempt to find relief from pain, from 
some external force which imposes, as we justly 



THE THREE SIGN AT A 153" 

say, a " strain " or " stress " upon the thing that 
moves. Take, for example, a magnetic needle. 
This is surrounded by its own magnetic field,, 
and so long as it lies in any direction save that 
of the magnetic meridian, the earth's magnetic 
field twists and distorts the little field of the- 
needle, pulling on this group of force-lines and 
pushing that. If it be free to move, that 
is, if it be so suspended that motion would not 
involve a greater effort than the distortion 
of its field imposes on it, it will swing and dip 
so as to lie precisely in the magnetic meridian 
or as near to it as its support allows. It is- 
as though the needle, over-stressed by the 
straining of the earth's force-lines, moves round 
so as to free itself from the pain the stress 
involves, it moves, as we say, into the placa 
or line of " rest," or of " least resistance ". 

Further still than such simple and fundamental 
responses to external stress, recent research 
has shown how matter -even such elementary 



154 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

forms of it as wires of pure metals and the 

like exhibits under certain conditions an 

actual, positive response to irritation differing 

only in degree from that displayed by such 

highly organised " living " matter as a nerve. 

And still, nearer simulating life, it even can 

" remember " ; a wire which has once been 

twisted slightly and then untwisted is no longer 

the same as before ; it has had an " experience " 

which for long will produce a demonstrable 

effect on it. The difference in response to 

external stimulus between so-called " dead " 

matter and a living organism is simply a 

difference of degree. It is, so to speak, in hopes 

of finding, by combination, some way of escape 

from the constantly recurring irritations or 

straining to which it is subject. We may 

conceive, that certain sorts of matter first united 

into those great molecular complexes which, 

owing to their high degree of impermanence, the 

more rapid flux of their stream of incoming 



THE THREE SIGNATA 155 

and outgoing molecules, became the first 
living organisms on our earth. 

All evolution tells the same sad tale of life's 
everlasting hope, if one might so express it, of 
finding some Way of Peace ; or, put in terms of 
the immediate necessity, hopes of finding 
escape from danger, pain, hunger, fear, and all 
of Nature's ruthless goads. The ancient doctrine 
(it goes back at least as far as the earliest days 
of ancient Egypt) of Vicarious Atonement, 
the idea that the Divine incarnated Itself on earth 
in this or that living being for the uplifting of 
the animal man, seems like a dim attempt to 
give expression to this fact about life. But, 
unhappily, like so many ancient doctrines, it is 
just the reverse of the real fact to state it 
truly one must invert it. The truth is, 
not that the Divine is incarnate in life, in us, 
or in another, to bear our sins and take our 
punishment, but that, by Nature's ruthless 
laws, the lower in life is ever being sacrificed 



156 THE RELIGION OF BUBMA 

for the benefit of that which is higher, more 
developed. All evolution spells that lesson, with 
its terrible teaching of the " survival of the 
fittest " ; its constant sacrifice of type after type 
in the struggle for existence ; and the higher, 
the more developed in strength, whether of 
claw and beak and muscle, or of the mind of 
man, the more, up to a certain point, does the 
advanced being prey upon the lower till all 
Nature is a shambles, a slaughter-house 
wherein no thought of pity ever enters. 
Even so-called " civilised " Man, inheriting this 
dire lack of Understanding, preys on his fellows, 
and on the weaker things below him ; even, 
alas ! to the extent of making the death-agony 
of highly sentient animals one of the foremost 
of his foolish " games " or " sports ". 

It is very largely just this fact of Suffering 
not as the mere occasional accident of life, 
but as its invariable and inalienable incident 
that, borne in slowly upon the resenting mind 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 157 

of the West by the discovery of Evolution with 
its grim "survival of the fittest " and the grow- 
ing comprehension of the facts of life, has done, 
so much to lead the advanced thinkers of the 
modern world away from the old religions, to 
bring it daily more and more in line with 
Buddhist thought. For, in deepest truth, the 
whole question really lies right on this point s 
so far as what I may term the emotional, the 
feeling side of mental life is involved. So long. 
as men were ignorant about the facts of life, so 
long as they could blind themselves to the : 
terrible meaning of evolution and its attendant 
horrors, they might well say, in the poet's 
words: " G-od's in His Heaven : All's well 
with the world I "That is what man ivishes to 
believe ; hence, for many a succeeding genera- 
tion, ifc has seemed to him, despite his own 
direct experience of life, to represent the truth. 
If the Self -theory be a fact ; .if indeed there be a 
Greater Self -hood which has made or emanated 



158 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

this universal life; if, further, there are in life 
those eternal, permanent, enduring "Goods'* 
imagined on that theory, and the Greater Self 
be really supreme, all-powerful then, of 
necessity, it must follow that the " Ills " of 
life will not predominate, nay indeed will not 
exist at all in such a world. 

Against all our old teaching and beliefs and 
hopes, we of the West are slowly learning now 
that in fact the world we know is very terrible ; 
learning how the very wit to understand 
these things has only been won for us by dint 
of the unthinkable suffering of the lower types 
of life through countless ages. Learning all 
that, we slowly come to understand that all our 
deepest hopes must be abandoned, all our old- 
time thoughts mast take some new direction. 
We see how even the most heartless man, to 
say nothing of a higher Being, could never, 
given omnipotence, have devised that fearful 
Law of the lower life, have made a world 



THE THREE SIGNATA 159 

wherein every advance could only be won at 
the cost of pain past measuring ; and pain 
and there the greatest pathos of it lies 
always to the weak, the sick, the feeble, the 
poor, just the type of being on whom its 
lash falls without the mitigation that strength, 
that health, that higher growth, and wisdom 
bring. That slowly growing comprehension of 
the Pain-Truth, on the side of the emotional 
life, that is, in the thought-realm of feeling ; 
and on the philosophic side the realm of 
pure thinking i the growing understanding of the 
meaning of Causation these two great dis- 
coveries and fundamental principles of modern 
science as of ancient Buddhism are the forces 
that above all else are leading the West-Aryan 
peoples away from all their old religions systems. 
They must, in years to come, lead them more and 
more potently into that one religion wherein 
they take their right position as leading prin^ 
ciples upon which all Truth must needs be built. 



160 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

The practical application of this Pain-Truth 
lies just here : That, knowing Pain and fearing 
it, as we all know and fear it; understand- 
ing how it is the common lot of sentient life, 
we ourselves should live, above all else, so that 
our lives may, add no smallest further load of 
suffering to this great burden of the Pain of 
Life. We now have " survival of the fittest," the 
Law that might makes right and that the 
weakest things of life must bear the burden of 
its pains, what time the strong and cunning 
make of their shrinking bodies a soft path for 
their feet to tread ; that cruel rule is indeed 
the Law of Nature, the ruthless principle 
of life and action throughout the lower king- 
dom of the animals. Whilst it is even yet the 
Law also of the natural man (since he, too, is of 
the bruteSj close kin to them alike by his here- 
dity and by his character), it never is the Law 
for whoso but a little understands ; for thinking 
men, who seek to follow in the Path announced 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 161 

by Him of Perfect Pity. The one thing that 
differentiates Man altogether from the brute, 
that mental faculty, no faintest germ of which 
is found in the animals, is Pity, Sympathy, 
Compassion. For that is Panna, Insight, as 
manifested in our mental sphere ; the perfect 
Understanding of the meaning and the pathos 
and the purpose of this life that seems so 
terrible ; that is the faculty of our minds which, 
far more than all the rest, we should ever 
strive to cultivate and practise in our daily 
lives. That is the Power that brings our 
wearied feet at last upon the Holy Path ; and 
that high Pity only, when we have cast away 
the self's dire bondage of delusion, can give us 
strength further to live, to live for the love and 
service of this so pitiable and so suffering 
life. 

To the Second Sign, this Fact of Suffering, 
the Second Mode of Nescience, Dosa, Hatred or 

f ,,'"*"- - '"^x_ 

Passion} stands opposed. Dosa includes, in its 
11 



162 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

full sense, all Passion, 1 not Hate alone ; but 
Hate is herein typical, founded as it is upon 
the special not-understanding of the fact of 
Pain. Its antidote lies in that understanding ; 
once see how all this life, including the 
particular object of our anger, is involved in 
Suffering, and at the very thought of it, Pity 
awakes and kills our thought of hate. When 
a pet animal, a cat or dog, is in great pain, 
often it will try to bite the very hand of its 
own master, the hand that is trying to bring 
the suffering thing some respite from its agony. 
Who, under such circumstances, would let his 



anger rise against his poor dumb suffering 
friend ? The very fact of it, telling us how 
great its pain was, would make our pity and 
our love stronger. Just so it is with all 
forms of this Second Mode of Nescience, all 
Mnds of Dosa, Passion, Hate. He who realises 

1 All antagonistic Passion, that is, such as the passions of Pear, of 
Loathing, etc. but not, of course, passions of attraction, sex-desire, 
the desire for possession, etc., which fall under Lofe/ier, Graving. 



THE THREE SIGNATA 163 

in his heart of hearts how terrible is all this 
Pain of life can no more hate ; that under- 
standing fills the heart with that divinest light of 
it, Compassion ; and, as in the story that I told 
you of the Monk who once was prone to anger : 
ft He who Jmoius this, for him all hatreds cease I " 
Lastly, as the third of the Three Signata, 
comes Anatta, the Doctrine of the Non-Self, of 
the non-reality of the seeming individualisation 
of life ; the teaching that there is in truth no 
self, no separate soul or entity apart from 
life at all. Otherwise put, we may here express 
The Master's Teaching in the words " All Life 
is One ". This is the profoundest Truth our 
Master won for us a Truth so deep that none 
in fact can truly, fully know and live it till 
they have won the Arhan's Final Peace. But, 
however far we may be from that supremest 
Wisdom, we may still make a beginning, may 
teach ourselves a little more of this great Truth, 
so hard to understand, so -utterly hard to live. 



164 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Those of vou who have fulfilled the Burmese 

/ 

custom of entering the Monastery as SamaneraSy ^ 
will probably have had given you, as your first 
lesson, a book containing the Pali of the 
KhuddaJca Pdtha to memorise. That Kfiuddalca 
Pdtha is a sort of little Manual for Novices ; 
it contains, in very concentrated form, much of 
the deepest Teaching of The Buddha ; and snch 
beautiful poems as the Sermon on Blessings, the 
Hymn of Love, and the Hymn of Treas'ures.. 
Just at the beginning of it, following the 
Refuge-Formula and the Precepts, come the 
Ten Questions for the Novices ; these Ten Ques- 
tions and their answers contain the fundamental 
elements of the whole great Buddhist Teach- 
ing, expressed in very technical and concen- 
trated form. First of the ten is EJca ndma 
Jam ?" What is the One Norm ?" And the 
answer runs : Sable sattd dhdratthitikd 

* 

" All beings depend for their existence upon 
Nourishment (Ahara)." That, like much of 



THE THREE SIGNATA 165 

this very technical and compressed Buddhist 
Teaching, seems at first sight to be a mere 
obvious platitude ; and the careless student is 
apt to pass it by as having no importance or 
bearing on the religious life at all. In reality, 
it is of supreme importance, as is frequently 
the case with such brief trivial-seeming 
enunciations of our Holy Truth ; or else, 
indeed, it would hardly find place here amongst 
the Ten Chief Teachings which even the very 
Novice must learn and understand. 

The Buddhist conception of life, that is to 
say of the Universe, 1 may be summed up, as 
already stated, in terms of the formula AH 
Itife is One. Just as all the waters of the ocean 
are one ivater, and one body of water, so is it 
with this universal teeming life ; and just as, 

1 Since all Buddhist Teaching is from the dynamic rather than 
the static aspect, it treats of things only from the standpoint of 
Consciousness (in the very widest sense of the term), not from that 
of Matter ; or, as we would put it, it is couched in terms of Nama, 
the Norm, as contrasted with modern science, which, dealing 
so far mainly with the non-sentient world, is couched in terms 
of RuO Form. 



1 66 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

in the great ocean, there is, and can be by the 
very nature of it, no individual body of water 
separate from the rest, so in life's ocean there is 
and can be by the very nature of it no 
single separate unit or body of life, whether it 
be the highest or the lowest, most subtle or 
most gross. As with the sea, the waters of 
life's ocean are in continual movement (the 
First Sign) ; stirred by the winds of Nescience, 
impelled by Craving, Passion and Self-delusion 
our Lobha., Dosa. Moha\ the ocean of being 

-,H^ffy.^^ ttM p ER zjfohfar* " 

is cast into countless waves. Jftach tiatta 
each living being that our Nescience makes 
us regard as an individual, a real and separate 
entity, a self or soul or Atma is in truth only 
one such wave, whether a billow or a ripple 
only, upon the surface of life's ocean. Just as 
waves in the sea seem each to consist of an 
individual mass of water which, rising in one 
place, travels across the surface of the deep so, 
to one gifted with the inner Vision (but not with 




THE THREE SIGNATA 167 

the Insight also of The Buddha or the Arhan), 
it seems as though the various Sattas. gravel * ^ 

' T^~ 

on the vast pilgrimage of life. When, at one ~ 
point of time and space our wave arrives, one 
who so watches will say : " So-and-so now again 
takes t)irth." When the wave, after a duration 
of life more or less long, passes away from the 
point observed, the onlooker will say: " So-and- 
so now dies here, but continues to live (he 
looking a little further on) in such-and-such a 
sphere of life, is reborn In such-and-such a 
place." Just as the only real wave is no 
individual mass of water, but a complex colloca- 
tion of hydraulic forces, themselves constantly 
in process of minor modifications so is the 
Satta no individual unit of life ; there is, in any 
living being, no self or soul separate from all 
else in life. The only -real "individuality " there 
is, is an immensely complex collocation of 
life-forces ; which forces are every moment 
causing new life-elements (new particles of 



168 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

water) to enter into that motion which as a whole 
we call the " wave " ; and likewise are every 
moment causing other life-elements to pass away 
from participation in the being of that 
particular life-wave. These causal forces are 
themselves being constantly modified, by 
surrounding waves, by our intercourse with our 
fellows, by the winds of Craving, Passion, Self- 
desire, that still are breathing on them from 
their past. 

Further, just as the wave is component not 
only of water, but of material solids, like salt, 
dissolved in that water ; of gaseous matter, air 
and other gases, dissolved in that water ; and, 
beyond this, aether itself, the aether in the 
inter molecular spaces of water, salt and air ; 
that bound up in the complex water-molecules 
themselves, and so forth so does a Satta, a 
living being, contain, at any one moment, 
life-elements on every plane on which its develop- 
ment enables it to function. I say "contain," 



THE THEEE SIGNATA 169 

but one might (but for the possible misunder- 
standing of a materialistic teaching) almost say 
" consist " ; the fact might better be expressed 
by saying that the "real" wave the colloca- 
tion of life-forces or Kamma finds temporary 
expression in that thus-arranged mass of the 
life-elements of all the different planes which 
together constitute the range of its functioning. 
Just as the actual wave could not exist for 
an instant if it did not every moment receive 
afresh the physical water, salt, air, aether, 
and so forth, the thus-putting-together of 
which constitutes its momentary expression- 
so is it with the living being, the wave 
of life. 

With a Five-grouped * being like a man, every 
or Group of him is constantly in 



1 This paper, it must be borne in mind, was written for a body of 
students already thoroughly conversant with the rudiments of 
Buddhist Teaching. For such as have not that knowledge, it may 
be explained that Buddhist metaphysic differentiates Man into 

j Five Groups (Khandhas) viz. : (I) Rupa, the Body or Form-Group ; 

i (2) Vedana, the Sensation -Group ; (3) Sanna, the Perception -Group ; 

j{4) Sarikhara, the Tendencies orKamma-elements; and (5) Vinnana, 



170 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

parallel, dual process of both intaking and 
upbuilding, and of down-breaking and rejecting. 
But nothing can serve to build new "moment- 
ary expressions " for him but matter already on 
the level of the Group whose upbuilding is 
involved. A sentient, living being, the very 
life-elements that go to build up his body must 
themselves be far above the merely mineral 
world. Life alone can feed life, and, as we can 
see at once from the wave -analogy, the supply 
must be continuous, concordant with his 
Kamma's need to find particular expression. 
Thus even the lowest of his Groups, his 
Body-Group or Rupa-khandha, must be fed 
with matter that has once had life. Only, 
in terms of modern biology, the complex 
proteid, fat, and carbohydrate compounds, 
which living organisms (whether of the 
vegetable or animal kingdom) are able to 

the Consciousness-Group. Each of these Five Groups is, as the 
name implies, itself an immensely complex collocation of life- 
elements, or rather forces, ranging from "Matter" to "Mind". 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 171 



produce, can serve as dhara, as SPJJlishment^ 
for even the lowest, the Body -Group of him. 
But man, Five-grouped, needs his Nourishment 
on all five planes: sabbe sattd dhdrafthitikd 
" All living beings are dependent on Nourish' 
ment "-and, in this sense, we may regard even a 
single thought as a Satta. Thus " Nourishment " 
is constantly needed, if the Kamma is to continue 
to find expression (i.e., if the being is to go 
on living) ; and that on every plane or in every 
Group in which the being considered functions- 
Thus do we win another vision, a new r 
sublimer outlook upon life ; we see the vast whole 
of. it as constantly engaged in carrying on, in 
the process of its very living, a ceaselesp, over- 
whelming sacrifice continually dying so that 
it may live anew. Looking at it from the 
illusory quasi-personal viewpoint, we see how 
life on every side is living, suffering, dying a 
hundred thousand deaths, that we ourselves ^may 
live, clearly enough in the instance of our 



172 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

body-food, Ahdra to our Form-Group, but not 
less obvious, to the man with Insight, in the case 
of the higher Nourishments of the Four Ndma- 
Khandha Groups. The life of each one of us 
means at this moment the living, suffering, 
dying, of other forms of life beyond all 
numbering ; from the humble and yet even 
there immensely complex- life of the seed, 
the plant whose death this day has added to 
our body-nourishment, to the builders of 
the highest thoughts and aspirations which 
constitute the nobler aspect of our life. Put 
in one way though that is but a little part of 
.all the deep, wide truth of it these very 
thoughts that now are making just a little 
clearer for us the nature of our being the Way 
to Peace that Understanding means have 
involved, in the mere handing-down only of the 
words, the Eupa aspect of them, the living, 
suffering, dying of noble, holy men beyond 
all counting. Their study and their teaching 



THE THREE SIGN ATA 178 

have built the Path, the Way or Bridge that has 
served to carry or convey the Teaching right 
from our Master's lips to our own ears and 
hearts this day. Thus seen, the All of Life 
appears no more as when we look upon the 
outer surface of its animal development a 
terrible and ruthless strife, a ceaseless battle of 
the strong against the weak and pitiful. We 
see, thus understanding the true meaning of 
this Doctrine of the Nourishments, all life as 
a conspiracy indeed, but as a conspiracy of \ 
love, of never-ending sacrifice and mutual help. / 
What little of wisdom, hope, strength ; what | 
little of aught that is great and noble in our 
characters, shines in our hearts, our lives this 
day, is the fruit and outcome of suffering lives 
beyond all thinking. Life's past has been, its 
agony endured, that we might live, and 
peradventure, later come to understand to 
find the Peace whereunto, through this soonian 
sacrifice, all life is slowly wending, growing 



174 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

a little nearer with each sacrifice of life. So 
is Life One. 

Such is the threefold nature or character of 

.' .. '."' ( "> ; 

life : Ani.cca., , Dukkha} Anqtta, Ever-changing, 
Fraught with Suffering, and of Self-hood Void. 
Great and terrible to learn it is but true, 
alas ! how true. A Truth so deep that could our 
minds but grasp the whole of it, then, where 
erst our petty, finite minds were limiting and 
determining the Life, at that same point of 
Time and Space and Consciousness were none 
of these were but Infinitude, Infinite Under- 
standing and Compassion $ Mbbana's sure, 
inalienable Peace. 

Anicca, Dukkha, Ana.Ua : and, now as I speak 
the words, hundreds and thousands of our 
fellows, here and in every Buddhist land, are 
also reciting them, are also endeavoring, were 
it but a little, to win the Insight of their 
meaning, the Vision of their Truth which 
means attainment of Peace. All that is 



THE THREE SIGNATA 175 

-v 

round us teaches them : the flowers, the incense, 
and the lights, all swiftly evanescent things, we 
offer at our Master's shrine in memory of His 
Love and Wisdom ; the deaths of those we 
loved ; the long-drawn failure of our earlier 
hopes ; and life -itself is whispering their 
message in our hearts unceasingly Changeful, 
Compact of Suffering, of Self-hood Void ! 

Great, wonderful, "aeonian Mystery of Life, 
forth streaming from the utter gloom of 
Nescience ; seeking the Ligh Beyond through 
Pain, through Sacrifice, through age-long 
giving of the hard-won individual-seeming 
life 1 Blinded by Kescience, by Craving Thirst 
.and Hate and Self-delusion, its witless crea- 
tures nay, even also Man, whose greater 
reason should make him wiser- strive, mad with 
.torture, one against the other ; life fighting 
against life because it does not understand ! 
How great it is, that, born from; such Dark- 
ness, one still can burn so after Light ! Born 



176 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

in life's battle, one still can strive so for the 
Peace Beyond ! Born to Suffering, one still can 
live in hopes of Sorrow's End ! Row pitiable, 
in its ceaseless agony ; how hopeful, in its endless 
sacrifice ! Surely a fact so holy and so great, so 
suffering and so weak, so not-understanding 
and so all-enduring surely it must attain its 
End at last, find Life's Beyond, wherein is its 
Fruition, the Peace wherein these manifold 
conditionings are finished ; where neither Pain, 
nor Craving Thirst or Hatred or Delusion, 
can enter in again for evermore ! 

And for the aim, the meaning of this Teach- 
ing of the Three Signata, the application of 
this Truth to this immediate life we live ? That, 
too, grows clear to us as we come to under- 
stand. Since we have seen how all in life is 
ever-changing, let us, seizing right now upon 
the priceless moment ere it for ever flies, cast 
from our hearts the Craving Thirst for these 
evanescent phantasms of the world's Desires. 



THE THREE SIGNATA 177 

Understanding how all of it is doomed to 
Sorrow wrought of the very warp and woof of 
Pain and Suffering and Despair let the divine 
emotion of Compassion that wakes in us at the 
thought of it kill out all Hatred from our hearts 
and ways. Seeing, so far as our small power 
permits us, how Life is One, ceaselessly dying, 
that new life in us, in all, may live and grow a 
little nearer to the Peace, let us live no more 
for self's fell phantasy, but for the All that 
seeks a G-oal so great ; let us live so that the All, 
the One, may be the nobler and the greater for 
our life. Or, summing up all in but two 
sentences, let us apply to our own lives the 
last great message of the All -Wise, All-Loving 
Master those words that you have so wisely 
taken for your motto, as your guide in life : 
Aniccd sankhftrd ; appamddena sampddetha 
" Transient are all the elements of being : where- 
fore through earnestness seek Liberation ! " 



12 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 

WHEN first the King of Truth, the Exalted 
Lord whose humble followers we strive to be, 
fresh from the victory over self that He had 
won beneath the Bodhi Tree for the blessing of 
the world, spoke in the hearing of mankind 
that message of Hope Attainable which for 
so long the great and wise had sought in vain, 
it was in terms of the Four Aryan or Noble 
Truths. In these He declared the essence of that 
Doctrine which since that greatest day of 
all the days in the history of human thought 
has wrought so greatly for the peace and 
progress of our kind. He spoke as then, in 
the Deer-garden by Benares Town to 
those five erstwhile disciples who had tended 
Him during His long essay of the value 
of asceticism, those five who had deserted 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 179 

Him when He had found the futility of all such 
practice, and who now by long association with 
Him had come to understand to the full the 
value He attached to every single term and 
formula He used. Thus it was unnecessary that 
He should then, in that first Utterance of the 
Law, do more than concisely sum together the 
very essence of the Dhamma for one at least 
of them to comprehend to the full the meaning 
and the utter value of the Insight into life 
that He had won. What memories, and 
what associations, must each single word He 
used have had for those five men, privileged 
as they had been to follow, almost from the 
beginning of His spiritual progress, the work- 
ings of that Master-mind of all humanity ! 
For they had been accustomed to enter with his 
guidance, and to pass with Him through realm 
beyond realm of spiritual attainment even to 
that ultimate level of cosmic consciousness in 
which, till His great achievement, consisted the 



180 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

highest wisdom, the greatest attainment known 
to man ! Little indeed can we wonder that one of 
them, KondaMa, as he heard that so compendi- 
ous enunciation of the mystery of being, caught 
at The Master's meaning and saw, through the 
rending Veil of Nescience, the Light, the 
utter Peace Beyond. As we have heard the 
Sutta tell us, " in him also arose the Vision of 
the Truth, the clear and spotless Insight of the 
Law," whereat The Master, seeing and rejoicing, 
announced : " Thou verily hast seen It, 
KondaMa" so that KondaMa of the Five, 
was known as " KondaMa who perceived It," 
from that day forth. 

But rare indeed, even amidst millions of 
millions of lives, is the Insight of a KondaMa, 
who, at the first hearing of it thus succinctly 
stated, could win that perfect Vision of 
the highest Truth ; insight so clear, or 
privilege so blessed, comes but as guerdon and 
fruitage of many a truth-seeking holy life. 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 181 

We whom the world calls Buddhists often 
indeed have heard, often have pondered deeply 
on that message of The Master, on that formula 
of the Aryan Truths the Greatest of the Aryans 
told for the saving of mankind. Yet not for us 
arises Truth's clear Vision, redolent of the 
Peace that reigns in the Beyond of Life, seeing 
that still Avijja, Nescience, rules in our hearts 
and minds ; blinding us still to Truth's great 
glory, hiding us still from its all-liberating light. 
The wording of the Dhamma, that, soothly, 
have we heard ; the incomparable surety of 
those Four Aryan Truths our minds have seen 
and ascertained in all our intercourse with life. 
Still, as we ponder on their meaning, deep 
after deep of new and surer Truth opens 
before the searching of our minds ; yet far off 
and unattained lies their more inward meaning ; 
and still we look, as to a goal distant by many 
a weary life, to the day when at last full 
Vision of the Truth shall open for us, when, 



182 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

like KondaMa, we shall see, and under- 
stand. 

For this is just the essence of our Buddhism 
that there exists beyond and apart from all 
our clearest comprehension, a new, deeper and 
surer mode of comprehension than any we as 
yet have known. That utter Wisdom, that 
clear heart's Vision of the Truth, which, dawn- 
ing in a man's life, changes for that one all his 
natal Nescience into perfect Understanding ; 
which makes of one little-knowing as ourselves 
an Arahan, all-comprehending and all-holy 
that fashion of knowing is named in our sacred 
.language Anna, Insight, or Panna, Wisdom. 
That it is and not the sort of intellection 
whereby we grasp the purport of one of Euclid's 
problems which The Master spoke of when He 
taught us : " It is by not-knowing and not- 
understanding that we have come to live so 
many pain-filled lives." Whoso, of all men 
greatest and most fortunate, can win to 



EIGHT UNDEESTANDING 183 

that Vision of the Truth, that new great 
Wisdom, that lucid Insight far beyond our 
intellection, wins with it Liberation from the 
bondage of Kamma. Free from the clinging 
fetters of Self-delusion, of Craving, and of 
Hate, he knows that for him the weary cycle 
of transmigration is ended and he enters, even 
then and there, into Nibbana's never-ending 
Peace. 

This, then, is Sammaditthi, in its fullest 
and highest sense; nothing less than the very 
attainment of Arahanship, the very fulfilment 
of the purpose of all conscious life in the 
dawning of a state beyond all consciousness. 
Just as the seed must perish as a seed ere it 
can grow to the fuller, more resplendent life 
of shoot and stem and bloom, so must the 
bundle of life-elements (SahJchdra) that we call 
the self perish before the Goal of Life can be 
attained. And, just as the first condition of 
the seed-growth is the darkness and the 



184 THE RELIGION Oi 1 BURMA 

confining contact of the moist warm earth 
wherein it germinates to newer life, so is Avijja, 
Nescience, Ignorance, the limitation of the 
self -hood with its Graying and its Passion, the 
prime necessity of all we know as life. But 
light and the free wide spaciousness of air, 
not darkness and restriction, is the need 
of the plant which blossoms from the seed's 
decay; and so, The Master taught us, a new 
state, a State of Light whereinto Nescience no 
longer enters, wherein the confines of the self 
no more are seen, is the characteristic of that 
state of sainthood, that Goal of Arhanship to 
which we all aspire. 

To this full rendering of Sammaditthi we 
may give expression by terming it, in English, 
Fullest Insight. But in Buddhist technology 
Sammaditthi is often used with narrower 

* 

meanings, the narrowest of which is the mere 
intellectual process of accepting, of regarding 
as true, the fundamental formula of the Buddhist 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 185 

religion, namely, the Four Noble Truths. It 
is thus defined in the Saccavibhahga, as being 
the understanding of Sorrow, of Sorrow's Cause, 
of Sorrow's Ceasing, and of the Path that 
conducts thereto. It is in this restricted sense 
only that we are ourselves immediately concern- 
ed with it ; for here it may truly be regarded 
as being the commencement of the Path; whilst 
in its deeper meaning, as " Fullest Insight," it 
stands at the end of the Path, and is, indeed, 
the means whereby alone that Goal may be 
attained. 

Here, before going further, it may be as 
well , to correct one nofc uncommon error as 
regards the Atthangika-magga, the Eightfold 
Path. It has not uncommonly been represented, 
by writers on Buddhism, that the Eight Members 
of the Path Right Understanding, Aspiration, 
Speech, Action, and so forth stand for 
consecutive stages in the Path of spiritual 
progress. There is, indeed, one sense in which 



186 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

such a classification in respect of time throws 
light on the working of certain of the 
mental processes, as when we consider the 
arising of a simple idea, comparable to DittM ; 
its growth into a desire for action, comparable 
to Sankappa; the crystallisation of this mere 
desire into approximate action, in speech, Vdca; 
and its outcome in that action as Kammanta. 
In this series, we do in fact see something very 
similar to the first four Members of the Path 
occurring consecutively in point of time; but 
where the Noble Eightfold Path is spoken of 
in Buddhist technology^ the Eight Members 
are to be regarded as all of them essential 
elements of that. Path just as the banks, the 
roadway, the road-metal, the footway, the 
avenue of trees, and so forth, may all be 
regarded, not as consecutive, but as integral 
elements of the road during its whole length. 
There is indeed, as pointed out by Buddhaghosa, 
a certain element of consecutiveness about the 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 187 

eight elements of the Path just as we might 
find, in respect of the road we have taken as 
our analogy, that at one part of the road the 
banks, at another the avenue of trees, were the 
most prominent feature of that road. But in 
that order, which we may term the Order of 
Attainment, to distinguish it from the Order of 
Exposition, in which latter we all know it, in 
that order of attainment the classification is in 
respect of Kdya, Vdca and Oitta : Body, Speech 
and Thought ; and in it, therefore, Sammaditthi, 
as falling under the head of Citta, comes last, 
not first, and thus carries in that connec- 
tion the meaning of Fullest Insight which has 
been considered above. In general, however, 
the Eightfold Path is to be considered not 
as consisting of eight successive steps or 
stages, but as a rule of conduct eightfold in 
character, wherein all the eight Angas or Ele- 
ments are severally essential. Each of these 
Eight Members has its minor, middle, and major 



188 THE BELIGION OF BURMA 

aspects ; the position of a given being in 
respect of consecutive attainment in progress of 
time, being measured by which of these three 
divisions of the several Members he has 
attained. 

Where, then, in our Buddhist studies, we 
desire clearly to define the path of progress 
towards Nibbana in respect of progress through 
time, or through consecutive stages, it is best 
to turn, not to the Eightfold, but to the Four- 
fold Path. The four elements of this latter 
are in fact consecutive ; first the attainment 
of the stage of Sotapatti, then that of Sakada- 
gami, then Anagami, and finally that of 
Arahattam itself. In this resume of the 
progress of a being from Life, the ocean 
of Saihsara or of the cycle of Transmigration 
wherein we all exist, to that Beyond of Life 
which we Buddhists term Mbbana we see very 
clearly the distinction between two of the 
different usages of the word Sammadittbi. 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 189 

That Fourfold Path, as you will remember, is 
classified in respect of the mental Fetters or 
Bondages which have been overcome. Before 
a being can enter on the first of those Four 
Stages, he must have overcome the first three 
out of the Ten Bondages of the mind. First 
amongst those three comes Salcdyaditthi, the 
belief or opinion that there exists within us any 
sort of permanent self or soul, whether great 
or small, mean or exalted, gross or subtle. 
When a thinking being has broken through 
that Bondage (it is like the little stem and 
root-fibre that first pierces through the hard 
triple cuticle of the germinating seed), and, 
together with it, has freed himself from 
Vicikiccha (Dubiety or the hesitance between 
two courses of action, the doubt as to whether 
one's conception of the Dhamma is correct), 
and Silabbat-paramdsd (the belief in the 
efficacy of rites and rituals and spells and 
prayers to effect any real change within his 



190 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

being), then he has won to the first of the 
Four Stages ; he has become Sotapatti, " He 
who has entered on the Stream " that stream 
in the ocean of Samsara which sets fair 
towards Nibbana's distant shore. Here is 
implied another usage of our Sammaditthi ; 
one standing, as it were, midway between the 
mere intellectual acceptance of the Four Noble 
Truths and that widest meaning of the term 
which we have designated Fullest Insight. 
For the breaking of this Bondage of self- 
delusion means far more than the mere holding 
of the opinion that " there is no self ". It 
means to see, to know that as the Very Truth 
and so to live it, for he only truly lives, who 
knows. 

Standing although it does at the very 
beginning of the Path, this middle mode of 
Sammaditthi implies a very great advance in 
comprehension of the truth about life". It is 
said in our Scriptures that whoso has entered 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 191 

on the Stream, and in this middle sense 
is Sammaditthi, has before him at the most 

* 

not more than seven lives ; it may be less, but 
that is the utmost possible. So we see that in 
reality, the gaining of even thus much of this 
Right Understanding is a very great achieve- 
ment one which few indeed now living have 
attained to a position which can be won only 
as the outcome of the fruit of many lives of 
earnest searching after Truth. 

Thus we have before us these Three Modes 
or meanings of Sammaditthi. First, the mere 
intellectual appreciation of the truth of the 
fundamental teaching of the Dhamma an 
appreciation which, I hope, we all have 
long since attained to. In Ceylon (where 
Magadhi, the Mula-bhdsa or sacred language of 
Buddhism, is still a spoken language amongst 
the learned and the Monks), if you ask a 
learned Monk of what religion is such- 
and-such a Buddhist, he will reply, not 



192 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Buddhdgama "of the Buddhist Religion" 
but " Sammaditthi "using this, the nar- 
rowest mode or meaning of the term. In English, 
indeed, we, speaking of our religion, or spoken 
of by others, term ourselves, or are termed, 
Buddhists ; but, convenient as it is, the term is 
not correct. We are, or should be Sam- 
mdditthi, having Right Understanding of the 
fundamental facts about life; we cannot truly 
claim to be Buddhists, save as a mere measure 
of convenience, for the sake of ready comprehen- 
sion of our religious principles ; for that term, if 
we trace it to its root meaning, would imply 
the claim of full enlightenment, seeing that the 
root is Bodh, to be Awakened, Illuminated, 
"Wise. Even if we take the word Buddhist to 
imply a follower of the religious teaching 
peculiar to The Buddha, it still involves a 
certain amount of misconception; for in fact 
much of what the world calls Buddhist 
doctrine was well-known in India long before 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 193 

The Buddha's day and is thus in no true sense 
the special Teaching of The Buddha. To one 
who is Sammaditthi, all that pertains to the 
deeper Truths about life, whether first enunciat- 
ed by The Buddha or no, is part of his religion ; 
and we may take this intellectual assent to Truth 
as being the determining factor in this, the 
Minor Mode of usage of " Sammaditthi ", 
Right Understanding, right appreciation of the 
Truth, is this mode of Sammaditthi; and this 
we trust all have now attained. 

Second comes the Middle Mode ; that usage 
of the term which, together with the breaking 
of the Bondages of Doubt and Ritual-reliance, 
involves the " Entering on the Stream," that 
great spiritual attainment which constitutes the 
First Stage upon the Fourfold Path. And, yet 
beyond that, great though to our eyes such 
attainment be, far yet beyond that lies the 
Major Mode. Therein Sammaditthi means the 
final destruction of Avijja, of Nescience, of 

13 



194 THE BELIGION OF BDEMA 

Not-understanding ; the attainment of the posi- 
tion of the Saint, the Arahan ; the winning in 
the highest degree of that Fullest Insight or 
Highest Wisdom which, as has been said, lies 
far beyond any mode of mental functioning of 
which we now are cognisant. Between the 
mere acceptance of Right Views concerning 
life, and that supreme Attainment of 
the Arahan, lies the whole mass of 
Buddhist Teaching; also, the whole long ., 
Path of patient culture, of slow growth, of 
ever-dawning horizons of wisdom extending, 
it may be, over many a following life which 
leads from all life's turmoil to the Peace. 
It is the hope of every Buddhist that, not 
only he, but in the end all living creatures, 
will one day travel to the glorious Goal. 
Looking thus on the Path as extended between 
the two terminal Modes of Sammaditthi Eight 
Understanding at one end of it and Fullest 
Insight at the other and placing, as we may 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 195 

legitimately place, our own mental attitude as 
somewhere on that line between the minor and 
the median mode, nearer to the former as our 
Buddhism is more of a lip-service and less of a 
heart-service, two most important facts at once 
appear. First, the true spiritual progress, 
the best use, if our Buddhism be true, that we 
can make of our life, lies only in the passing 
from our present position to one yet nearer to 
the Middle Mode. Secondly, since the same 
fundamental element of Sammaditthi is found 



at both ends of the Path, the dimension in 
which that Path is extended, its direction, as it 
were, in the space of consciousness, lies in 
what we may term the attainment of a series of 
ever-deepening Modes of Truth, the several points 
on our line, each serially giving place to that 
beyond it. To make any use at all of our 
Buddhism, and, if we take it rightly, there is 
naught else in all the Universe so essentially 
useful, we have to discover in what direction in 



196 THE RELIGION .OF BURMA 

OUT lives lies that line of ever-deepening Truth; 
and, having found it, to walk therein to the 
best of our ability ; for that, surely, is the Holy 
Path itself, and save through its ever- deepening 
modes of seeing Truth, there is never freedom 
to be won from all the sorrow and the change 
of life. 

Let us try to ascertain what we mean when 
thus we speak of ever-deepening Modes of Truth, 
and to realise what fashion of falsehood it is 
that we must needs avoid that we may rightly 
conceive of this our Right Understanding. Let 
us at first consider what sort of Understanding 
is that which is common to all thinking beings, 
and which on that very ground is too component 
of Nescience to be of real service to the aspirant 
after Truth. 

Looking on the world presented to him by 
his senses, one fact predominates over all 
others in the mind of the ordinary man : the 
fact that there exists an es.sential difference 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 197 

between that which, for him, is self his 
thoughts, words, actions and all the rest of 
life, the whole great Universe, which lies 
beyond, in the region of the not-self. That 
view, that fact ever so apparent to the 
unconverted mind, is the first Wrong View ; 
the first great Micchddifthi which the All- 
Wisdom of our Master has taught us to 
avoid. But the ordinary man, taught only by 
his natal Nescience, by Avijja, sees in that 
illusory distinction between self and the not- 
self the fundamental fact of life ; and from it, 
as from any start made in the wrong direction, 
all the Wrong Views of life depend. It 
needed the wisdom of a Copernicus to over- 
come, for the mass of civilised humanity, the 
delusion that the sun goes daily round the 
earth ; and the opponents of Copernican 
Astronomy objected that it was the common 
daily testimony of the sense of sight of every 
being that it did so move. So did it need 



198 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

the Wisdom of The Buddha to overcome for us, 
His followers, that deepest delusion of the 
central self -hood ; and just so, also, is still the 
cry of the opponents of His Teaching, that the 
daily momentary testimony of our own minds 
declares this self -hood as the central fact 
of life. 

So starting wrongly, the world's philosophies, 
of necessity, go further and further from 
the Truth they seek. Finding this Self- 
hood as the central fact of life, they deduce, 
from the phenomena about them, the existence 
of other selves besides their own. The savage, 
seeing the motion of sun and moon and star 
and stream and all the manifold phenomena of 
being, hearing the multitudinous sounds of 
Nature, attributes to each and all of them a 
separate self, a god or spirit using each and 
all just as he fancies from his wrong under- 
standing about life he uses his various organs 
of motion and of speech. And when, later on 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 199 

in the course of evolution, the savage comes to 
the point where families coalesce into tribes and 
clans, and these into nations, ruled over by one 
sovereign, so in his mind, grows the religious 
idea. The gods of star and earth and forest 
slowly take the names of servient angels, with 
one Great Self their Ruler, the Soul or Self of 
Space, wherein all these lesser beings have 
their dwelling-place. So does the religious 
consciousness of man, with great periods of 
time, pass from polytheism to monotheism or 
to pantheism ; till, passed out of savagery, man 
grows to mental adolescence ; by which time 
we generally find his monotheism or his 
pantheism well established, even as now they 
are in many directions in the western world. 
Another very vital factor in the moulding of 
the religious consciousness of mankind (for the 
origin of religion is immensely complex, by no 
means taking its birth from one set of facts or 
theories alone) added its record also to the 



200 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

common testimony of all mankind's experience 
as to the existence of the Self. It is the factor 
of Religious Experience, of the partial 
recollection, by saint and seer 9 of the manifold 
States of consciousness that exist beyond that 
realm of waking life wherein we normally act 
and live. More clear-seeing, indeed, in the 
greater light of consciousness to which they in 
their several Attainments had achieved, the seers 
of all times (at least such of their number as 
attained to the higher Jhanas, the states of con- 
sciousness pertaining to the Formless Worlds) 
announced the fact that, with progression up- 
wards, element after element of the lower self 
was cast aside, till in the ultimate of conscious- 
ness they saw, no longer the manifold self-hoods 
of our experience, but One Self one highest Self 
alone. This Self they, with minds already 
cast in the theistic mode by reason of the 
religious teaching of their nation, identified 
with the Supreme Being who had been 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 201 

hypothesised as having made or emanated all 
this universal life. Thus, rightly casting out in 
the light of their superior experience, the petty 
self of man, they yet adhered to a still greater, 
because subtler, if far deeper-lying delusion. 
The conception grew of an ultimate, enduring, 
blissful higher Self -hood, wherefrom all life has 
consciously, intentionally been emanated ; 
wherein whoso will rightly train his mind may 
merge his lesser self-hood, as the drop mixes 
with the wide ocean's wave. 

Growing side by side with this rich 
crop of wrong opinions, sprang up likewise, 
intimately connected with it, another group 
of misconceptions as to the facts of life, a 
group which, in its totality, we may con- 
veniently term the Theory of the Joy of Life. 
This theory also had many a different factor 
in its being ; chief amongst these being the 
circumstance of human mental immaturity ; 
the fact that all mankind was passing, whilst it 



202 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

upsprang, through the childhood of humanity. 
Nay, it is even now, and even amongst the 
most advanced units of the most civilised of 
nations, only just passing from that epoch 
into the period of mental adolescence ; and 
the sense of the joy of life is perhaps the 
acutest sentiment of child-life, the characteristic 
of the undeveloped, the immature consciousness 
of the little child. Cast back your own minds 
to the days of your early childhood, and if the 
memory has not altogether faded, you will see 
how true this is, you will remember how wonder- 
ful and fair and noble and good did all exist- 
ence seem ; how joy seemed the reality, and 
pain and sorrow only a passing, if dreaded, 
shadow to its glorious light. You will recall the 
vivid sense of wonder and of pleasure that came 
with each new phenomenon of life ; how even 
some newly seen insect might arouse a perfect 
ecstasy of wonder; how every hour, nay every 
moment of the waking life seemed dear and 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 208 

pleasant so that even when tired out, you 
hated the very thought of sleeping, since that 
would mean the deprivation of some few hours 
of blissful conscious life. That is the charac- 
teristic of the infant consciousness, that sense 
of joy in life; and in this, as in so many 
ways, our own experience as children but 
epitomised the common daily condition of 
human consciousness in its early days. For 
such is the peculiarity of our growth, that 
the human individual, in the process of only a 
few years of infancy and childhood, epitomises 
in his life and thought the bygone history 
of the whole human race whose experience he 
inherits. Watch the daily growth of a young 
child and you will see the truth of this, you will 
see the infant life telling the story of the 
development of all humanity, from the tree- 
dwelling anthropoid, scarcely yet a man, 
through the Stone Age down to the hunting, 
fighting, kingdom -organising age which, even 



204 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

now, only the most advanced units of our 

9 / 

kind have outgrown. The child-mind sees 
and hears, and finds deep-rooted joy in 
mere sight and hearing ; but it does not, till 
grown out of childhood's age, think of what it all 
must mean. Due to this, and again to the 
reproduction of the history of savage man, is 
the child's callousness to pain sometimes so 
shocking. Wonderful and therefore pleasant in 
its eyes are the struggles of some tortured 
animal or insect ; just because the sort of 
movements executed are new and strange, the 
sight of them gives pleasure ; and so, with all 
but a small minority of quite exceptional 
children, we have to educate the young out of 
the savage instinct to kill and torture the 
lower forms of life. 

This early joy in life, so characteristic of the 
young, the mentally immature and thoughtless, 
bulking so largely as it still does in human 
thought, came, of necessity, to affect profoundly 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 205 

the development of religious thought; meaning 
by that term, as we have all along implied, 
man's way of looking at the deeper things 
of life, his attempts to propound an answer 
to the riddle of existence. Applying, as 
always (in the nescience-working of the mind), 
the conditionings of his own life to the greater 
life about him, man early came to hold the view 
that all in life was essentially good. The joy of life 
in his own heart he reflected on the world about 
him, and in particular did he attribute joy and 
graciousness and goodness to the Supreme Self 
whom he later came to conceive as having made 
the earth and sky. He himself, for the service of 
his daily needs, could fashion out of stone and 
wood and earth his implements of hunting, 
warring, cooking ; and so again he came to 
think that all this Universe, so fair and good 
before his mental vision, must likewise have 
been fashioned by that great Being. Remem- 
bering his own delight in the accomplishment 



206 THE BBLIGION OF BTJBMA 

of work well-done, the joy of the maker 
over some tool or structure well-adapted 
to its purpose, he could even conceive the 
Deity as resting from his labor of creation, 
as looking on the world that he had made, 
and saying that it all was " very good J) . 

Yet knowledge grows, and with its growth 
comes deeper insight and a truer appreciation 
of the real nature of the Universe about us and 
within. With that growth of mental stature, 
the conception of the Deity, this personification 
of the ultimate forces of our being, comes of 
necessity to take a less and less important 
place within the thoughts of men. They see 
with growing understanding how much 
of utterly useless suffering there is in life; 
they learn, if very slowly, that in truth 
there is in all life no persona^ no self, 
whether the personal or the greater self ; 
but only a continuum, a flux of being, a 
ceaseless movement of the restless tides of life. 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 207 

Slow, indeed, is that coming to mental 
adolescence; even still, (by reason of the 
influence on our speech of that Wrong View 
of life) we say " I think " where rightly we 
should say "It thinks". The Indian of The 
Buddha's time said " The God rains " where 
we should say " It rains ". We have indeed 
advanced to the intransitive mood in this 
respect; but how long will the self persist 
in our speech in respect of human actions? 
With this personalisation of life's pheno- 
mena, indissolubly connected with it, spring- 
ing from the same source, sad Nescience, rises 
that other Theory of the Joy of Life ; ideas so 
plausibly and so naturally associated in the 
lines of that English poet who exclaims : 
" Grod's in his heaven : All's well with the 
world." 

Such are the theories of life termed by the 
Buddha Micchdditthi Wrong Views, the sort 
of Not-understanding we must sheer avoid, if 



208 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

ever we are to merit the title of Sammaditthi* 



First, is the Theory of the Self, the conception 
that life is enselfed, that there is, within or 
behind it, an unchanging vital persona, whether 
regarded as ultimately one or many. Secondly, 
is the Theory of the Joy of Life, the view that 
life is in its fundamental nature blissful, good to 
live for the sake of its mere pleasure ; and that, 
by any means whatever, we may realise therein, 
not the well-known Karmic sequence of the 
craving for pleasure bringing ultimately Pain ; 
but a never-ending succession of pleasurable 
states of consciousness, a permanent Happiness 
resulting from the continued gratification of 
the desire for experience, for life. 

These are the two great root-conceptions, 
springing from Avijja, from Nescience, Ig- 
norance, the Not-understanding of the real 
nature of life, the rejection of which constitutes 
the basis of Sammaditthi in its Minor Mode. 



Here, before going further, we may well 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 209 

pause to consider jvhy these mere theories 
about life should constitute, from the Buddhist 
point of view, so serious a danger to the well- 
being of humanity ; and so grave an obstacle 
that the very first step on the Path cannot be 
taken till they have been for ever set aside. 
Both of them have their roots in the deepest 
places of the human heart. It is fair and sweet 
and pleasant to a man to think that he the 
real "he," as the Attavadin would put it is 
immortal, changeless, sure (if he but live 
aright) of inheriting a blissful and an eternal 
life ; to conceive of all this world as being 
made and guided by a Great Person, infinitely 
powerful and beneficent, willing and able to 
help ; and to look on life as in its essence 
blissful, pleasant, good to live. All this being 
so, why make the rejection of these theories 
the very test of the Buddhist orthodoxy if 
we may use the term ; or, how does it happen 
that, in a religion so essentially practical as 

14 



210 THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 

Buddhism, the mere intellectual acceptance or 
rejection of certain theories should hold so 
prominent a place ? 

The answer to that question is to one who 
Dot yet is Sammaditthi the most terrible in 
all the world ; it is an answer which, if it stood 
alone, would leave no hope or help or purpose 
in our life ; it simply runs : They are untrue. 
To the Buddhist, Truth, the search after and 
the attainment to Truth, is his religion ; 
and no man may hope to win to Truth who 
starts out in the wrong direction, who seeks 
for Truth whilst laying to his heart the false 
if fair solace that these Wrong Views present. 

Untrue ! And is Truth, then, worthy of 
so great a sacrifice that a man must needs give 
up convictions the most deep-rooted and con- 
soling for its sake alone ? Answers the 
Buddhist : Truth not alone denies the false, 
it goes far deeper, it affirms the True. So 
great and so inspiring in our lives, and, in its 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING ^ 211 

deeper levels so profound, so far beyond our 
knowing is Truth, that it has been worthy of all 
sacrifice in all the worlds. Truth is greater 
than our hopes, nearer and yet dearer, could 
we but see and know it, than even our 
so cherished Theory of Self-hood, of the 
personal immortal life ; wider is Truth than the 
heavens, vaster than the abyss of space ; greater 
than aught we can compare it to It is so 
free and high ! Renunciation ? Surely. Did 
ever the seed give being to the flower, shed- 
ding its perfume on the morning breeze, but 
first, below there in the darkness of the mire, 
it gave its own life, that a greater life might 
come ? That is why Renunciation is the key- 
note of all Buddhist practice ; and that is why 
the first step to be taken is the rejection 
utterly of all that is not utterly true. 

For in Buddhism we are concerned with facts, 
not theories. If ever we may make our hearts, 
our minds, worthy receptacles of Truth's sweet 



212 THE KELIGION OF BUEMA 

Amrita, we must first cleanse them of every 
trace of the bitter drugs Avijja has to give. 
Untrue, these two Wrong Views of life bear in 
themselves the seal and proof of their untruth ; 
to see this fact, you have but to consider 
what has been the fruit of them in the history 
of humanity ; to observe their outcome in the 
story of the creeds and faiths of all mankind. 
The destroying progress of Islam, the tortures 
of the Inquisition, the awful period of the Dark 
Ages when no man dared to breathe his free 
thoughts in the air of a mind -enslaved continent, 
and I know not, dare not think, what total 
sum of human agony and misdirected human 
energy and work these are the fruits of those 
Wrong Views of life. It was because men dream- 
ed they had immortal souls, destined to per- 
sonal immortality of joy (on darker side of it, 
to immortality of torture : what charnel-minded 
imagination ever first put forth that thought 
of horror to taint the mental atmosphere of the 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 213 

earth ?) and must placate the Supreme Self as 
they, poor grovelling nescience-darkened heartSj 
then wanted to placate their lords and kings 
that they could kill, burn, torture even the 
greatest, noblest minds that ever their race 
gave birth to. For what cruelty, what torture 
mattered in the noiv, where eternity to-morrow 
weighed against it in the other scale ? If 
one of the world's greatest epics of religion, 
the Bhagavad-Gita, could be marred, utterly 
marred it is by that deadly advice of Krishna 
to his disciple, who, on the point of plunging 
all his kith and kin into suicidal warfare, was 
very properly seized with pity-born compunc- 
tion, but ordered, in the name of the Soul- 
Theory, to go on and kill, seeing that truly the 
Self was spiritual, and could not be destroyed. 
If such outcomes of the Atta- theory as all 
these could make a Shelley rightly cry : " The 
name of God hath fenced about all crimes 
with holiness," can we not see, not looking 



214 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

further, that Truth is absent from . all views 
of life, where such sad fruits can follow the 
acceptance of those views ? 

Why is this ? How is it that these twin ideas 
have so imbruted man (ah, pity of it, in the 
name of all that should be holiest and best !) as 
to have brought more misery and bloodshed on 
the earth than any other single cause of human 
folly and misdeed ? As our Master taught us, just 
because they spring from Nescience, from men's 
untrained Desire ; because they are but theories 
only ways of seeing things, views, difthis, 
things having no foundation in Truth or Fact. 
There comes the whole solution of the problem ; 
there comes the point in the supreme impor- 
tance of Sammdditthi Eight Understanding 
of the facts of life. Over facts, whoever fought 
or hated or inflicted suffering on life ? No man 

/ 

of all the myriads that have ever lived. But 
over views, mere theories, things having no 
foundation save in the cobwebs of some pent-up 



.'EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 215 

Nescience-darkened human mind, over mere 
theories, such as no man could ever tell the 
truth of (were truth not all too holy a word to : 
be employed in such connection), over mere 
views men always have quarrelled and ever 
will, until at last such follies are for ever set 
aside ; and no man shall live so ignorant as to say : 
" 1 hold such-and-such a theory, have worked it 
out, adopted it as mine ; being my view, I am 
ready to fight for it against the world at 
large." 

Not that in the past alone have these 
Wrong Views of life wrought damage to human 
progress ; not that now we have so far pro- 
gressed that their power for ill-doing has 
passed away from the causes of life's unceasing 
suffering on earth. Even to-day, in the name 
of those twin theories, inconceivable agony is 
being inflicted upon life. Even to-day a 
hundred thousand altars cast the ill savor 
of their sacrifices on the air. Follies, you 



216 THE BELIGION OF BURMA 

say, committed by barbarians, who, seek* 
ing more of joy in this world or the next, seek 
to placate their imaginary gods enselved. So 
be it. Ignorance it is ; yet not worse evil than 
is daily happening in western lands. If , as is 
happily the case, no more the cries of human 
victims, burnt living in the market-places 
of our towns in the name of those two Modes of 
Nescience, prove their untruth and potency for 
evil in the hearts of men, still, under other 
names and forms, are they wreaking untold 
woe on all mankind. To the Self-Theory, 
as manifested under the form of so-called 
patriotism, is due the fact that so large a 
proportion of the manhood of the modern 
nations, drawn from useful service to mankind 
in field or factory, is wasted- worse than 
wasted in the study and practice of warfare ; 
which, in plain English, is the study and 
practice of the most efficient method of achiev- 
ing on a wholesale scale the most terrible of all 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 217 

human crimes- murder. To the same mani- 
festation of Self-delusion is due the fact that 
so large a proportion of the wealth -and re-* 
sources of the western nations is wasted on this 
same folly of armaments. Only because men 
will cherish the Self-Theory, they will not under- 
stand that we allEnglish, Germans, French 
and so forth alike are human beings, fellow- 
creatures, brothers ; members of the one great 
fraternity of conscious, suffering, living beings, 
they would not war like wolves or savages-^ 
the one upon the other, did but they understand* 
It is the Wrong View : " lam English ; glorious 
English nationality is mine,, so it behoves me 
to fight against persons who have another 
sort of Self -Theory, and say : f No, but a 
Teuton I.' " It is that Wrong View which now 
makes necessary that the bulk of the resources 

*/ 

of every branch of the West-Aryan race is 
wasted on armaments of war wasted, when 
so much might, in the present state of our 



218 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

knowledge, be achieved by man, /were that 
great wealth to be expended in combating, not 
only physical disease, but also those far more 
fatal mental sicknesses, to which so much of 
western misery is due. 

To the Wrong View of the Joy of Life, 
also, how much of our occidental suffering may 
be assigned! Believing that in life joy may 
somehow be gained, we add and add, instead 
of seeking to diminish, the number of the 
things we say we " need ". Climatic condi- 
tions of necessity add to the number of the 
actual necessities of life: as compared with the 
simple needs of warmer climates. But beyond 
those actual necessities, beyond the needs of 
science and of art and literature (civilising 
influences all, and so not less true "needs" of 
the mind than food-stuffs are of the body)- 
beyond our true needs, how much our modern 
civilisation now produces just by reason of this 
false belief in the Joy of Life; the mere theory 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING . 219 

that by much possession we may come to 
happiness! To produce that vast array of 
things really useless, thousands and hundreds 
of thousands of women, men, and even little 
children , must live squalid and hopeless lives, 
ever in fear of some catastrophe of commerce 
that may deprive them of food, warmth, and 
shelter ; and how many, alas, of these producers 
of the unnecessaries of life are, even now, short 
of due food, lacking the barest of human 
necessities ? 

Thus, looking even into the present-day con- 
ditions of our human existence, do we see how 
deadly, how full of poison for humanity, are 
the two Views or Theories of Life which, 
warned by our Master, we who are Samma- 
ditthi have come to reject as false and full of 
danger and of fear. Heart's poisons in very 
truth are they, poisoning the very innermost 
lives of men ; and yet, in one after another 
of their endless manifestations whether a& 



220 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

religious dogmas, as political or national concep- 
tions, as militarism, or as commercialism the 
minds of men still seize upon them with avidity, 
still give them great, high-sounding and heart- 
stirring names. Just so, in the old Buddhist 
simile, a man, afflicted with a grievous open 
sore, from mere fear of thinking of it, 
covers it up from sight with piled-up layer 
after layer of gold-leaf, since so it seems no long- 
er hideous ; yet ah, the corruption that festers 
beneath it all! Great names; high-sounding 
words; wonderful theories of things that no 
man knows the how and why of life ; such 
now, as ever, is the gold-leaf this poor suffering 
humanity applies to its festering wounds ! 
How long, how sorrow-laden must it yet be, 
ere we shall tear it all away, this glittering 
gilding of mere empty and high-sounding terms, 
and dare to look on life as in very truth it is; 
or have the wit to turn to that All-greatest of 
the Heart's Physicians* who, with Truth's 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 221 

healing salve, stands ever ready to allay the 
growing poison and the fever of our wound ? 

That salve, the healing, even with a bitter 
seeming balm, is Sammdditfhi, Eight Under- 
standing of the facts of life, the comprehen- 
sion of the Truth about existencethe pulling- 
off of the gold-leaf and examining and recog- 
nising the true sources of our pain. To dare to 
look on life as it really is: Anicca, Dukkha? 
Anatta ; Transient, and Sorrow-laden, and 
Devoid of Self that is the first step we must 
take. It means the casting-out of all the vain 
reliances and theories that ever the mind of 
man has spun; the setting-aside, since such 
conduce not to our urgent need of healing, of 
all such questionings as : How life came to be, 
or Whence it is. Whither it shall go- with that 
alone we really are concerned; for that, if 
we have Eight Understanding, we may some- 
what direct, since we- are what ,we really 
know of life. 



222 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

Speaking of the particular religious aspects 
of the two great Wrong Views, I have said 
that their casting-off: seems at first sight 
a thing most cruel and most terrible; it is 
the plucking-off: of the gold-leaf from the 
poisoned wound. Some few rash minds indeed 
have dared to do that (not knowing, alas for 
them, of the Physician and His salve !) and, 
seeing what lay beneath it all, these have come 
straight to yet another new Wrong View about 
it all. Seeing the suffering inseparable from 
all life understanding the meaning of the 
fact, that^ in the body's evolution, what is now 
for us sensation is the direct descendant of the 
irritability, the reaction to irritation, of the 
primordial protoplasm these have come to 
formulate a new Wrong View of Life, and one 
which does x not possess the merit even of 
looking beautiful, as the old gold-leaf method 
did. : That view is now termed Pessimism ; 
we may briefly put it thus. There is no Soul, 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 223 

no God, but a new sort of eternal self-hood or 
principle called Matter alone exists. That 
Matter is itself insentient, but somehow, by 
mere chance, certain combinations of it occurred 
which were so unstable as to involve a constant 
molecular change ; a taking-in of new molecules 
at one point, and a turning out of old ones on 
the other. By virtue of the action of environ- 
ment on this primordial life-stuff, it presently 
developed into what now we are, living, con- 
scious beings, destined to cease at death, and 
pass away as uselessly as first we came. In 
this view one, happily, held now by but a 
few adherents there is no Law in life, that is, 
no Law of Life as such, at all : our existence 
came by Chance ; and one day, when the earth 
grows cold or hot enough, it will similarly 
perish. All life. is thus regarded as not merely 
full of sorrow and of evil but as uithout a 
purpose or a future. Life, wonderful, ever- 
miraculous as to the thoughtful man it is, has, 



224 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

in this view of it, no origin save Chance and 
the workings of the blind Laws of Nature ; no 
hope save death, with ail its suffering left 
unrewarded; no aim, no end, no purpose, and 
no brighter goal. 

Few men ever will, we hope, come to 
hold that so terrible view of existence, least of 
all any Buddhist. But it is mentioned here to 
introduce a most important point in Buddhist 
Teaching, namely, that this Pessimism is, from 
the Buddhist standpoint, just as wrong as the 
optimistic and theistic theories which we have 
already discussed. For it is characteristic of 
that Teaching that it ever pursues the Middle 
Way, in this great question of the Good and 
Evil of existence as in all other matters. In 
the first Sermon of The Buddha, the importance 
of avoiding such extremes of view-point was 

V f _ 

emphasised by the terming of the Path the 
Middle Way. Preached, as that Sermon was, 
to Monks accustomed to regard self-torture as 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 225 

the means of liberation from suffering, the 
essence of the religious life, the contrast was 
drawn between the life of self-torture and the 
life of self-indulgence ; and the Middle Way, 
the way that leads to Truth, to Fullest Insight 
was- announced to lie between these two 
extremes. But in our question of life's Good 
and 111 also, the same rule applies. While we 
must, if Sammaditthi, reject the theories of the 
Self and of the Joy of Life ; we must likewise 
reject the opposite extreme of view :the 
theory I have given above as Pessimism. Life, 
then, as the Buddhist sees it, is indeed full of 
Suffering ; but it. may be so directed as to lead 
us to a Peace Beyond, a state far past our 
dim perceptions of its glory, wherein is 
Sorrow's End for evermore. Though in our 
Hight Understanding- there is no Supreme Self 
that made these worlds and by his will upholds 
and rules them, yet there is a Power that 
moves to righteousness and brings all beings 

15 



226 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

to the greater Light : the Power of Wisdom, 
of that high holy Insight which we have seen 
is Sammaditthi's Major Mode of use. Thus, 
as much as in the Theist's view of it, life has 
for the Buddhist both a Hope and, if you will, 
a Purpose. This Eight View declares the 
existence of a G-oal so great and high that we 
are forbidden even to call it Life, it is Beyond, 
and as it were a glory which this self we fancy 
now may grow to, to just the very extent to 
which it ceases to be component of that Self- 
delusionjust as the seed in perishing, and in 
perishing alone, gives being to the so-far- 
diffierently-conditioned flower. 

Yet this great Hope in Buddhism this Goal 
without which all life were purposeless, its 
long suffering useless and inexcusable this 
ideal of the Peace Beyond All Life is no mere 
view or empty theory. We Buddhists hold 
that hope not, by any means, on faith or 
trust, such as must ever form the basis of 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 227 

the Theist's hope. It is deduced by us from 
life's phenomena ; attested in chief by the 
King of Truth, the Great Teacher who first 
in our history attained to it (though not the 
first, Buddhist tradition declares, who ever 
had attained before,) and by the testimony of 
the million Great Ones who, since He discovered 
the Way thereto, have walked in the Path that 
He declared. Lastly, if in far less degree, 
it is attested by our own experience, by the 
fact that we can see, to just the extent we 
strive to follow the Middle Way ourselves, 
the utter truth the ever-deepening truth- 
of all that noble Aryan Teaching of Truth's 
King. Following it as best we can, we 
too find the Great Peace growing in our 
hearts ; thus to us this ideal of Nibbana is 
no mere view, but a reality ever deepen* 
ing as our life grows nearer to the Truth, 
the Way of Peace that The Master taught and 
lived. 



228 THE KELIGIOtf OF BURMA 

When, growing out of that period of mental 
childhood in which all life seems so fair and 
pleasant, men come to mental adolescence, 
as so many in the western world are 
doing at this day, then, with the passing of 
their immaturity, passes the keen sense of the 
joy of life, for knowledge grows as the mind 
of man grows* Man comes to see that, behind 
this so fair-seeming mask of life, lies Death ; 
he understands that the very law of evolution is 
Suffering, and that the species which most can 
suffer best survives. No more can one, under- 
standing the great and awful suffering involved 
in life, regard it as created by an omnipotent 
and all-loving Selfhood ; no more can one who 
once has sought by clear analysis in his own 
heart for that imagined lesser self of man, 
conceive of aught within him as eternal, change- 
less or secure. Looking deeper and, if he be 
fortunate, aided by the Truth The Master left 
us, the adolescent man perceives how all there 



RIGHT UNDERSTANDING 229 

is in life, as now we know it, is of necessity 
Changeful; he sees how the great sequences 
of the Law of Life, Kamma, make of 
Suffering an essential element of all component 
being ; he sees that that which formerly he 
conceived of as his self, eternal, stable, is but a 
wave in life's great ocean. He sees it destined, 
not indeed, as in the Pessimist's thought, to utter 
annihilation after a little span of such sad 
sordid life as living creatures on our planet 
know, but to give place, at the end of all its 
long cycle of evolving Transmigration (wherein 
for no two following hours is it in totality 
either " the same " nor yet " another " being) to 
a State Beyond all thought and naming the 
Peace, the Purpose, the Fruition of all Life. 

Not one self-hood of our own, separate from 
the other selves of all the Universe, but a 
bundle of Sankhdras, of elements of the 
common life : that is the idea which is implied. 
Just as the elements of the body enter in our 



230 - THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

food -stream, become for a little while integral 
portions of our being, and then, in the ceaseless 
flux of form, pass out on their further never- 
resting course of life so, in this Buddhist 
view, do these Sankharas come, dwell for a 
little in our minds, then pass out again ; a never- 
ceasing flux of thought. Just as some ele- 
ments of our corporeal frames are, as it were, 
nobler or of higher import to our life than 
others, and some, again, inimical to our 
welfare, so is it with the elements of thought. 
Here now to-day a whole group of the nobler 
of the elements of thought, first set in motion 
we know not when, but wrought to their 
present form in the Mind of the Great One 
whom we strive to follow thoughts which 
have echoed down through life for five-and- 
twenty centuries -are passing once again 
through the medium of the spoken or the printed 
word, into your several minds. To-morrow lit, 
peradventure, by some new illustration of their 



EIGHT UNDERSTANDING 23l 

meaning -they will be passing from your minds 
into 'yet others, and so on until life shall end 
at last in Peace. From this conception of the 
flux of thought follow many points of great 
importance. One is the need we have of 
constantly attending to the thought-food of 
our minds, just as we attend to the food- stuffs 
of our bodies ; we must reject from our 
mental diet the ill thoughts, and definitely 
cultivate the assimilation of high and holy ones. 
Another, of yet greater moment, is the fact 
that, at long last, all conscious life is 
one ocean, whereof our several minds are now 
the waves; whose force is ever giving rise to 
further wavelets, waves not " another " and yet 
not "the same". It is the flux which passes: 
on and, in its changing, yet in some sense 
endures ; it is the totality of that Flowing on 
now, at this moment, in us, that we call " our- 
selves ". Thus, rightly understanding, life 
becomes as One, which we can best help 



232 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

onward as we ennoble each though -element 
in its passage through our minds ; wherefore, 
from the Buddhist view- point, all reformation, 
all attempt to help on life, can best be effected 
by first reforming our immediate life-kingdom 
of the -" self ". 

Now, finally, one thought remains to be 
considered. We have seen what are the views 
and theories which we must fain avoid, if we 
will make ourselves worthy of the title "Sam- 
maditthi ". We have seen how the Eight View 
of Life, teaching as it does Life's Oneness, 
makes for Compassion, for endurance, for the 
ennobling of all our relations with life. No 
more, as in the View of Self -hood, looking on 
self and life as two different things, we have 
understood them One. We see, too, how we 
each may, humble though we be, yet help on 

t 

life at large ; and how only we can help 
life, by making this understanding of our 
oneness with it enter, in practice, into all our 



BIGHT UNDERSTANDING 283 

daily ways as pity and as love. We see how 
this Eight View of Life might change the 
world to paradise to-morrow ; how all the 
bitter pain of life comes only from the follow- 
ing of the false, the selfish view. All this is 
but the Minor Mode of Sammaditthi, just the 
intellectual appreciation of the fundamental 
Buddhist Truths. What lies beyond? What 
must we do so as to enter upon that 
Fourfold Path of Attainment on whose first 
step stands, not this Minor s but Sammaditthi's 
Middle Mode ? The answer is : Just live that 
Understanding. Let it be no mere vain theory 
for still a theory it is, until it enters into 
practice in our own, our very lives. It means 
so to direct the course in life's great ocean of 
this our group of elements of life that, with each 
thought that passes from us, a little gain will 
come to life at large ; it means to suppress, with 
constant watchfulness, the evil, selfish thoughts, 
and cultivate the nobler, self-renouncing 



234 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

ones ; to understand how Sorrow rules in- 
alienable to life s and yet because Beyond, 
Peace is ever reigning how we may so 
restrain our ways that when we die all life will 
have become something the nobler and the 
nearer to the Peace because we lived and 
suffered, and just a little knew. All that, or, 
briefly, to live Eight Understanding and not to 
make an empty talk of it ; all that it is to come 
nearer to that deeper, Middle Mode of Truth 
about Right Understanding, the winning of 
which means the Entering of the Stream, the 
great ancient, holy Stream of deathless Light, 
which all the glorious Company of the Great 
and Wise follow ; and which passing across 
life's ocean brackish with the tears of its 
unending pain breaks at last upon Life's 
Further Shore ; wherein is Peace, greater 
beyond all naming than the life we erst have 
known. 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 

THE religion of the Buddhas is, in the most 
eminent sense of the word, a practical philo- 
sophy. It is not a collection of dogmas which 
are to be accepted and believed with an un- 
questioning and unintelligent faith ; but a 
series of statements and propositions which, in 
the first place, are to be intellectually grasped 
and comprehended; secondly, to be applied 
to every action of our daily lives, to be practised 
and lived, to the fullest extent of our powers. 
This fact of the essentially practical nature of 
our religion is again and again insisted upon 
in the Holy Books. Though one man should 
know by heart a thousand stanzas of the Law, 
and not practise it, he has not understood the 
Bhamma. That man who knows and practises 
one stanza of the Law, he has understood the 



236 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Dhamma, he is the true follower of The 
Buddha. It is the practice of the Dhamma 
that constitutes the true Buddhist, not the 
mere knowledge of its tenets ; it is the carrying 
out of the Five Precepts, and not their repeti- 
tion in the Pali tongue. It is the bringing home 
into our daily lives of the Great Laws of Love 
and Righteousness that marks a man as 
Sammdditthis and not the mere appreciation 
of the truth of that Dhamma as a beautiful 
and poetic statement of Laws which are 
too hard to follow. This Dhamma has 
to be lived, to be acted up to, to be felt 
as the supreme ideal in our hearts, as the 
supreme motive of our lives; and he who 
does this to the best of his ability is the right 
follower of The Master; not he who calls 
himself "Buddhist," but whose life is empty 
of the love The Buddha taught. 

Because betimes our lives are very pain- 
ful, because to do right, to follow the Good 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 237 

Law in all our ways is very difficult, therefore 
we should not despair of ever being able to 
walk in the way we have learned, and resign 
ourselves to living a life full only of worldly 
desires and ways. For has not The Master 
said : " Let no man think lightly of good, 
saying, ' it will not come nigh me ' for even 
by the falling of drops, the water-jar is filled. 
The wise man becomes full of Good, even if he 
gather it little by little " ? He who does his best, 
he who strives, albeit failing, to follow what is 
good, to eschew what is evil, that man will 
grow daily the more powerful for his striving i 
and every wrong desire overcome, each loving 
and good impulse acted up to, will mightily 
increase our power to resist evil, will ever 
magnify our power of living the life that i& 
right. 

Now, the whole of this practice of Buddhism, 
the whole of the Good Law which we who call 
ourselves Buddhists should strive to follow, 



238 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

lias been summed up by the Tathagata in one 
single stanza : 

"Avoiding the performance of evil actions, 
gaining merit by the performance of good 
acts, and the purification of all our thoughts : 
this- is the Teaching of all the Buddhas" 

We who call ourselves Buddhists have 
so to live that we may carry out the three 
rules here laid down. We all know what 
it is to avoid doing evil; we detail the 
acts that are ill each time we take Panca 
Sila. The taking of life, the taking of what 
does not rightly belong to us, living a life of 
impurity, speaking what is not true or is 
cruel and unkind, and indulging in drugs and 
drinks that undermine the mental and moral 
faculties- these are the evil actions that we 
must avoid. Living in peace and love, return- 
ing good for evil, having reverence and patience 
and humility these are some part of what we 
know for good. And so we can all understand, 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 239 

we can all try to live up to, tbe first two 
clauses of this stanza, and endeavor to put 
them into practice in our daily lives. But the 
way to purify thought, the way to cultivate 
the thoughts that are good, to suppress and 
overcome the thoughts that are evil; the 
practices by which the mind is to be trained 
and cultivated of these things less is known, 
they are less practised, and less understood. 

The object of this paper is to set forth 
what is written in the books of these 
methods of cultivating and purifying the mind ; 
to set forth how this third rule can be followed 
and lived up to ; for in one way it is the most 
important of all, it really includes the other 
two rules, and is their crown and fruition. 
The avoidance of evil, the performance of 
good : these things will but increase the merit 
of our destinies, will lead but to new lives, 
happier, and so more full of temptation, than 
that we now enjoy. And after that merit, 



240 THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 

thus gained, is spent and gone, the whirling 
of the great Wheel of Life will bring us 
again to evil and unhappy lives ; for not by 
the mere storing of merit can freedom be 
attained, it is not by mere merit that we can 
come to the Great Peace. This merit-gaining 
is secondary in importance to the purification 
and culture of our thought ; but it is essential, 
because only by the practice of Slla, of Right 
Conduct, comes the power of Mental Concen- 
tration that makes us free. 

In order that we may understand how this 
final and principal aim of our Buddhist faith 
is to be attained, before we can see why 
particular practices should thus purify the 
mind, it is necessary that we should first 
comprehend the nature of this mind itself 
this thought that we seek to purify and to 
liberate. - 

In the marvellous system of psychology 
which has been declared to us by our Teacher, 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 241 

the Citta or thought-stuff is shown to consist of 
innumerable elements which are called Dliamma, 
or SanJchdm. If we translate Dhamma or 
SanlcJiara as used in this context as " Tenden- 
cies/' we will probably come nearest to the 
English meaning of the word. When a given 
act has been performed a number of times ; 
when a given thought has arisen in our minds 
a number of times there is a definite tendency 
to the repetition of that act, a definite tendency 
to the recurrence of that thought. Thus each 
mental Dhamma, each Sankhara, tends con- 
stantly to produce its like, and be in turn 
reproduced ; and so, at first sight it would 
seem as though there were no possibility of 
altering the total composition of one's Sankharas, 
no possibility of suppressing the evil 
Dhammas, no possibility of augmenting the 
states that are good. But, whilst our Master 
has taught us of this tendency to reproduce, 
that is so characteristic of all mental states, 

16 



242 THE EEL1GION OF BURMA 

He has also shown us how this reproductive 
energy of the Sankharas may itself be 
employed to the suppression of evil states, and 
to the culture of the states that are good. For 
if a man has many and powerful Sankharas in 
his nature, which tend to make him angry or 
cruel, we are taught that he can definitely 
overcome those evil Sankharas by the practice 
of mental concentration on Sankharas of an 
opposite nature ; in practice by devoting a 
definite time each day to meditating on thoughts 
of pity and of love. Thus he increases the 
Sankharas in his mind that tend to make men 
loving and pitiful ; and because " Hatred ceaseth 
not by hatred at any time, hatred ceaseth by 
Love alone," therefore do those evil Sankharas 
of his nature, those tendencies to anger and 
to cruelty, disappear before the rise of new 
good tendencies -of love and of pity, even as 
the darkness of the night fades in the glory of 
the dawn. Thus we see that one way and 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 243 

the best way of overcoming bad Sankharas, 
is the systematic cultivation, by dint of medita- 
tion, of such qualities as are opposed to the 
evil tendencies we desire to eliminate; and 
in the central and practical feature of the 
instance adduced, the practice of definite medi- 
tation or mental concentration upon the good 
Sankharas, we have the key to the entire 
system of the Purification and Culture of the 
Mind, which constitutes the practical working 
basis of the Buddhist religion. 

If we consider the action of a great and 
complex engine such a machine as drives 
a steamship through the water we shall 
see that there is, first and foremost, one central 
and all operating source of energy : in this case 
the steam which is generated in the boilers. 
This energy in itself is neither good nor bad it 
is simply Power; and whether. that power does 
the useful work of moving the ship, or the bad 
work of breaking loose and destroying and 



244 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

spoiling the ship, and scalding men to death, 
and so on, all depends upon the correct and co- 
ordinated operation of all the various parts of 
that complex machinery. If the slide-valves 
of the great cylinders open a little too soon 
and so admit the steam before the proper 
time, much power will he lost in overcoming 
the resistance of the steam itself. If they 
remain open too long, the expansive force of 
the steam will be wasted, and so again power 
will be lost ; and if they open too late, much of 
the momentum of the engine will be used up 
in moving uselessly the great mass of 
machinery. And so it is with every part of 
the engine. In every part the prime mover is 
that concentrated expansive energy of the 
steam; but that energy must be applied in 
each divers piece of mechanism in exactly 
the right way 9 at exactly the right time; 
otherwise the machine will not work at all, 
or much of the energy of the steam will 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 245 

be wasted in overcoming its own opposing 
force. 

So it is with this subtle machinery of the 
mind a mechanism infinitely more complex, 
capable of far more power for good or for 
evil, than the most marvellous of man's 
mechanical achievements, than the most 
powerful engine ever made by human hands. 
One great engine, at its worst, exploding, may 
destroy a few hundred lives, at its best may 
carry a few thousand men, may promote trade 
and the comfort of some few hundred lives ; but 
who can estimate the power of one human mind, 
whether for good or for evil ? One such mind, 
the mind of a man like Napoleon, may bring 
. about the tortured death of three million men, 
may wreck states and religions and dynasties, 
and cause untold misery and suffering. Another 
mind, employing the same manner of energy, 
but rightly using that energy for the benefit 
of others, may, like The Buddha, bring hope 



246 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

into the hopeless lives of billions upon billions 
of human beings, may increase by a thousand- 
fold the pity and love of a third of humanity, 
may aid innumerable millions of beings to 
come to that peace for which we all crave- 
that Peace the way to which is so difficult 
to find. 

But the energy which these two minds 
employed is one and the same. That energy 
lies hidden in every human brain, it is generat- 
ed with every pulsation of every human heart, 
it is the prerogative of every being, and the 
sole mover in the world of men. There is no 
idea or thought, there is no deed, whether good 
or bad in this world accomplished, but that 
supreme energy, that steam-power of our mental 
mechanism is the mover and the cause. It is 
by the use of this energy that the child learns 
how to speak ; it is by its power that Napoleon 
could bring sorrow into thousands of lives ; it 
is by this power that The Buddha conquered 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 247 

the hearts of one-third of the human race ; 
it is by that force that so many have followed 
Him on the Way which He declared the 
Nibbana Magga, the way to the Unutterable 
Peace. The name of that power is Mental 
Concentration ; and there is nothing in this 
world, whether for good or for evil, but is 
wrought by its application. It weaves 
upon the loom of time the fabric of men's 
characters and destinies. Name and form twine 
twin-threads with which are blended in the 
quick-flying shuttles of that loom, men's good 
and evil thoughts and deeds ; and the pattern 
of that fabric is the outcome of innumerable 
lives. 

It is by the power of this Samddhi or Mental 
Concentration that the baby learns to walk; 
it is by its power that Newton weighed the 
suns and worlds. Ifc is the steam-power of 
this human organism ; and what it does to make 
us great or little, good or bad, is the result of 



248 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

the way the mechanism of the mind, all these 
complex Sankharas, apply and use that energy. 
If the Sankharas act well together, if their vary- 
ing functions are well co-ordinated, then that 
man has great power, either for good or for evil. 
When you see one of weak mind and will, 
you may be sure that the actions of his 
Sankharas are working one against another; 
and so the central power, this power of 
Samadhi, is wasted in one part of the mind in 
overcoming its own energy in another. 

If a skilful engineer, knowing well the 
functions of each separate part of an engine, 
were to have to deal with a machine whose 
parts did not work in unison, and which thus 
frittered away the energy supplied to it, he 
Would take his engine part by part, adjusting 
here a valve and there an eccentric ; he would 
observe the effect of his alterations with every 
subsequent movement of the whole engine, and 
so, little by little, would set all that machinery 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 249" 

to work together, till the engine was using to 
the full the energy supplied to it. And this is what 
we have to do with the mechanism of our 
minds each one for himself. First, earnestly 
to investigate onr component Sankharas, to see 
wherein we are lacking, to see wherein our 
mental energy is well used and where it runs 
to waste ; and then to keep adjusting, little by 
little, all these working parts of our mind- 
engine, till each is brought to work in the way 
that is desired, till the whole vast complex 
machinery of our being is all working to one end 
the end for which we are working, the goal 
which* now lies so far away, yet not so far, but 
that we may yet work for and attain it. 

But how are we thus to adjust and to alter 
the Sankharas of our natures ? If a part of 
our mental machinery will use up our energy 
wrongly, will let our energy leak into wrong 
channels, how are we to cure it ? Let us take 
another example from the world of mechanics. 



250 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

There is a certain part of a locomotive which 
is called the slide-valve. It is a most important 
part, because its duty is to admit the steam 
to the working parts of the engine : and upon 
its accurate performance of this work the 
whole efficiency of the locomotive depends. 
The great difficulty with this slide-valve 
consists in the fact that its face must be per- 
fectly, almost mathematically, smooth ; and no 
machine has yet been devised that can cut this 
valve-face smooth enough. So, what they do 
is this : they make use of the very force of the 
.steam itself, the very violent action of steam, 
to plane down that valve-face to the necessary 
smoothness. The valve, made as smooth as 
machinery can make it, is put in its place, and 
steam is admitted ; so that the valve is made 
to work under very great pressure and very 
quickly for a time. As it races backwards 
and forwards, under this unusually heavy 
pressure of steam, the mere friction against the 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 251 

port-face of the cylinder upon which it moves, 
suffices to wear down the little unevennesses 
that would otherwise have proved so fertile a 
source of leakage. So must we do with our 
minds. We must take our good and useful 
Sankharas one by one ; must put them under 
extra and unusual pressure -by special mental 
concentration. By this means those good 
Sankharas will be made ten times as efficient ; 
there will be no more leakage of energy ; and 
our mental mechanism will daily work more 
and more harmoniously and powerfully. From 
the moment that the Mental Eeflex 1 is 
attained, the hindrances (i.e., the action 
of opposing Sankharas) are checked, the 
leakages (Asa/vas, a word commonly translated 
corruptions, means, literally, leakages : i.e., 
leakages through wrong channels of the energy 
of the being) are assuaged, and the mind 

1 The Mental Reflex, or Nimitta, is the result of the practice of 
certain forms of Samaclhi. For a detailed account, see Visuddhi 
Magga. 



252 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

concentrates itself by the concentration of the 
neighborhood degree. 1 

Now let us see how these Sankharas, these 
working parts of our mental mechanism, first 
come into being. Look at a child learning 
how to talk. The child hears a sound, and 
this sound the child learns to connect by 
association with a definite idea. By the power 
of its mental concentration, the child seizes on 
that sound by its imitative group of Sankharas. 
It repeats that sound, and by another effort of 
concentration it impresses the idea of that 
sound on some cortical cell of its brain, where 
it remains as a faint Sankhara 3 ready to be 
called up when required. Then, some time 
an occasion arises which recalls the idea that 
sound represents the child has need to make 
that sound in order to get some desired object. 
It concentrates its mind with all its power on 

1 Visuddhi Magga, iv. There are two degrees of mental con- 
centration" Neighborhood-concentration " and " Attainment-con- 
centration " respectively. 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 258 

the memorising cortex of its brain, until that 
faint Sankhara, that manner of mind-echo of 
the sound that lurks in the little brain-cell, is 
discovered, and, like a stretched string played 
upon by the wind, the cell yields up to the 
mind a faint repetition of the sound-idea which 
caused it. By another effort of concentration, 
now removed from the memorising area and 
shifted to the speaking centre in the brain, the 
child's vocal chords tighten in the particular 
way requisite to the production of that sound ; 
the muscles of lips and throat and tongue 
perform the necessary movements ; the breath- 
ing apparatus is controlled, so that just the 
right quantity of air passes over the vocal 
chords ; and the child speaks : it repeats the 
word it had formerly learnt to associate with 
the object of its present desire. Such is the 
process of the formation of a Sankhara. The 
more frequently that idea recurs to the child, 
the more often does it have to go through the 



254 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

processes involved ; the more often, in a word, 
has the mind of the child to perform mental 
concentration, or Samddhi, upon that particular 
series of mental and muscular movements, the 
more powerful does the set of Sankharas 
involved become, till the child will recall the 
necessary sound-idea, will go through all those 
complex movements of the organs of speech, 
without any appreciable new effort of mental 
concentration. In effect, that chain of associa- 
tions, that particular co-ordained functioning 
of memory and speech, will have established 
itself by virtue of the past mental concentra- 
tions, as a powerful Sankhara in the being of 
the child, and that Sankhara will tend to recur 
whenever the needs which led to the original 
Samadhi are present, so that the words will 
be reproduced automatically, and without fresh 
special effort. 

Thus we see that Sankharas arise from any 
act of mental concentration. The more 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 255 

powerful, or the more often repeated, is the 
act of Samadhi, the more powerful the San- 
kharas produced; thus a word in a new 
language, for instance, may become a Sankhara t 
may be perfectly remembered without further 
effort, either by one very considerable effort of 
mental concentration, or by many repetitions 
of the word, with slight mental concentration. 
The practical methods, then, for the culture 
and purification of the mind, according to the 
method indicated for us by our Master, are 
two: first, Samindsati, which is the accurate 
reflection upon things in order to ascertain 
their nature an investigation or analysis of the 
Dhammas of our own nature in this case; and, 
secondly, Sammasamddhi 3 or the bringing to 
bear upon the mind of the powers of concentra- 
tion, to the end that the good states, the good 
Dhammas may become powerful Sankharas in 
our being. As to the bad states, they are to be 
regarded as mere leakages of the central power ; 



256 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

and the remedy for them, as for the leaky 
locomotive slide-valve, is the powerful practice 
upon the good states which are of an opposite 
nature. So we have first very accurately to 
analyse and observe the states that are present 
in us by the power of Sammasati, and then 
practise concentration upon the good states, 
especially those that tend to overcome our 
particular failings. By mental concentration 
is meant an intentness of the thoughts, the 
thinking for a definite time of only one thought 
at a time. This will be found at first to be 
very difficult. You sit down to meditate on 
love, for instance ; and in half a minute or so 
you find you are thinking about what someone 
said the day before yesterday. So it always is 
at first. The Buddha likened the mind of the 
man who was beginning this practice of 
Samadhi to a calf that had been used to running 
hither and thither in the fields without let or 
hindrance, and which has now been tied with a 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 257 

rope to a post. The rope is the practice of 
meditation; the post is the particular sub- 
ject selected for meditation. At first the 
calf tries to break loose, he runs hither 
and thither in every direction ; but is always 
brought up sharp at a certain distance from 
the post, by the rope to which he is tied. For 
a long time, if he is a restless calf, this process 
goes on ; but at last the calf becomes more calm, 
he sees the futility of struggling, and lies down 
by the side of the post. So it is with the mind. 
At first, subjected to this discipline of concen- 
tration, the mind tries to break away, it runs in 
this or that direction ; and if it is an usually 
restless mind, it takes a long time to realise the 
uselessness of trying to break away. But 
always, having gone a certain distance from the 
post, having got a certain distance from the 
object selected for meditation, the fact that 
you have sat down with the definite object of 
meditating acts as the rope, and the mind 

17 



258 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

* 

realises that the post was its object, and so- 
comes back to it. When the mind, becoming 
concentrated and steady, at last lies down bjr 
the post, and no longer tries to break away 
from the object of meditation, then concentra- 
tion is obtained. 

But this takes a long time to attain, and 
very hard practice; and in order that we 
may make this, the most trying part of 
the practice, easier, various methods are 
suggested. One is, that we can avail ourselves 
of the action of certain Sankharas themselves. 
You know how we get into habits of doing 
things, particularly habits of doing things 
at a definite time of day. Thus we get into 
the habit of waking up at a definite time 
of the morning, and we always tend to wake 
up at that same hour of the day. We get into 
a habit of eating our dinner at seven o'clock, 
and we do n^t-feel hungry till about that time ; 
and if we change the times of our meals, at 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 259 

first we always feel hungry at seven, then, 
when we get no dinner, a little after seven that 
hunger vanishes, and we presently get used to 
the new state of things. In effect the practice 
of any act, the persistence of any given set 
of ideas, regularly occurring at a set time of the 
day, forms within us a very powerful tendency 
to the recurrence of those ideas, or to the 
practice of that act, at the same time every day. 
Now we can make use of this time-habit of 
the mind to assist us in our practice of 
meditation. Choose a given time of day ; always 
practise in that same time, even if it is only for 
ten minutes, but always at exactly the same 
time of day. In a little while the mind will 
have established a habit in this respect, and 
you will find it much easier to concentrate the 
mind at your usual time than at any other. 
We should also consider the effect of our bodily 
actions on tjie mind. When we have just eaten 
a meal the major part of the spare energy in us 



260 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

goes to assist in the work of digestion ; so at 

those times the mind is sleepy and sluggish, 

and under these circumstances we cannot use 

all our energies to concentrate. So choose a 

time when the stomach is empty of course 

the best time from this point of view is when 

we wake up in the morning. Another thing 

that you will find very upsetting to your 

concentration at first is sound, any sudden, 

unexpected sound particularly. So it is best 

to choose your time when people are not moving 

about, when there is as little noise as possible. 

Here again the early morning is indicated, or 

else late at night, and, generally speaking, you 

will find it easiest to concentrate either just after 

rising, or else at night, just before going to sleep. 

Another thing very much affects these 

Sankharas, and that is place. If you think a 

little, you will see how tremendously place 

affects the mind. The merchant's mind may 

foe full of trouble ; but no sooner does he get 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 261 

to his office or place of business, than his 
trouble goes, and he is all alert a keen, capable 
business man. The doctor may be utterly 
tired out, and half asleep when he is called up 
at night to attend an urgent case ; but no sooner 
is he come to his place, the place where he is 
wont to exercise his profession, the bed-side of 
his patient, than the powerful associations of 
the place overcome his weariness and mental 
torpor, and he is very wide awake all his 
faculties on the alert, his mind working to the 
full limits demanded by his very difficult 
profession. So it is in all things : the merchant 
at his desk, the captain on the bridge of his 
ship, the engineer in his engine-room, the 
chemist in his laboratory the effect of place 
upon the mind is always to awaken a particular 
set of Sankharas, the Sankharas associated in 
the mind with place. 

Also there is perhaps a certain intangible 
yet operative atmosphere of thought which 



262 THE RELIGION OE BURMA 

clings to places in which definite acts have 
been done, definite thoughts constantly re- 
peated. It is for this reason that we have a 
great sense of quiet and peace when we go to a 
monastery. The monastery is a place where life is 
protected, where men think deeply of the great 
mysteries of Life and Death ; it is the home of 
those who are devoted to the practice of this 
meditation ; it is the centre of the religious life 
of the people. When the Burmese people want to 
make merry, they have dramatic and singing 
entertainments, in their own houses, in the 
village ; but when they feel religiously inclined, 
then they go to their monastery. So the great 
bulk of the thoughts which arise in a monastery 
are peaceful, and calm, and holy ; and this 
atmosphere of peace and calm and holiness 
seems to penetrate and suffuse the whole place, 
till the walls and roof and flooring nay, more, 
the very ground of the sacred enclosure seem 
soaked with this atmosphere of holiness, like 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 263 

some faint distant perfume that can hardly 
be scented, and yet that one can feel. It may 
be that some impalpable yet grosser portion of 
the thought-stuff thus clings to the very 
walls of a place ; we cannot tell, but certain it 
is that if you blindfold a sensitive man and take 
him to a temple, he will tell you it is a peaceful 
and holy place ; whilst if you take him to the 
shambles, he will feel uncomfortable or fearful. 
And so we should choose for our practice of 
meditation a place which is suited to the work 
we have to do. It is a great aid, of course, 
owing to the very specialised set of place- 
Sankharas so obtained, if we can have a special 
place in which nothing but these practices are 
done, and where no one but oneself goes ; but, 
for a layman especially, this is very difficult to 
secure. Instructions are given on this point in 
the Visuddhi Magga how the priest who is 
practising Kammatthdna is to select some place 
-a little away from the monastery, where people 



264 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

do not come and walk about either a cave or 
a cleft in the rocks. Or else he is to make or 
get made a little hut, which he alone uses. 
But as this perfect retirement is not easy to a 
layman, he must choose whatever place is most 
suitable some place where, at the time of his 
practice, he will be as little disturbed as possible ;: 
and, if he is able, this place should not be the 
place where he sleeps, as the Sankharas of such 
a place would tend, so soon as he tried ta 
reduce the number of his thoughts down to one r 
to make him go to sleep, which is one of the 
chief things to be guarded against. 

Time and place being once chosen, it is 
important, until the faculty of concentration is 
strongly established, not to alter them. Then 
bodily posture is to be considered. If we stand 
up to meditate, then a good deal of energy goes 
to maintain the standing posture. Lying down 
is also not good, because it is associated in our 
minds with going to sleep. Therefore the sitting 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 26 & 

posture is best. If you can sit cross-legged, as 
Buddha-rupas sit, that is best; because this 
position has many good Sankharas associated- 
with it in the minds of Buddhist people. 

Now comes the all-important question of 
what we are to meditate upon. The subjects 
of meditation are classified in the books under 
forty heads. In the old days a man wishing 
to practise Kammatthana would go to some- 
great man who had practised long, and had so> 
attained to great spiritual knowledge ; and by 
virtue of his spiritual knowledge that Arahan 
could tell which of the forty categories would 
best suit the aspirant. Nowadays this i& 
hardly possible, as so few practise this Kammat- 
thana ; and so it is next to impossible to find 
anyone with this spiritual insight. So the best 
thing to do will be to practise those forms of 
meditation which will most certainly increase 
the highest qualities in us, the qualities of 
Love, and Pity, and Sympathy, and Indifference 



266 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

to worldly life and cares ; those forms of 
Sammasati which will give us an accurate 
perception of our own nature, and the Sorrow, 
Transitoriness, and Soullessness of all things 
on the Wheel of Samsara; and those forms 
which will best calm our minds by making us 
think of holy and beautiful things, such as the 
life of The Buddha, the liberating nature of 
the Dhamma He taught, and the pure life which 
is followed by His Bhikkhus. 

We have seen how a powerful Sankhara is 
to be formed in one of two ways : either by 
one tremendous effort of concentration, or by 
many slight ones. As it is difficult for a 
beginner to make a tremendous effort, it will 
be found simplest to take one idea which can 
be expressed in a few words, and repeat 
those words silently over and over again. 
The reason for the use of a formula of 
words is that, owing to the complexity of 
the brain actions involved in the production 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 267 

of words, very powerful Sankharas are 
formed by this habit of silent repetition ; the 
words serve as a very powerful mechanical aid 
in constantly evoking the idea they represent. 
In order to keep count of the number of times 
the formula has been repeated, Buddhist people 
use a rosary of a hundred and eight beads, and 
this will be found a very convenient aid. Thus 
one formulates to oneself the ideal of the Great 
Teacher ; one reflects upon His Love and 
Compassion, on that great life of His devoted 
to the spiritual assistance of all beings ; one 
formulates in the mind the image of The Master, 
trying to imagine Him as He taught that 
Dhamma which has brought liberation to so 
many ; and every time the mental image fades, 
one murmurs Buddhanussati " he reflects upon 
The Buddha"' each time of repetition pass- 
ing over one of the beads of the rosary. And 
so with the Dharnma, and the Sangha which- 
ever one prefers to reflect upon. 



268 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

But perhaps fche best of all the various 
meditations upon the ideal, are what are known 
as the Four Sublime States Oattdro Bralima- 
vihdra. These meditations calm and concentrate 
the Oitta in a very powerful and effective way ; 
and besides this they tend to increase in us 
those very qualities of the mind which are the 
best. One sits down facing east, preferably ; and 
after reflecting on the virtues of the Ti-ratana, 
as set forth in the formulas Iti pi so Bhagava, 
etc., one concentrates one's thought upon ideas 
of Love ; one imagines a ray of love going out 
from one's heart, and embracing all beings in 
the Eastern Quarter of the World, and one 
repeats this formula : " And he lets his mind 
pervade the Eastern Quarter of the World with 
thoughts of Love- with Heart of love grown 
great, and mighty, and beyond all measure 
till there is not one being in all the Eastern 
Quarter of the World whom he has passed over, 
whom he has not suffused with thoughts 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 269 

of Love, with Heart of Love grown great, 

and mighty, and far-reaching beyond all 

measure." As you say these words you 

imagine your love going forth to the east, 

like a great spreading ray of light ; and 

first you think of all your friends, those 

whom you love, and suffuse them with your 

thoughts of love. Then you reflect upon all 

those innumerable beings in that Eastern 

Quarter whom you know not, to whom you are 

indifferent, but whom you should love ; and you 

suffuse them also with the ray of your love. 

And lastly you reflect upon all those who are 

opposed to you, who are your enemies, who 

have done you wrong; and these too, by an 

effort of will, you suffuse with your love " till 

there is not one being in all that Eastern 

Quarter of the Earth whom you have passed 

over, whom you have not suffused with thoughts 

of Love, with Heart of Love grown great, and 

mighty, and beyond all measure". Again 



270 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

you imagine a similar ray of love issuing 
from your heart in the direction of your right 
hand ; and you mentally repeat the same 
formula, substituting the word " Southern " for 
" Eastern," and you go through the same series 
of reflections in that direction. And so to the 
west, and so to the north, till all around you y 
in the four directions, you have penetrated all 
beings with these thoughts of Love. And then 
you imagine your thought as striking downwards, 
and embracing and including all beings beneath 
you, repeating the same formula, and lastly as 
going upwards, and suffusing with the warmth 
of your love all beings in the worlds above. 
Thus you will have meditated upon all beings 
with thoughts of love, in all the six directions 
of space ; and you have finished the meditation 
on Love. 

In the same way, using the same formula, 
do you proceed, with the other three Sublime 
States. Thinking of all beings who are 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 271 

involved in the Wheel of Samsara involved in 
the endless sorrow of existence thinking 
especially of those in whom at this moment 
sorrow is especially manifested, thinking of the 
weak, the unhappy, the sick, and those who are 
fallen ; you send out a ray of pity and 
compassion towards them in the six directions 
of space. And so suffusing all beings with 
thoughts of Compassion, you pass on to the 
meditation on Happiness. You meditate on all 
beings who are happy, from the lowest happiness 
of earthly love to the highest, the happiness 
of those who are freed from all defect, the 
unutterable happiness of those who have 
attained the Mbbana Dhamma. You seek to 
feel with all those happy ones in their happiness* 
to enter into the bliss of their hearts and lives, 
and to augment it ; and so you pervade all six 
directions with thoughts of happiness, with 
this feeling of sympathy with all that is happy, 
and fair, and good. 



:272 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

Then, finally, reflecting on all that is evil and 
cruel and bad in the world, reflecting on the 
things which tempt men away from the holy 
life, you assume to all evil beings thoughts of 
indifference understanding that all the evil in 
those beings arises from ignorance ; from the 
Jisavas, the leakages of mental power into 
wrong channels. You understand concerning 
them that it is not your duty to condemn, or 
revile, but only to be indifferent to them ; and 
when you have finished this meditation on 
Indifference, you have completed the meditation 
on the Four Sublime States on Love, and 
Pity, and Happiness, and Indifference. The 
meditation on Love will overcome in you all 
liatred and wrath; the meditation on Pity 
will overcome your Sankharas of cruelty 
and unkindness; the .meditation on Happi- 
ness will do away with all feelings of envy 
and malice ; and the meditation on Indifference 
take from you all sympathy with evil 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 273 

ways and thoughts. And if you diligently 
practise these Four Sublime States, you will 
find yourself becoming daily more and more 
loving and pitiful, and happy with the highest 
happiness, and indifferent to personal misfor- 
tune and to evil. So very powerful is this 
method of meditation, that a very short 
practice will give results results that you will 
find working in your life and thoughts, bring- 
ing peace and happiness to you, and to all 
around you. 

Then there is the very important work of 
Sammdsati, the analysis of the nature of things 
which leads men to realise how in the Circle 
of Samsara all is characterised by the three 
characteristics of Sorrow, and Transitoriness, 
and Soullessness ; how there is nought that is 
free from these three characteristics ; and how 
only right reflection and right meditation can 
free you from them, and can open for you 
the way to Peace. Because men afe very 

18 



274 THE -RELIGION- OF BURMA 

much involved in the affairs of the world ; 
because so much of our lives is made up of our 
little hates and loves and hopes and fears ; be- 
cause we think so much of our wealth, and of 
those we love with earthly love s and of our 
enemies, and of all the little concerns of our 
daily life therefore is this right perception 
very difficult to come by, very difficult to realise 
as absolute truth in the depth of our hearts* 
We think we have but one life and one body ; so 
these we guard with very great attention and 
care, wasting useful mental energy upon these 
ephemeral things. We think , we have but one 
state in life ; and so we think very much of 
how to better our positions, how to increase 
our fortune. : 

"I have these sons, mine is this wealth 
thus the foolish man is thinking : he himself 
hath not. a self ; how sons,; how wealth ? " But 
if we could; look back over the vast stairway 
of our, innumerable lives, .if we could see how 



THE CULTURE OP MIND 275 

formerly we had held all various positions, had 
had countless fortunes, countless children, 
innumerable loves and wives ; if we could so 
look back, and see the constant and inevitable 
misery of all those lives, could understand our 
ever-changing minds and wills, and the whole 
mighty phantasmagoria of the illusion that we 
deem so real ; if we could do this, then indeed 
we might realise the utter misery and futility 
of all this earthly life, might understand and 
grasp those three characteristics of all existent 
things. Then indeed would our desire to escape 
from this perpetual round of sorrow be 
augmented, so that we would work with all our 
power unto Liberation. 

There is one form of Sati meditation which is 
very helpful, the more so as it is not necessarily 
confined to any one particular time of the day, 
but can be done always, whenever we have a 
moment in which our mind is not engaged. 
This is the Mahasatipatthana-, or Grreat 



276 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Reflection. Whatever you are doing, just observe 
and make a mental note of it, being careful to 
understand of what you see that it is possessed 
of the three characteristics of Sorrow, 
Impermanence, and lack of an Immortal 
Principle or soul. Think of the action you 
<are performing, the thought you are thinking, 
the sensation you are feeling, as relating to 
some exterior person; take care not to think 
4e l am doing so-and-so" but "There exists 
such-and-such a state of action ". Thus take 
bodily actions. When you go walking, just 
^concentrate the whole of your attention upon 
what you are doing, in an impersonal kind of 
way. Think : " Now he is raising his left foot," 
or, better : " There is an action of the lifting of 
a left foot." " Now there is a raising of the 
right foot; now the body leans a little for- 
wards s and so advances; now it turns to the 
right; and now it stands still." In this way, 
just practise concentrating the mind in observing 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 277 

all the actions that you perform, all the 
sensations that arise in your body, all the 
thoughts that arise in your mind ; and always 
analyse each concentration object as in the 
case cited above of the bodily action of walk- 
ing. " What is it that walks ? " and by accurate 

> 

analysis you reflect that there is no person or 
soul within the body that walks, but that there 
is particular collection of chemical elements, 
united and held together by the result of certain 
categories of forces, as cohesion, chemical 
attraction, and the like. These acting in 
unison, owing to a definite state of co-ordina* 
tion, appear to walk, move this way and that, 
and so on, owing to, and concurrent with, the 
occurrence of certain chemical decompositions 
going on in brain and nerve and muscle 
and blood ; this state of co-ordination 
which renders such complex actions possible is 
the resultant of the forces of innumerable 
similar states of co-ordination; and the 



278 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

resultant of all these past states of co-ordination 
acting together constitute what is called 
a living human being. Thus owing to 
certain other decompositions and movements of 
the fine particles composing the brain, the idea 
arises "I am walking," but really there is no 
*' I " to walk or go, but only an ever-changing 
mass of decomposing chemical compounds. 
Such a decomposing mass of chemical com- 
pounds has in it nothing that is permanent, 
but is, on the other hand, subject to pain and 
grief and weariness of body and mind ; its 
principal tendency is to form new sets of co- 
ordinated forces of a similar naturenew 
Sankharas which in their turn will cause new 
similar combinations of chemical elements to 
arise thus making an endless chain of beings 
subject to the miseries of birth, disease, decay, 
old age, and death. And the only way of 
escape from this perpetual round of existences 
is the following of the Noble Eightfold Path 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 279 

declared by the Sammasambuddha ; it is 
only by diligent practice of His Precepts 
that we can obtain the necessary energy for 
the performance of Concentration ; by Sam- 
masati and Sammasamadhi alone the final 
release from all this suffering is to be obtained. 
By practising earnestly all these reflec- 
tions and meditations the way to liberation 
will be opened for us even the way which 
leads to Mbbana, the State of Changeless 
Peace. Thus do you constantly reflect, alike 
on the Body, Sensations, Ideas, Sankhara,s, 
and the Consciousness. 

Such is a little part of the way of meditation, 
the way whereby the mind and heart may be 
purified and cultivated. And now for a few 
final remarks. 

It must first be remembered that no amount 
of reading or talking about these things is 
worth a , single moment's practice of them. 
These are things to be done, not speculated 



280 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

upon ; and only he who practises can obtain 
the fruits of meditation. 

There is one other thing to be said, and that 
is concerning the importance of Slla, of Right 
Conduct, of Moral Behavior. It has been said 
that Sila alone cannot conduct to the Mbbana 
Dhamma ; but, nevertheless, this Sila is of the 
most vital importance, for there is no Samddhi, 
no Mental Concentration without Sila, 
without Right Conduct. And why ? Because, re- 
verting to our simile of the steam-engine, while 
Samddhi, Mental Concentration, is the steam 
power of this human machine the fire that heats 
the water, the fire that makes that steam and 
maintains it at high pressure, is the power of 
Sila. A man who breaks Sila is putting out 
his fire ; and sooner or later, according to his 
reserve stock of Sila fuel, he will have little or 
no more energy at his disposal. And so, this 
Sila is of eminent importance ; we must avoid 
evil, we must fulfil all good, for only in this 



THE CULTURE OF MIND 281 

way can we obtain energy to practise and apply 
our Buddhist philosophy ; only in this way can 
we carry into effect that third rule of the 
stanza which has been our text ; only thus can 
we really follow in our Master's footsteps, and 
carry into effect His rule for the purification 
of the mind. Only by this way, and by con- 
stantly bearing in mind and living up to his 
final utterance " Athakho, bhikkhave, amenta- 
ydmi vo ; vayadhammd sanlchdrd, dppamddena 
sampadetha " for there is no Samadhi, no Mental 
Concentration, without Sila> 9 without Right 
Conduct. 

" Lo ! now. Oh Brothers, I exhort ye ! Decay 
is inherent in all the Tendencies ; therefore,, 
.deliver ye yourselves by earnest effort." 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT 
IN BUDDHISM 

WHEN, in the magic crystal of imagination we 
evoke the mental imagery of our earlier child- 
hood's years, and recall how then we saw and 
lieard and felt and thought ; how life appeared, 
appealed, and called to us, then fresh from 
its re-making, one feature stands out clear 
and vivid. Even amidst our dimmest memories 
of those bygone days there dominates each 
pictured recollection the all-pervading, ever- 
present sense of the keen wonder of it all ; that 
wonder in which the noble thinker of ancient 
{rreece perceived the root and source of all 
our human wisdom. 

Later in life, indeed, we may encounter 
things more seeming new and strange. We 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 288 

may travel into distant lands and live amidst 

*/ 

conditions utterly different from all that we 
have grown accustomed to. But never, if we 
make exception of a man's first penetration 
into the interior spiritual realm, never after 
those first early years can aught that life brings 
us so move our hearts to wonder, so thrill our 
very being to the core, as did the common 
sights and sounds that life brought us in our 
arly childhood. In those days the mere scent 
of flowers in the springtime, the sight of some 
familiar scene by moonlight, the voice of a 
singing bird in summer woods, could call forth 
an answer in a very passion of wonder, till the 
veil of tbe visible seemed trembling to the 
point of rending. The veil of matter seemed 
about to part to make clear the way for childish 
feet and eager, opened arms to reach forth 
into a world of never-ending glamor, into the 
faery realm where all is marvellous and 
beautiful beyond dreaming, into the land 



284 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

of undying Youth, where there is joy for 
evermore. 

Such is childhood's dream, the leaping and 
the laughter of the little stream new sprung 
from the dark confinement of the earth, 
rejoicing in the freedom of its careless move- 
ment, each fall and turning of its way the 
harbinger of new joys, new wonders yet to 
come. As we have learned during this past 
few generations, wherein so vast a field of 
knowledge has opened to the gaze of man, the 
child but recapitulates, and in its smaller scale 
epitomises, all the great common story of the 
growth of the whole human race. So the babe 
of a few days' growth, so helpless and weak- 
seeming, can yet support its weight and will 
cling to and hang from the stick we place 
within its grip. Thus he enacts the story of 
its half -simian and arboreal ancestry : reverting 
to the age when the forerunner of the human 
species was compelled in infancy to cling to 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 285 

boughs of trees, or to its shaggy mother's 
breast as she bore it through the woods. So 
the healthy boy of a later age delights in 
woodcraft, in playing the Red Indian, in mimic 
warfare. So, too, the younger child delights 
in playing with stones, in dim race-memory of 
the palaeolithic age. Thus all young children 
love to mould the clay into some dim resem- 
blance to man's earliest attempts at pottery. 
Every natural child finds fascination in a sea- 
shell, earliest adornment of mankind, and listens 
with wonder, as his remote adult forbear 
listened, to the murmuring voice within the 
shell, telling of the music of the waves it never 
can forget. 

Thus, then, we learn that that keen sense of 
wonder, that thrilling sense of imminent, 
marvellous happenings, of inner doors about to 
open on a world of fantasy and of enchantment 
which we have seen so dominating all our 
earlier life, must have surely been the common 



286 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

feeling, the common attitude, even of adult 
humanity in the ages that have passed away. 
Even lacking other evidence, we should know 
it must have been so. But in fact there is 
evidence enough and to spare to just that same 
effect. The earliest of human literatures that 
have come down to us, all tell this selfsame 
story of an all-pervading wonderment at life ; 
of marvellous happenings; of wholesale 
miracles and magic powers. If one can see the 
wonder in the world, that life is full of mystery, 
then there are " miracles " enough and to spare I 
Here we do not wish to be misunderstood to 
imply that, either then or now, there were or 
are no marvellous happenings ; or that the 
bulk of the strange marvels that the old books 
record happened really only in the imaginations 
of those peoples -of the childhood of our race. 
All the wonders of the Thousand Nights and 
One fade into insignificance before the daily > 
momentarily repeated .mystery of life^ of 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 287 

growth .; to say nothing of the utter miracle of 
consciousness, that one is conscious. The more 
we learn of the nature of the mind of man, 
little as yet we know of it, the more do we see 
how all those ancient miracles might have 
happened, even if they did not happen in quite 
the way that their recorders thought they did* 
If it comes to that, what now happens exactly 
as the wisest of us moderns think it does ? Till 
man has no more to learn, he will never fully 
understand, or rightly see, the least and 
commonest of happenings in his daily life. 

There is a very interesting theory which 
has of late years been put forward to explain 
the undoubted fact that animals, and even 
insects, are able to communicate intelligence, 
even of happenings that, to their undeveloped 
minds, must seem quite complicated. It is 
supposed that the method of communication, 
common to the animal world and to; humanity 
before the development of language, lies in 



288 THE BELIGION OF BURMA 

telepathy : in the direct transmission of ideas 
from mind, to mind. Mankind also, it is 
suggested, was sensitive to mental images, 
till the growing use of speech, and its 
substitution for the earlier method of com- 
munication, superseded this more direct, but 
less certain, telepathic communication. By 
disuse this telepathy grew slowly atrophied, 
except, perhaps, in rare cases of reversion, or 
amongst very primitive communities, or under 
unusual conditions such as special training or 
the like. 

This hypothesis, as has been said, was 
brought forward to explain certain undoubted 
facts. Into those facts, beyond the bare 
generalisation of animal communication, as 
into certain curious collateral evidence which 
goes far to lend support to the idea, it is 
unnecessary here to enter. The theory is only 
introduced at this point because, in connection 
with what we know of the subliminal self, the 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 289 

hypothesis casts a very illuminating sidelight 
on this subject of marvellous happenings. 

The work of the more modern psychologists 
has demonstrated the fact that, besides the 
ordinary active and self-conscious mental 
faculties, of which we are all aware, and with 
which we now are functioning, there exists in 
each one of us a whole vast realm of mental 
functions. To these, since normally they 
remain, at our present stage of mental 
development, below the threshold of 
consciousness, the name of the Subliminal Self 
is given. With the normal human being in 
this age, this extensive realm of mental faculties 
(faculties which in some respects transcend by 
far those of the normal waking mind) remains 
as it were asleep, or inactive, during waking life. 
It is only when the normal waking life is 
temporarily suspended, as may occur in ordinary 
sleep, in dreams, in somnambulism, and most no- 
tably in the hypnotic state, that these underlying 

19 



290 THE BELIGION OP BUEMA 

powers of the subliminal self are active 
and dominant. When this occurs, during the 
temporary abeyance of the normal waking mind, 
an entirely new and in many respects a most 
remarkable set of mental phenomena is found to 
occur. Take, for example, the faculty of 
memory. This, as we all know only too well, 
is in waking life a very imperfect and often 
unreliable faculty. It is, indeed, just when we 
most need to recall some particular event, 
name or idea, that it completely eludes our 
groping search. The memory of the subliminal 
self, on the other hand, appears almost 
miraculously perfect. It would appear as 
though no single impression of sense, no 
faintest conception of an idea, ever entered, 
even unconsciously, into the waking mind, 
into the content of our experience, but that it 
is promptly and perfectly registered in the sub- 
liminal realm. Thence it may be, recovered when 
this subliminal self is in possession. If, for 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 291 

example, we have forgotten some important 
word or idea, our best way to recover it is, not to 
continue groping after it in the conscious mind, 
but simply to go to sleep whilst thinking of 
its associated ideas. 

A better example, however, of this 
perfect memory of the subliminal mind 
is to be found in the old classic case 
of the woman who, when hypnotised, 
would recite with perfect accent and intonation 
the Hebrew text of various of the Psalms. As 
this woman was of the working class, and 
quite illiterate even in her own language, this 
appeared to the thinkers of that time (it hap- 
pened about a century ago, before the nature 
of the subliminal self was known at all) well- 
nigh a miracle, until, on going into the past 
history of that woman, it was discovered that she 
had formerly been maidservant to a clergyman, 
a great Hebrew scholar. He was in the habit 
of walking about his study and declaiming the 



!292 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

text of various favorite Psalms! The 
maidservant, of course, could not understand a 
single syllable. If asked what her master 
was reciting she would probably have answered : 
" Oh, some old gibberish or other ! " Naturally, 
in her normal mental state she could not have 
reproduced a single word of those, to her, 
unintelligible utterances. But every syllable 
and tone and accent of it all was perfectly 
recorded, perfectly registered by the subliminal 
mind ; and so, when in later years it happened, 
through hypnosis, that this subliminal mind 
was in possession, the whole of that un- 
consciously stored knowledge could be tapped. 
Another most remarkable faculty of the 
subliminal mind is its seemingly perfect sense 
of the lapse of time. All who have studied 
accounts of modern experiments in hypnotism 
will be well aware that if, to a hypnotised 
subject, the hypnotiser makes a post-hypnotie 
suggestion for a determinate time, for example. 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 29 B 

that the patient shall, after he or she is awake, 
perform such an action at precisely 1,567 
seconds after being wakened, that patient, in 
nine cases out of ten, will carry out the 
suggestion exactly at the moment thus 
precisely designated. Needless to say, without 
constant reference to a very accurate clock, 
such a feat would be impossible to any ordinary 
person in the waking state. 

This brings us to the point we wish to draw 
attention to. If we can, so to speak, give a 
command to this subliminal self whilst it is in a 
condition to hear us, that command will, even 
after a return to the ordinary mental state, be 
carried out. It is as though the subliminal 
mind had the power, as it were, of dramatising 
an idea impressed upon it into an actual and 
seeming objective happening. Suggest to a 
hypnotised person that, after awakening, he 
will see on some blank sheet of paper some 
definite design, and his wakened mind will see 



294 . THE RELIGION OF BDHMA 

it. More remarkable still, if you, say, trace on 
the patient's arm a cross with cold metal rod, 
having suggested that the simple figure so 
traced out will appear in a few hours as if the 
mark were branded, then, somehow or other, 
the very flesh of the body will obey the com- 
mand in the designated time. This will happen 
long after the patient, utterly unaware of the 
command, has awakened, and that design will 
duly appear. Here the phenomenon is not 
merely subjective, but it actually objectivises. 
No doubt exists as to the possibility of this 
phenomenon. It has been produced hundreds, 
perhaps thousands, of times within the last 
few years. 

To connect up what has been said concerning 
the subliminal mind with what has gone before* 
it. may be pointed out that there is every 
reason for supposing that it is this sublimi- 
nal mind which is concerned in telepathy ; 
even as, in rather rare cases, that mind 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 295 

seems capable of sheer clairvoyance and even 
foresight. 

There is, however, every reason for suppos- 
ing that this great group of powers of the 
mind which we now, for the reason that has 
been mentioned, term the subliminal self or 
mind, was far more active, entered far more 
completely into the normal waking mental life 
of mankind, in bygone ages than it does in our 
present times. Perhaps it would be more 
accurate to say that that realm of mental action 
was nearer to the threshold of consciousness 
then than now ; it was more readily susceptible 
of being evoked. To take one only of the 
many facts which point in this direction. We 
have seen how the mind of the child tends to 
a constant state of what we may term expectancy. 
It is ever ready to suppose itself on the verge 
of some great and marvellous happening. Now 
this state o expectancy, as those who have 
studied modern hypnotism well know, is just 



296 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

one of the conditions which predispose to the 
sudden lowering of the threshold to the inclu- 
sion of more or less of the subliminal realm. It 
has been noted that any condition which may 
characterise modern childhood is probably a 
reminder 3 a recapitulation, of the state in 
which the human adult of a thousand years or 
more ago commonly lived during his lifetime. 
So this tendency of childhood to expectancy, 
with its implication of ready suggestibility t 
must have been the normal state of mind some 
thousands of years ago. 

Why is it, then, that when we make some 
suggestion involving the marvellous, the 
unusual or unexpected, to the normal adult 
developed mind as it is now, that suggestion al- 
together fails of its effect ? Partly, no doubt, 
because the readily suggestible subliminal mind 
is then, the person being awake, dormant or 
partly inactive. But mainly it is because the 
awake mind, aware of the unusualness of the 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 297 

suggestion, strongly inhibits that idea from 
seizing hold upon the consciousness. If, then, 
we could by any means make our suggestion 
in such a fashion that it reached the subliminal 
self without reaching the awake mind with its 
, sane tendency to veto the unusual, then we 
might be able to get our suggestion dramatised 
into subjective, or even objective fact, just as 
we now can with a hypnotised person. 

But there is only one way now known to us 
of doing this, of speaking, as it were, to the 
subliminal mind direct, without the knowledge 
or the intervention of the waking mind. That 
means is by telepathic communication of the 
suggestion direct from mind to mind. We 
have seen how it is partly at least the sublimi- 
nal mind that is concerned in such telepathy as 
now is possible, both in respect of the trans- 
mitter and the receiver of the idea. Bearing^ 
then, in mind the fact that those ancient 
peoples lived, so to speak, far more in the 



298 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

subliminal realm than is now the case, we can 
at once come to see why it was that what we 
may term the miraculous was so much more 
common than it is now. Again we must not 
foe misunderstood to imply that the so-called 
miracles did not happen, or rather that they 
happened only in the imagination of those 
childlike peoples. For we must remember how, 
even with the very little that we now know of 
the powers of the subliminal region, it is pos- 
sible under proper conditions to produce actual 
objective happenings, like the appearance of 
the brand-mark on a person's skin. Once 
grant that the subliminal was in those early 
ages nearer to the surface than it now is, and 
we can understand how widely this opens the 
door for the relatively frequent occurrence of 
what are commonly termed miracles. 

It was not, then, in respect of faulty 
observation, or the pure imagination, of 
these strange phenomena that most of 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 299 

the ancient peoples went so far astray. 
The case, indeed, was closely comparable 
to that of modern so-called spiritualistic 
phenomena. The miracles, we may quite 
comfortably with our modern knowledge grant, 
did happen ; just as (apart from cases of 
fraudulent " mediums ") the modern phenomena 
of the seance-room do occur. One must, however, 
admit these to be very feeble beside the effects 
of the old-time workers of marvels. It was, 
then as now, in respect of the interpretation 
placed upon those events that men made the 
profoundest error. Then, the common mis- 
apprehension was that the miracle-worker 
produced his effects through the agency, 
compelled or voluntary, of the gods just as 
now the common error of the modern spiritualist 
is to imagine the phenomena of the seance-room 
to be the work of spirits of the dead. And 
most of the marvel-workers, then, themselves 
believed in. and attributed their wonders to 

' 9 



800 : THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

tfieir gods -just as now most mediums believe 
in, and attribute their phenomena to, their 
so-called " spirit guides ". 

And, since those ancient peoples naturally 
attributed to their gods the possession in an 
enhanced degree of all their own higher mental 
characters, they fell into a far more profound 
and more far-reaching error in respect of the 
marvels of which they deemed them the prime 
movers. In the gods, they thought, was the 
spirit of Truth. The marvels were the direct 
work of the gods. Therefore they were the 
proof of the truth of whatever doctrine the 
gods' servant, the visible miracle-worker, gave 
utterance to. 

Here, of course, we moderns, with our 
logically trained minds, altogether part company 
with those old-time thinkers. If a man should 
come to us, and perform some seemingly 
marvellous feat before our eyes, we should, if 
we were seized of the scientific spirit, be 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 301 

intensely interested in the phenomena. But 
however many, and however great and 
wonderful, were the phenomena, we should not 
on that account be in the least inclined to 
accept as true whatever doctrine that wonder- 
worker might be pleased to teach. We should, 
indeed, regard the claim, that because he could 
work wonders, therefore his teaching was true, 
as wholly illogical and absurd. But it was far 
otherwise with the ancients. To them, the 
proof of true doctrine lay in good, sound 
miracles. The proof that a man had real 
knowledge of the nature of the deeper things 
of life lay in his capacity to produce these 
wonders, So much so, that with most of the 
old-time religions, like Christianity, the marvels 
were adduced in proof of the divine mission 
und true doctrine of the Founder. Even 
modern Christians, for example, would, we 
think, agree in admitting that, if the crowning 
miracle of the resurrection of their Founder did 



302 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

not happen as an historical fact, then Christian 
teaching loses its claim to being inspired Truth, 

In ancient India, the very home of high 
spiritual development, and of the most 
wonderful of miracles, this wrong view of the 
value of the miracle as a proof of doctrine was 
of course most widely spread. So much so, 
that we find in our Buddhist Scriptures many a 
tale of how this or that religious teacher (in 
one celebrated case a whole body of such 
teachers) came to The Buddha to propose a sort 
of contest in miracle-working, as a proof of 
the superiority of their respective doctrines, be 
it understood. 

As might be expected from what has already 
been said in connection with the underlying 
mental faculties, it is a part of Buddhist 
Teaching that a person can gain control over 
the .hidden forces of his own mind as they 
develop, and the power to affect the minds of 
others in various ways. Certain of these would 



THE MIRACDLOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 80S 

distinctly come under the heading of the 
so-called miraculous. But although these 
powers over the minds of others, and even over 
what we should term objective phenomena, are 
said to come naturally to most in the normal 
course of their interior development towards 
Arahanship, it must not be supposed that^ 
according to Buddhist Teaching, the possession 
of these powers, or their exercise, proves a man 
to be of high and spiritual development^ Rather^ 
indeed, in some ways it is the opposite. To the 
aspirant himself, the development of these 
powers is regarded as a possible snare, because 
he may become so interested in them, and in 
the new worlds which their possession opens to 
his investigation, as to forget tbe higher 
teaching, and to neglect his training for 
the Path itself. On the other hand (these 
powers being simply powers, and therefore, 
like all powers, capable of being put to ends 
either good or bad) they may be developed by 



304 THE EELIGION OF BDEMA . 

-quite selfish and worldly persons. Thus their 
possession proves nothing at all save a certain 
degree of mastery over one's own mind, and 
over the forces of Nature. 

This brings us to what is the most remark- 
able circumstance of all : namely, that whilst 
Buddhism, like all ancient teachings, declared 
the existence of these mental powers, and 
indeed used them in its own curriculum of 
interior development, it yet put them exactly 
in the place that the modern scientific and 
logical mind would put them. It denied 
that they proved anything at all as to 
the truth or otherwise of the doctrine 
that might accompany them. The Buddha 
Himself, indeed, was said to possess (as would 
naturally follow from their connection with 
interior mental control) these powers in a more 
exalted degree than any other saint or sage. 
We are told how, on one occasion, a whole 
foody of fire- worship ping ascetics challenged 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 305 

the Great Teacher to one of those contests in 
the miraculous which have been referred to, 
with the usual illogical object of proving, by 
their superior miracles, the superiority of their 
doctrine over His. The Master accepted 
the challenge, wishing, once and for all, to put 
an end to these continued and unreasoning 
claims, and to place, by a supreme object- 
lesson, this matter of miracles in its proper 
place. 

So, tradition tells us, the contest was held, 
in the presence of a vast concourse of people, 
attracted by the very human desire to see who 
would get the best of it. As the challenging 
party, the fire-worshippers, whose piece de 
resistance was making the fire of sacrifice 
kindle by their magical mastery over the fire- 
element, first took the field. But the far 
greater power of The Buddha altogether pre- 
vented, or even reversed, the effect that they 

were wont easily to produce. And then, after 
20 



306 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

an altogether unparalleled display of marvels, so 
wonderful that even the fire-worshipping 
ascetics themselves became His followers, the 
Great Teacher preached a sermon to the assem- 
bled multitude on the Wrong Marvel and the 
Eight. He showed how all these marvels were 
beside the point of true Religion, of Right 
Understanding ; how they proved nothing for 
or against the truth of any body of teaching. 
Such things, He said, were mere worldly 
powers, which anyone who chose to take the 
needful trouble could acquire. What, then, 
He asked, was the Right Miracle ? It lay, He 
said, in the incomparable power of Truth itself, 
which, apart from any really unconnected 
display of wonders, could so seize upon and 
move men's hearts as to make them altogether 
change their lives. That was the Right Marvel, 
as He saw it : just the power of Truth to 
endure, to triumph in men's hearts and live for 
ever, even when all these worlds, that are in 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 307 

themselves such miracles 9 will have perished 
utterly. 

Such, then, is the attitude which Buddhism 
(in this, as in many other respects, so 
singularly modern in its outlook upon life) 
takes up towards the question of the miraculous. 
The Buddhist sacred books, like all other 
ancient literature, teem, indeed, with tales of 
the miraculous and marvellous. But, according 
to the understanding of even the most unen- 
lightened of Buddhists, it relies in no least 
degree upon these wonders for its own support. 
Take away, if you care to do so, every marvel 
recorded in the Buddhist books, and in The 
Teacher's own words, the greatest miracle of 
all will yet remain the miracle of the power 
of Truth to conquer falsehood ; even when the 
Truth is hard to bear, when the falsehood 
appeals to every hope and passion in our hearts. 

Fundamentally, of course, here as in 
other contexts where this word Dhamma, 



308 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

which I have translated Truth, is concerned, 
it is rather the great spiritual power which, 
reigning behind all ^consciousness, lies at the 
back of every form of progress. At its highest 
it is manifested in the Path of Attainment ; in 
its lowest aspect, perhaps it is responsible 
even for physical evolution. But, in a 
secondary degree, it means just what we 
moderns mean^by Truth a body of knowledge 
which is in harmony with the facts of life. 
And how great a wonder is even that lower, 
manifested Dhamma, all the story of humanity 
but goes to prove. Looking back on the 
history of our own civilisation, we see that dim 
reflection of the Truth Supernal conquer in 
face of all the hopes and fancies and desires 
of man. We see it, in the Middle Ages, 
dammed back, crushed down by every power 
of Church and State, yet conquering in the 
end, in spite of all that Church and State 
could do. Against the very hopes, the keen 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN BUDDHISM 309 

desires of man, we see it triumph even over 
rack and stake. It is that great miracle of 
Truth which here to-day has emptied and is 
emptying the Churches which preach a creed 
whose very sanction lies in that old error that 
a miracle proves Truth. 

JSTot so indeed. As an ancient Buddhist 
saying has it : " Truth verily is deathless speech." 
Deathless and unconquerable, whether it has 
sprung from intensest interior spiritual attain- 
ment, or from the patient study of the Universe 
which our outer senses present, Truth will 
spread and grow amongst the hearts of men, 
till all our ignorances, our errors, shall have 
passed away ; until at last, after all this weary 
round of cyclic transmigration, it shall come 
home to each one of us in its highest, holiest 
form. Whoso wins that Highest Truth 
knows that he has no more to do ; that the 
hidden purpose of his being is fulfilled at 
last ; that for him there is no more of living as 



310 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

we know it. For, as The Master said, it is 
only " By not-knowing and not~under standing 
that we have come to live so many pain-filled 
lives" 



THE EULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 

IN Burma there is one of the lesser lessons 
which The Master taught us, that still survives, 
ages of torpor notwithstanding. That lesson 
is the lesson of Charitv, one of the mere minor 

ts ' 

lessons of our faith, namely, that as compas- 
sion, or thought for others is noblest of all 
human sentiments and ideals, therefore one 
who .would call himself in truth a Buddhist, 
should give of his worldly goods to the 
poor or to religion. That is one Buddhist 
lesson that Burma's race -has learned; you 
know the fruits of it ; you know how far 
your fellow-men live up to it ; it is indeed 
your proudest title to the name of followers of 
Him who once was called Vessantara the King. 
You know how large a part of all this nation's 
wealth is spent for purposes of religion; a 



312 THE EELIGION OF J3UEMA 

vastly larger moiety of the national wealth 
for religion than any other race on earth can 
boast of! Now, indeed, for want of comprehen- 
sion of the real meaning of our motto, " The 
gift of Truth outweighs all other gifts," most 
of that wealth goes in what we may term 
" brick-and-mortar " harity; but still is the 
lesser lesson learned, and, what is more to the 
point, it bears fruit in every Burman's life. 
Teach your new, higher rendering of that 
lesson ; teach, as The Master taught, that greater 
than these so quickly ruined clay -gifts is the 
Truth itself, the Law you seek hereby to 
follow ; teach that indeed the gift of Truth is 
nobler, greater than all other gifts ; and in years 
to come, what could not this single race 
achieve in these days of facile transit 
and of the printing-press with two-thirds 
of humanity that so far has not heard The 
Master's Law ? Turn but a tithe, but the 
hundredth part, of that so generous tide of 



THE EULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 313 

Charity to water the fallow fields of a true 
wakening of Buddhist life, of Buddhist 
propaganda ; turn but a fraction of your bricks 
to books ; a fraction of your Monks again, as in 
the ancient glorious days, to teachers of the 
Way in other lands ; and you shall see, here in 
this actual moving world and not in dreams of 
heavenly future life, the Immediate Fruit 
Sanditthihiphalam of The Master's Teaching. 
You will fulfil the purpose of His Law, and 
bring His Light to multitudes still waiting in 
the darkness, and watching still the eastern 
sky for signs of dawn. 

Even so did He behold it, when, making 
clear His Heavenly Vision, He looked upon the 
Triple World, and watched the presage of the 
day to come : The hearts of countless myriads 
of beings plunged in Samsara's wave, like 
lotuses unnumbered ; and each the symbol of 
the miracle and mystery of a life, such miracle 
as men so often live and die uncomprehending ; 



314 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

heirs of infinitudes unnumbered, yet wasteful of 
the swift-winged hours, plunged in the three- 
fold tide of Craving, Hatred, and Illusion, 
unseen, even to themselves, by reason of 
Avijja's night ; many, alas, still clinging to the 
mire they sprang from ; yet many another 
striving upwards through the clearer waters ; 
some even well-nigh to the surface, waiting in 
the gloom with hearts unopened, in a world 
wherein as yet Truth's glory had not dawned. 
Such was His Vision of the world to come, 
and so did He, the Wisest, figure what other- 
wise might not be conceived of ; the mystery 
of universal life, slowly moulded from prime- 
val Chaos, as the lotus by life's alchemy 
transmutes dead clay to root, to leaf, and final 
bloom. So, with the Buddha- vision He beheld 
it, and perceived : " Many there are now, and 
shall follow in the ages yet to come, hearts well- 
nigh free from all these three floods, who, 
if the Truth's great sun should dawn, would 



THE RULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 815 

open to reflect his rays " ; and, so knowing, did 
He then decide to set on foot the Kingdom of 
Righteousness, so that in the hearts of men that 
light of Truth might come. 

To take a part in that great work, however 
humble, to live and strive for that great 
realisation, how high a task ! yet it is within the 
reach of all of us, howsoever little be his earthly 
lot ; a task indeed ever bearing for the gathering 
its Immediate Fruit the harvest of the 
Dhamma, Inviting, Timeless, Sure ! 

Such is in fact a part of the possibilities life 
has for us here in this outer world, the world 
wherein our fellows live and strive. Yet, for 
each one of us, there is yet another Kingdom 
which we may help to enlighten ; a Kingdom 
indeed near, necessary, vital to us, if in the outer 
realm our work shall prosper and attain. 
In the outer world our words, our work, 
our life has influence ; wider and wider 
we mav kindle in our comrades 5 hearts the 



316 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

ancient spirit of our Buddhist faith ; but here 
we have the power of influence only. In the 
inner kingdom, it is we who are at once the 
ruler and the ruled ; as in the face of Yama, 
Death's Great King, all men and all beings of 
the Threefold World stand equal, even so 
stand we all in respect of conquest or failure 
in this inner empire. "Without, our lot, our 
power for good, is as our bygone actions 
made it ; within, our only present possession is 
the kingdom of the heart, where none can 
gainsay us or thwart the hope we have. 

Now, then, in this our empire indeed the 
throne of power may be . usurped either by 
passion or hate or folly, rightly not our ruler 
but our slave, to whom betimes we foolishly 
bow. How in this kingdom of the mind 
should we so rightly order all our ways, 
that we may become indeed the ruler of 
that inalienable realm, Lords of Self's 
Sovereignty, and walk therein as did Asoka in 



THE BULK OF THE INNER KINGDOM 317 

the world? It is our great ideal to spread 
through the kingdoms of the earth the over- 
lordship of the King of Truth. How should we 
live and work that for a surety one realm at 
least may own His sway, as outcome, as visible 
Immediate Fruit of our ideal " Live so as to 
merit the name of Buddhist "and win there- 
by the inner power which alone can make our 
words and deeds influence our comrades 
in the outer world, the world of men ? 

The answer to this vital question is the 
simplest in the world, so far as words go; 
most difficult of all things, when it comes to 
real achievement. Let us consider the words 
of it, even as spoken by The Buddha Himself. 

Under the great twin Sala-tree by Mallian 
Kusinara the Lion of the Sakya Clan lies nigh 
to death ; the life that changed and still 
throughout the centuries is changing all the 
history of humanity is now swiftly drawing to 
its end. About Him kneel a mighty company 



318 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

of the Brethren, such a company, indeed, as 
now I fear the visible Sangha of the world 
could never furnish ; for all of them save 
Ananda have won to Life's Supremest Goal, 
Arahans, ever beholding, face to face, Nibbana's 
glory ; the Three Great Floods for them crossed 
over ; their course towards the Eternal finished ; 
passed, gone over to the Further Shore. 

Now at that time, the story in the Sutta 
tells us, Beings innumerable from all the 
Heavens above gathered to Kusinara's grove 
to pay what seemed a fitting reverence to Him 
who was Teacher both of gods and men, even 
the laws of .Nature changing, so that these 
might have their will. All out of season the 
Sala-tree brake into blossom, and the flowers 
scattered and sprinkled themselves over the 
body of the Tathagata, out of reverence for 
the Successor of the Buddhas of Old. And 
heavenly Mandarava-flowers came falling from 
the skies, and these also scattered and sprinkled 



THE BULB OF THE INNER KINGDOM 319 

themselves all over the body of the Tathagata, 
out of reverence for the Successor of the 
Buddhas of Old. And heavenly perfumes fell 
from the skies, and these scattered and sprinkled 
themselves over the body of the Tathagata, out 
of reverence for the Successor of the Buddhas 
of Old. And the sound of the voices of the 
gods, singing the Triumph of The Teacher, and 
heavenly music, came floating on the breeze, 
out of reverence for the Successor of the 
Buddhas of Old ; till on that moonlit night 
in Kusinara's grove it seemed as though. all 
Nature and the gods themselves had united 
to offer fitting reverence and fitting worship to 
Him who lay there ; waiting for Death's last 
boon. But The Teacher spoke, and all the gods 
were silent : " It is not thus, Ananda, that 
the Tatkdgatas are rightly worshipped, rightly 
reverenced, rightly borne in mind. But whoso, 
Ananda, whether Bhikkhu or BhiWiuni, Updmka 
or Upasilcd, shall walk according to the Teaching 



320 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

I have given> by such an one am I rightly 
worshipped, rightly reverenced, rightly borne 
in mind !" 

So is our answer. The true worship of the 
Buddhas is not even in divinest-seeming outer 
offering or praise ; rightly that one shall be 
called a follower of The Buddha, rightly will he 
merit the name of Buddhist, who walks the Way 
The Buddha found ; that is, the Way, that He, 
the Master of Compassion, walked first Himself, 
twenty-five centuries ago in India. 

To be a Buddhist, then to rule as Cakkavatti 
king over this our personal heart's empire 
means no outer act of worship, no lip- 
testimony of Buddhism; but only walking 
in such wise as all our powers make possible, 
in just that Way the Buddhas walked of old . 
It means to set before us, not sometimes 
only, but through every hour of our lives, and 
to the utmost of our powers, the ideals by which 
the Buddhas shape their lives ; to aspire as they 



THE RULE OP THE INNER KINGDOM 321 

aspired ; to live and walk in such high hopes as 

the Bodhisattas, the Buddhas-to-be, have lived. 

Nor is this unattainable, remote, impossible ; 

for you must always remember that the Way 

of the Buddhas is not the Way they walk in 

that last life on earth wherein the Final 

Enlightenment is won ; the Bodhisattas begin 

to walk in that Way from the far distant day 

in which their great resolve is taken. But the 

Bodhisattas save only for the special Ideal, 

ever-growing as they win to height after 

height of that Path are men such as ourselves, 

perchance taking even lower birth according to 

their deeds. So that, if, as indeed is true, we 

cannot achieve such a life as that which in 

this last birth The Buddha led, still, if we 

shape our lives by the ideal which from the 

beginning inspires the Bodhisatta, we, to some 

small extent and in some humble manner, can 

even now enter, immeasurably distant though 

the Goal may be, on that one Path whereon to 
21 



322 TEE RELIGION OP BURMA 

walk is to be truly worthy of the name we 
claim. 

The work we have to do, then, that we may 
make this our heart's empire Buddhist, is, 
primarily, to strive after one definite ideal. 
Whatever else we may do, whatever special 
virtue we may strive for, whatever discipline 
we may practise, whatever religious exercises we 
may use, it must be with that one aim in view ; 
the aim that characterises the Way the Buddhas 
go, even though five hundred lives may lie 
between us and the Great Attainment. 

What that especial ideal is, all Buddhists 
know full well ; its keyword is Renunciation ; 
its hope is the attainment of the higher 
Wisdom ; its aim is the relief of somewhat of 
the world's great suffering, the winning of 
enlightenment and power, not that oneself may 
profit by it, but that benefit may come to all 
the living world. This is the special purpose, 
the sublime ideal, characterising the Way the 



THE KULE OF THE INNEK KINGDOM 323 

Buddhas walk ; it is to have, and to live up to 
that ideal, far off and humbly though it be, 
thus to work and strive and suffer, so that 
thereby all life may find the Way of Peace. 

Hear how The Master Himself describes, in 
the Patisambhida-magga, the nature of that 
ideal. We must remember, of course, that here 
it is no humble follower that is speaking, there- 
fore it is no aspiration such as we might frame* 
nor language we might use; but the final 
blossoming of that ideal of the Great 
Compassion, in the language of One who had 
attained finished His work, and won the Goal 
and possessed of the power which comes to 
him who life after life has walked Renuncia- 
tion's Way. 

"On fire are all the habitations of the 
world, so seeing, the Great Compassion for 
living things descends into the Hearts of the 
Buddhas, the Exalted Ones ! Fallen into an evil 
way . . . without a shelter . . . without a 



324 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

refuge . . . inflated, unsoothed, so seeing, the 
Great Compassion for all living things descends 
into the Hearts of the Buddhas, the Exalted 
Ones ! Pierced is the world with many darts 3 
and there is none to draw them out but 1 1 
Flung into a cage of corruption, enwrapped with, 
the gloom of ignorance, and there is none can 
make it to see light but I ! None but Myself is 
able to put out the fires of lust and misery. 
I crossed over, I can make them cross; freed, 
I can make them free ; so seeing, the Great 
Compassion descends into the Hearts of the 
Buddhas, the Exalted Ones." 

Such is The Master's own expression of the 
Great Ideal. Surely we indeed are very 
very far from that glad realisation" Freed, 
I can make them free " far indeed from that 
perfection of Pity, outcome of many a life 
spent on the Way of all the Buddhas, which in 
the Text is called the Great Compassion ; still, 
in our lesser way we can fill our lives and light 



THE RULE OP THE INNER KINGDOM 325 

our hearts with that ideal. That it is, truly, to 
"rightly worship, rightly reverence, rightly 
bear in mind " the Greatest of the wide world's 
Teachers, to follow in the Path He went, to 
live according to His Law. 

Who, indeed, in this our life with all 
its petty trials, has not, in an immediate 
and obvious way, countless opportunities to 
rule his kingdom after that ideal ? Chiefly, 
of course, living after that ideal means an 
ordering of the inner kingdom of the mind, the 
constant resumption of the thought : " I will live 
and work and strive only that the sorrow in the 
hearts of all. may thereby be diminished " ; that, 
and the constant watchful suppression of every 
thought for self as it may arise. But, apart 
from the heart's kingdom, in relation to the 
outer world about us, how much benefit we 
could confer on those who live about us by 
ever striving to bring forth fruits of our ideal 
in the little multitudinous relations with our 



326 THE EELIGION OF BURMA 

fellows that make up our lives ! Slowly, alas ! 
even with rigidest constant rule, may we 
perceive the fruits, in ever-growing love and 
understanding, of the attempt to win this in- 
terior empire to the Way of the Buddhas ; 
quickly, on the other hand, do we perceive the 
welcome fruit of this our golden rule put into 
practice in the outer world ! To bear sorrow 
silently, and present a smiling face to the 
world without, lest the visible tokens of our 
grief should bring suffering to the hearts of 
others ; to avoid sharp-spoken words ; to abhor 
as our great enemy each least act fraught 
with another's pain ; to count as gain each help- 
ful word spoken or deed done for those about 
us- how soon, of all such sowings of our 
great ideal, may we not see the fruits in our 
comrades' lives ! Far we may be, and far 
indeed we are, from being able even to conceive 
the nature of the Great Compassion that the 
Buddhas, the Awakened, feel; like so many a 



THE RULE OP THE INNER KINGDOM 827 

term used in the Buddhavacanam, this stands 
for a state of consciousness not to be attained 
save as the outcome of many an arduous life. 
But if the Pity of the Buddhas now lies far 
beyond our grasp, our very thought, its seed, 
the Pity of Mankind may still be sown, and its 
harvest gathered, be ever so small the world 
wherein we live and move. 

One thing essential to the ordering of the 
inner kingdom is the daily practice of definite 
mental culture, Bhavana, to that end. Sllci 
and Dana, practice of Virtue and of Charity, 
are the common bases of all the great religions ; 
of themselves they are quite unable to bring 
anything more than happier and freer lives ; 
their fruit is in the future, rarely visible now 
in this earthly life. But the practice of 
Bhavana alone can lead us to the Holy Path ; 
its fruits are immediate, visible in our hearts 
and ways. It is as the Royal Edicts, carved on 
rock and stone, wherewith, like the emperor 



328 THE RELIGION OF BUKMA 

Asoka, we may make known the purpose of 
our rule to every subject of the inner empire. 
In Burma there are many works dealing 
with the details of the various practices 
of Bhavana ; here, in connection with the 
special ideal which should inspire the would-be 
Buddhist, I can indicate the barest outline of 
but one. Choosing some time when we can be 
alone each day (the times of dawn and sunset 
are the best, but any time will do so long as it 
is always the same time), sitting alone after our 
daily religious exercises, we call to mind the 
words of The Buddha treating of the meditation 
on Compassion. " And he lets his mind 
pervade one quarter of the world with thoughts 
of Compassion, and so the second, so the third, 
and so the fourth ; so that the whole wide 
world, above, around, below, and everywhere, 
does he continue to pervade with thoughts of 
Compassion ; with Heart of Compassion grown 
great, mighty and far-reaching and beyond all 



THE RULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 329 

measure. Just as, Vasettha, a mighty trumpeter ,. 
makes himself heard, and that without difficulty, 
in all the Four Directions, even so of all beings 
that have form or life there is not one that he 
passes by, but regards all with mind set free, 
with deep Compassion," Bearing in mind this 
or some similar utterance of The Teacher, we 
endeavor, with the greatest intensity of 
mental effort of which we are capable, to hold 
our thoughts upon the meaning of the passage ; 
to waken in ourself , as represented therein, the 
thrill of pity that naturally arises when we see 
some fellow-life in pain. That thrill of pity 
once awakened, directed as in our passage to 
the multitudinous beings caught in the surging 
whirlpool of Craving, Passion, and Illusion, is 
to be dwelt on, magnified, purified in our 
thoughts, always with our ideal as its substratum, 
with the idea that this definite cultivation of an 
emotion otherwise only occasional, will open for 
us the entrance to the Path the path that 



330 THE RELLGION OF BURMA 

leads to power to help relieve the sorrow of 
the world ; and so, each day we meditate, always 
at the same time, for such a duration as we are 
able. At first we find the words employed 
important; also we find that our ability 
to awaken the thrilling feeling of pity (which 
is in this case the first Nimitta) varies very 
much on different days ; sometimes it will seem 
to come almost without an effort, and yet on 
other occasions we may never get as far as its 
awakening at all. Another of the invariable 
effects on the beginner is the arising of a 
definite distaste for the practice we are engaged 
in ; we find that a very strong persuasion 
arises that the whole thing is useless ; we 
want at the selected time to do anything else 
but meditate ; we find a tendency to leave off 
the practice altogether, or to leave it alone till 
it becomes welcome to our minds once more. 
When these opposing thoughts are uppermost, 
moreover, our mind will wander, the Nimitta 



THE RULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 331 

will not easily arise, perhaps not at all ; we 
feel convinced that we have not the right 
method, or the right sort of mind for 
meditation practices. 

Now it is just at the point when, by the 
arising of these opposing ideas, our progress 
seems altogether stopped, that we are 
despite the difficulty and despite the apparent 
lack of result able to do most in the way of 
overcoming those Five Hindrances which 
always oppose any attempt to meditate. This 
is why it is so important always to practise at 
our chosen time, to let no feeling or condition 
of our affairs interfere ; at such times it is 
better even merely to say the words, were it for 
a few minutes only, than to give up or to miss 
the practice of one day. 

How long it takes to win to the next stage, 
the stage in which the Immediate Fruit of our 
meditation becomes apparent, depends in the 
first place on the energy and determination with 



332 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

which we go into and sustain the practice; 
also on our Kaimna 5 health, and many other 
things. If, winning to nothing, we give it up 
at the first appearance of obstacles, letting 
our fickle minds wander whithersoever they 
will, then, trying to meditate now and again 
by fits and starts, we shall never accomplish 
anything in the matter at all. But if, with 
silent, brave determination we understand that 
all our difficulties are only questions that time 
and determined will can overcome ; if we 
persevere against all obstacles and, even if 
it take us years, press ever onwards, under- 
standing these obstacles as but the outcome 
of our bygone lives ; if we keep on, then, one 
day or other, the first real step upon the actual 
Path will be made. Suddenly, some time when 
we have awakened and magnified to our utmost 
that internal overpowering sensation or thrill 
of pity, suddenly and without a warning our 
first Immediate Fruit will come; and for, 



THE ROLE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 333 

perhaps an instant only as our minds count 
time, we shall enter and dwell in the state of 
the First Jhana. 

Then we shall know, and for the first 

time understand the truth of what we have 

read, as words and words only in the 

sacred books, but never have seen or 

known. As from the heart of a dark thunder- 

loud at night time when nought or but a 

little of earth or heaven can be seen, suddenly 

the lightning flashes, and for an instant the 

unseen world gleams forth in instantaneous 

light, light penetrating every darkest corner, 

flushing the clouded sky with momentary 

glory so then, at that great moment, will 

come the realisation of all our toil. No words, 

no similes, no highest thought of ours can 

adequately convey that mighty realisation ; but 

then, at that time, we shall know and see; 

we shall realise that all our life has changed of 

a sudden, that what of yore we deemed 



334 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Compassion what of old we deemed the 
utmost attainment that the mind or the life of 
man can compass th?*t is ours at last; we 
have won, achieved, and entered into the Path 
of which mere words can never tell. As is 
deep sleep to sudden wakening to day's bright 
consciousness ; as sight's coming to the man born 
blind ; as life from death itself so, in that 
instant, dawns for us the moment of attain- 
ment. As a flash lighting up the darkest corners 
of our mental kingdom, revealing, clear and 
luminous, the wide unconquered empire of 
the mind, so comes for the aspirant the glorious 
moment of attainment. Living, as we cannot 
think of life, yet still with the feeling of self- 
conscious being, of identity with that one who 
lived and strove ; with mind still reasoning, dis- 
cerning, he who has attained understands : " At 
last I have attained." With that knowledge, 
just as all the heavens start forth into momen- 
tary glory at the lightning flash, so is his being 



THE BOLE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 835 

flushed, illumined with an ecstasy of joy past 
mortal speech or thought. But for an instant 
only, yet that instant's light even if never 
again he could achieve that instant's light 
suffices to make new his life, to illumine for 
him all his future ways. For ever after, he 
who has so attained sees life with other eyes 
than heretofore ; he knows that, ignorant and 
uncomprehending as he now still is, once his 
mind's Vision saw the very meaning and the 
purpose of existence ; for him no more the vain 
and purposeless wandering here and there, 
seeking for this or that new object of the 
sense or thought. He knows there is a meaning 
and a purpose, vaster than thinking mind can 
hold, behind, beyond, this petty dream of lif e ; 
no more can foolish doubt assail him ; the Path 
is his, the Way is opened, the Way that leads 
to that great Goal once seen afar. 

You know how once the king Ajatasattu 
came to the Exalted One, asking for an answer 



336 THE RELIGION OF BDEMA 

to his question as to the Immediate Fruit. 
Here in this world, he said, men follow many 
a different worldly way 9 in this trade or the 
other, earning their livelihood by this or that 
profession. Now in all these ways of life, 
the king maintained, there is for the worker an 
Immediate Fruit -visible, obvious, dear to him ; 
the wealth that makes him able to live, give 
help, betimes, to others, win what may be 
of his heart's desires, maintain his family and 
parents, dwell in happiness amongst his fellow- 
men. But of this Religious Life, the king 
declared, no such Immediate Fruit, pleasant and 
dear to man, fulfilling his purified desires, 
<5ould be perceived. Where then, he asked The 
Teacher, where is the Immediate Fruit of this 
Beligious Life, for the sake of which men in 
the world live according to the precepts of 
religion, for the sake of which the Samana 
leaves house and home and devotes himself 
to the harder Precepts of the Bhikkhu, 



THE RULE OF THE INNEB KINGDOM 337 

and to the fulfilment of the duties of the 
Higher Life ? 

And The Teacher answered him : " Yes, there 
truly is many a Fruit, immediate and visible 
to him who wins it, of this Religious Life " ; 
and some of these He taught the king. First 
the mere loMka advantages ; the happiness 
which comes to him who keeps the Ways of 
Righteousness, who lives in accordance with 
the Precepts, the peace and the calm joy 
which spring within him as he sees : " Formerly 
I lived s unrestrained in appetite, craving for 
this and that, yet never satisfied ; now do I 
live, by practising this Sila, calm, restrained, 
at peace within ; this it is well and noble to 
have done." But, continued The Buddha, there 
are other, higher, nobler Fruits of the Holy 
Life ; visible, satisfying, to be realised by him 
who strives ; Immediate Fruits of the Higher 
Life, dearer and sweeter than any fruit of 

worldly or of virtue's ways. Of those Higher 
22 



338 THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 

Fruits the first is. the attainment of the First 
Great Ecstasy ; happy is he, in this world and 
the next, who has attained so far, be it only an 
instant's seizing on the Fruits of but the First 
Attainment. 

All this so real-seeming life we lead, 
this earth we walk on, men about us, or the 
containing Heavens above ; all this, and whatso- 
ever we may see, feel, hear or know, is but the 
phantom, the puppet-show, enacted, as a dream 
is, by the deep mystery that we term the Mind. 
He who would free himself from this Illusion ; 
who with clear-seeing Wisdom's eye would rule, 
and understand, and help he first must rule in 
his inner kingdom ; he must guide and develop 
it till he no longer is slave of its desires, but 
emperor of them all. And he indeed who seeks to 
make his life worthy of the name of Buddhist ; 
who seeks to follow in the "Way The Master 
walked and taught of old ; who seeks to gain 
the power that comes with Understanding, that 



THE RULE OF THE INNER KINGDOM 339 

lie may in Ms humble way bring joy, not sorrow 

to the worldthat one, like Dhammasoka in the 

olden days, first has to conquer these usurping 

enemies, the Five Great Hindrances, the 

passions, follies, and weaknesses within. Then, 

that his rule may be established, like as Asoka 

; engraved on pillar and on rock and cave the 

Royal Edicts, so must he, on his heart of hearts, 

inscribe in deep -cut characters his great ideals, 

If we can do but this ; if for The Buddha's Law 

we will subject our own inalienable empire 

then with the certainty of success we may send 

forth our Sasana over the whole wide world. 

Each one of us who weakens in the task is 

weakening the religion ; each one who overcomes 

the tests brings strength and light to it from far 

beyond Illusion's Veil. By such sustained, 

enduring, arduous toil, shall we accomplish this 

first and greatest of our aims ; we shall light, in 

this sleeping land, the old ideal once more, kindle 

to new and greater vigor the ancient pitying 



340 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

fervor of our faith. Greater than all other 
tasks is this, its fruits immediate, timeless, 
sure ; leading not us alone but all- who may 
thereby hereafter follow the Hidden Way 
The Buddhas have trodden and have taught 
from life and death's unending circle, over 
the trackless wastes of dire Avrjja's ocean, 
safe, safe, safe, on to the Other Shore ! 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 

THERE are few circumstances more surprising 
to the student of comparative religion than the 
fact that, in the pure Buddhism of the 
Theravdda, which constitutes the national 
religion of Burma, he finds exhibited, both in 
the scriptural sources of the religion, and in 
the lives of the people who follow it, an all- 
pervading spirit of intense devotion a spirit of 
loving adoration, directed to The Buddha, His 
Teaching and His Brotherhood of Monks, such 
as is hardly to be equalled, and certainly not to 
be excelled, in any of the world's theistic creeds. 
To one, especially, who has been brought up 
in the modern western environment, this 
earnest devotion, this spirit of adoration, seems 
almost the last feature he would expect to find 
in a religion so intellectually and so logically 



342 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

sound as this our Buddhist faith. He has 
been accustomed to regard this deep emotion 
of adoration, as the peculiar prerogative of the 
Godhead of whatever forms of religion he has 
studied. So to find it in so marked a degree, 
in so predominant a measure, in a creed from 
which all concept of an animistic Deity is 
absent, appears as well-nigh the most remark- 
able, as it was the most unexpected feature, of 
the many strange and novel characteristics of 
this altogether unique form of religious 
teaching. That trusting worship, that self- 
abnegating spirit of devotion in which, in the 
rest of the great world -religions, the devotee 
loses himself in thoughts of the glory, power, 
and love of the Supreme Being of whom they 
teach, so far from being absent here, whence 
all thought of such a Being is banished, actual- 
ly exists in a most superlative degree. It is 
lavished, indeed, on no hypothesis, on no Being 
whom none has ever known or seen, but on the 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 348 

thought of a man, not altogether different from 
ourselves, who once lived without a doubt on 
this our earth, and on the Truth He taught, 
and on the Brotherhood He founded for the Ton- 
tinuance of that Dhamma, and for the finding 
of that Peace whereto He showed the Way. 
. Wherever else you find that spirit of devo- 
tion, it will always be associated with blind 
faith ; with that trusting mental attitude which 
is characteristic of the earlier stages of our 
mind's development, the unquestioning faith 
and love a little child exhibits towards those 
elders who constitute its small restricted world. 
To the dawning infantile intelligence, the chief 
feature of the life, in which it so far can 
scarcely distinguish betwixt self and not-self, 
is its own absolute dependence on mother or 
nurse for the food that constitutes almost its 
sole desire; to that central all-bestowing 
figure of its narrow horizon it looks for every * 
thing ; it deems nurse or mother the omnipotent 



344 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

dispenser of all human blessings, so far as it 
can come to aught approaching abstract 
generalised thought. Then, later, as the ever- 
recurring marvel of the growth of Mind out of 
this mere mass of sentiency is enacted, as these 
early days pass on to childhood, and thought, 
marshalled to the tune of speech, begins to 
raise the budding life above the purely animal 
horizon, the same depending, trusting, all- 
relying attitude supervenes, directed now to all 
those elders who form the environment of the 
dawning mental life. If the moon seem a 
bright and glorious plaything, the child will ask 
it for his own, never doubting but that the 
omnipotent elder could grant the boon if he or 
she were so disposed. All the child learns is 
thus assimilated by faith and faith alone ; and 
that indeed is well for us, seeing that without 
that blind dependence we at that age, lacking 
the power of spontaneous thinking, could 
assimilate no thought at all. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 345 

This faith or blind devotion, then, constitutes 
an essential feature of mind-growth; by 
it, and not by reasoning, by judgment, or 
discernment, are our earlier concepts moulded. 
By it do we acquire all our earlier ideas of 
life, of right and wrong action, of the nature 
of the world in which we live; by it alone we 
lay the foundation-stones of the future structure 
of our mental life. This structure, indeed, is 
likely to become either a temple, a great and 
glorious palace, or a sordid hovel, the abode 
and haunt of ignorance and crime, according 
as these faith-moulded corner-stones accord the 
more with truth and understanding, or with 
false views and the dictates of our elders 5 
ignorance. In that early stage, all that comes 
must be accepted without thought of question- 
ing; and the mere attestation of an elder 
suffices to assure the childish mind of the truth 
of any folly or superstition, howsoever great 
it may be. 



346 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

Now the growth of all mankind, of races 
and of nations, only repeats, on the wider 
platform of human, racial, or national life, 
the microcosmic play of the individual develop? 
ment. Bather, perhaps, the truth might better 
be approximated by exactly the inversion of 
this statement, that the individual life follows 
the universal, since our Dhamma teaches us 
that in reality all life is one, and therefore the 
true prototype, the real unit, lies not in the 
individual, but the whole of life at large. 
However that may be, certain it is that in* 
dividual and racial life both pass through 
stages so similar as to be obviously in some way 
connected ; and, just as some human children 
are more backward than others, and thus much 
later pass out of this early era of faith-founded 
knowledge, so is it also with the nations and 
races of mankind. The further you go back 
in the history of human civilisation, the more 
clearly do you see on every hand how, in those 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 847 

days, what we now term reasoned knowledge 
was simply unknown, undreamed of by the 
great masses of mankind ; it was achieved only 
by such few individuals as were wiser and far 
more developed than their fellows. It is as 
though our forefathers never passed at all out 
of this early age of simple-hearted faith, knew 
naught of questionings, comparisons, decisions,, 
as to right and wrong, truth or falsehood, save 
what they learned by national and racial tradi- 
tion, - For them, blind faith took that 
position which now, for us who are grown nearer 
to human adolescence, is occupied by Wisdom* 
Knowledge, Understanding, the fruit and 
heritage of years of questioning search and of 
earnest investigation of the facts of life, 

For that, of course, is the special feature of 
the next stage of mental growth which follows 
mental childhood, the period of adolescence* 
when, if we rightly win to its attainment, all 
those earlier faith-laid corner-stones of our 



348 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

mental fabric are subjected to keenest scrutiny, 
to most careful testing of their soundness and 
their strength. Still the great mass of our 
humanity, of course, never reaches even to this, 
which is but the second stage of mental 
growth ; most men are still content to take 
life as they find it, its philosophies and faiths 
just as their fathers held. But, in our modern 
age, in our new civilisation of but a hundred 
years, swiftly indeed those old conditions 
vanish ; year after year more and more men 
pass from the ranks of human childhood, of 
the Age of Faith, into those of human adoles- 
cence, of the Age of Investigation. Some 
few, perhaps, already, are passing yet 
beyond this limit, here and there ; in this or 
that department of our mental life are draw- 
ing nearer to full Understanding ; to that 
goal of full mental development, which our 
Buddhism sets before us as the ultimate ideal 
of life. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 349 

This, then, is the reason why the occidental 
student in particular, one born and bred at the 
very heart of this new era of transition which 
even in Burma is already so swiftly changing 
all the old sanctions and the ways of life finds 
with surprise this strong element of devotion 
in the Buddhist Teaching ; and he finds it, still 
more vivid and manifest in Burma's daily life. 
For him, at first sight, it seems almost a token 
of degeneration, an instance of atavism, of throw- 
ing backwards to an earlier stage of religious 
development than that most modern, most 
advanced position to which it is so clearly, so 
uniquely entitled, by virtue of the logical, the 
reasoned basis of all its prominent and funda- 
mental Teachings. 

If the student has really gained a grasp 
of the true significance of Buddhism in human 
thought and development, as also of its place 
in human history, he will have understood that 
here in very truth exists a body of religious 



350 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

teaching not at all like the theistic creeds. For, 
unlike them, it is suited not only to the Age of 
Faith, the era of human mental childhood, bat 
&lso to this new Age of questioning, of Investi- 
gation, of mental adolescence, into which at the 
present day the more cultured members of 
modern civilisation are entering and have 
entered. Studying to gain a right perspective 
and a correct appreciation of the significance of 
Buddhism, he must needs have studied the 
conditions amidst which Buddhism had its 
foirth in India twenty-five centuries ago, he 
will have grasped the fact that Buddhism, 
alike in its internal evidence and structure, 
and in the history of its origin, takes a 
place amongst the great world-religions, not 
unlike that which is held by the whole 
body of modern science as compared with the 
logomachies of the Middle Ages in Europe. 
Historically it takes this unique position, 
inasmuch as we find in it the admitted ultimate 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 351 

of Aryan religious thought. For that eastern 
branch of the great Aryan Race which gave 
it birth, had reached, even before the days of 
The Buddha, to heights of religious experience, 
to depths of religious philosophy and world- 
view, such as even now is far from being 
attained by any race amongst the several 
nations into which the western branch has 
differentiated. For this fact the reason is not 
far to seek, for true religion, and most of all 
the deeper, subtler levels of religious philosophy, 
is the fruit and outcome only of a life set free 
from worldly cares ; it can only arrive at such 
great heights, as it had then attained in India^ 
under conditions in which great opportunity 
for protracted thought and meditation is present ; 
in brief, like all true science, it is rather the 
offspring of human leisure than of a life of 
human toil. The climatic environment in 
which the eastern Aryans found themselveSj 
once they had fairly established their colonies 



352 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

in the fair and fertile plains of middle India, 
offered opportunities for leisured thought, such 
as were utterly denied to their northward- and 
westward-tending kinsmen of the European 
branch, in their harsher climate and wolf- 
haunted forests. And this circumstance, com- 
bined doubtless with the fact that the 
eastern Aryans, in their genial climate, grew 
far more quickly to maturity in the mental 
sphere, even as they earlier attained to physical 
fulness of ^growth, had already, even before The 
Buddha's time, resulted in a stage of religious 
development such as far transcended aught 
that any western race as yet can show. In 
matters of material development, indeed, the 
Indian Arvans were little more advanced 

*/ 

than are their descendants now; but in the 
deeper things Tof life, which go together to 
make up religion, they had travelled further 
than any race iof which our human history 
tells. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 358 

We have seen, in the incomparable 
achievements of western science and its 
applications daring the past hundred years, 
what marvellous heights can be attained by the 
Aryan mind, when once it emerges from the 
Age of Faith, of mental childhood, and grows 
to mental youth in an Age of Investigation. 
In all our records there is nothing like it, the 
achievement in so short a period of a body of 
knowledge and power so great. "What that 
wonderful instrument of the keen, clear Aryan 
mind, thus lately grown to the stature of the 
manhood in the West, has of late years 
accomplished in the sphere of the material 
sciences, all that, and more indeed, had the 
Aryans of the Gangetic valley accomplished 
in the vaster, wider empire of religious 
experience and life. 

To all that long era of immense religious 
activity, to all the long glorious line of Indian 
sage and saint, The Buddha came as the crown 

23 



354 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

and greatest glory ; His Teaching, as the last 
achievement of Aryan religious thought and 
life. Thus it happened, as has been said 
above, that the student of* Buddhist origins 
finds how the very historical circum- 
stances of the birth of Buddhism mark it 
at once as the one religion, so far known 
on earth, which is the offspring, not of the 
Age of Faith, but of the Age of Under- 
standing; the sole religion known so far, 
which is stated in the terminology of mental 
and intellectual, rather than emotional life. What 
this external evidence of history teaches us 
concerning it, that also is no less manifest from 
the internal witness of the Teachings set forth 
in its sacred sources, the wonderful philosophy, 
so true and obvious when once we know it, 
which we find The Master's word expounds. 
Here is no teaching of blind faith, no shutting 
of our eyes to the pain, the cruelty, the 
changefulness of life; no setting aside of the 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 355 

great problem of suffering as a mystery into 
which, we must not seek to penetrate; no fond 
and fair belief that all of it is somehow for the 
best, in that it all was made and still is guided 
by some great mystic Being whom none has 
ever known or seen. 

In the place of all that fare for human 
mental infancy, we have the harder and 
yet strength-building food of adult man ; the 
problem of evil nobly faced and met, with the 
one Wisdom that can avail to end it. Sorrow 
exists, is very shadow to all life enselfed ; its 
Cause lies in not-understanding; whence 
springs Desire ; its Cure lies in the undermin- 
ing of desire, in letting go the love of self 
for the nobler, greater love of all. What made 
it? That is in the dark; we do not know, 
we cannot understand. Why is it so ? That 
question must be met by noble silence only. 
We do not know, we cannot understand ; and 
when men try to put in words that which 



356 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

transcends our human knowledge, such words 
are in reality all meaningless, they bring 
no help to us; over such mere views men 
ever are at war. What then avails ? To 
realise the Truth ; to see how Sorrow reigns, in 
that our hearts are slave to self ; to put an end 
to all this suffering ; to seek the Peace which 
reigns where Sorrow cannot come. How can 
this be ? How, bound in self -wrought pain, in 
the transition and illusion of our life, can we, 
in Ignorance enmeshed, hope to find the Peace 
Beyond ? Because the processes which we 
describe as " Life," occur in conformity with 
the Law of Cause-Effect; and so, by ceasing to 
do evil, to inflict pain on life ; by doing good, 
helping to relieve life's pain; by purifying 
heart and life, learning the great lesson of its 
Oneness and our part in it, surely must we 
presently find Peace, find Sorrow's End even 
in this sad world most surely, since Causation 
obtains everywhere throughout its entire realm. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 357 

That is the Truth which The Master taught . 
us : so simple and yet so profound ; so cutting 
at the very roots of pain, and wrath, and 
ignorance ; so clear when we have learned it, 
yet it was so hidden from the searching thought 
of all the world's great Holy Ones save 
One. Because Causation reigns ; because the 
Sequence is inevitable ; because Good grows to 
Better, the good seed to further golden 
crop ; because Causation reigns, so must there 
be that Way of Peace within our very hearts ; 
sure as Causation itself, shines this clear 
lamp of Hope through Ignorance's night. 

That is our Truth. No dream of poet ; no 
imaginary Power that made this aching world 
of life and yet is merciful ; demand for faith 
we cannot have when once our minds have 
outgrown infancy. Wisdom for Faith our 
Dhamma offers us, the knowledge of the 
incomparable surety of Nibbana's Peace, if 
we can turn our hearts from love of self to 



858 TEEBELIGION OF BURMA 

love for all. That is our Dhamma, nobly facing 
all life's facts, and never hiding in a veil of 
transcendent mystery ; certain, sequent, stable, 
sure ; surer its truth than our own life is, for 
we have dreamed before, and even this our life 
may be in truth another dream. But that is 
true and sure, that Dhamma of our Master; 
truer and surer the more rightly do we com- 
prehend it ; our Hope therein is sure, seeing. 
Causation reigns. 

Surer than Life It is, since life is but a 
seeming and becoming; surer than Death It 
is, for the seed, cabined in earth's close 
darkness, dies but to live again in greater, sweet- 
er life of leaf, and bud, and bloom, unfolding in 
the wide, free air and glorious sunlight ; and is 
the life that now is, thrilling in our hearts as 
this transcendent miracle of thought, the less of 
life, that it should perish where that seed- 
spark of life endures ? Deeper and yet deeper, 
as our minds can attain to measure It, we find 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 859 

the surety of It grow for us and in us ; the 
deeper our understanding of It, still the surer 
grows Its Very Truth; and, even then, when 
with our thought grown deepest, we essay 
to plumb sheer to Its utter depths, to learn the 
fulness of It, to attain Its final Truth, even then 
ever open new gulfs of depth and width past all 
our fathoming, past all our reach of It, so great 
is It, so deep, so wide. 

- The student knows that Buddhism is first 
and above all else a G-nosis, a Wisdom, a 
Religion of Understanding, showing the Way 
of Peace, the Path of Liberation and Salvation, 
as lying through selfless Love and Knowledge, 
twin aspects of the same great, final Truth of 
Life. So, at the first sight of it, that attitude 
of Faith and of Devotion, which we have seen 
to be the characteristic of the earlier stages of 
mental growth, seems to the student to be out 
of place ; and its undoubted presence, both in 
the Teaching of The Master and in the modern 



360 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

practice, to approach at least to a reversion to 
the methods and weaknesses of an earlier 
mental stage. He reads, perchance, the 
beautiful, ancient Pali hymn : 

Ye ca Buddha afcita ca, 
Ye ca Buddha anagata, 
Paeeuppanna ca ye Buddha 
Aham vandami sabfoada! 

N'atthi me Saranam afinam ; 
Buddho me Saranam varam 
Etena saccavajjena 
Hotu me Jayamangalam ! 

" To all the Buddhas of the ancient days ; 
To all the Buddhas of all future time ; To all 
the Buddhas of the present age, I offer 
adoration evermore. 

" For me there is no other Refuge ; the Buddha 
is my Refuge He, the Best ! By power of the 
Truth in these my words, may I attain the 
Glorious Victory ! " 

And if, further, he has the priceless oppor- 
tunity of prosecuting his studies of the Dhamma 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 361 

not in those western lands where he can learn 
but from books alone, and where, accordingly, 
its Teachings seem far off, remote alike in space 
and time, but in a Buddhist land like Burma, 
where it becomes, for one who has the wit to 
understand it, a living power, a supreme reality 
that sways the lives and ways of multitudes of 
men then once again, perhaps, the same 
feature stands out most prominently, is manifest- 
ed in the very life of the people before his eyes. 
He sees how the religious life of the nation 
centres around the Monastery and round such 
great religious shrines as the Shwe Dagon 
Pagoda ; he sees, at some great Pagoda Festival, 
the worshipping crowds kneeling at the feet of 
The Master's Image, offering their incense and 
lights, heaping great piles of tropic flowers 
before His shrine, and each and all prefacing 
every act of meditation and of worship with the 
Formula of the Salutation : Namo Tassa 
Bhagavato, Arahato, Sammdsambuddhassa I 



362 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

"Glory unto Him, The Exalted Lord, The Holy 
One, The Utterly Awakened I " 

" What, then," he asks himself, " is the 
meaning of this so obviously fervent and true- 
hearted Buddhist devotion, whether as found 
in salutation or in hymn ; or, more manifestly 
yet, in this adoring praise and worship of what 
is without doubt the truest Buddhist nation 
in the world ? Is it indeed an instance of 
reversion to an earlier type of religious develop- 
ment, a thing adopted bodily from earlier 
Indian religious thought -adopted as it stood 
without that changed significance which The 
Buddha stamped on so many of the old beliefs 
and thoughts ? Or is it, again, a recrudescent 
growth of later introduction into Buddhism, an 
instance of that slow but sure decay of the 
pristine purity of the religion,. such as we find 
so common in all the long-lived religions, but 
from which, so far, the Theravdda seems so 
wonderfully to have escaped ? " 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 863 

The answer to these questions, as further 
study of the Dhamma teaches him, pursues, as 
is ever the case with Buddhist thought, the 
Middle Way between the two extremes. Devo- 
tion has in very fact a definite and indeed 
a prominent place in Buddhist life ; and it 
consists of two widely different emotions, a, 
lower and a higher, of which the latter alone may 
be regarded as the exclusively and charac- 
teristically Buddhist type. The first, and of 
necessity the most prevailing form of it, is just 
that same emotion of dependence and reliance, 
on an unseen G-uide, of the heart that entertains 
it; and it finds a place, a very humble one in- 
deed, but still a certain and defined position in the 
body of Buddhist Teaching as a whole. This is 
that same unquestioning faith in some being 
living, the blind belief in some great Power 
or Person able to hear and aid, which, as we 
have seen, is typical of the dawning intellectual 
growth of man. Seeing that this lower form 



364 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

of devotion constitutes, not only a stage, but an 
essential stage in a man's mental development ; 
and seeing that the Dhamma was expounded, 
not only for the more advanced units of human- 
ity who have transcended mental childhood, 
but for mankind at large, for every class of 
mind this lower type of devotion is also to be 
found in it as well as in all the other great 
religions of the world. But in the Teaching of 
The Buddha we find that this devotion, in- 
stead of taking the foremost place amongst 
religious ideals and inculcated practices, instead 
of acting as the cloak of manifold mysteries, 
as an excuse for the incompatibility of the 
facts of life with others of the Teachings of the 
religion, holds only that position to which it is 
entitled as an indispensable feature of the earlier 
stages of human mental growth. 

As such, we find it in the beautiful Story of 
MaUakundali, the traditional exposition at 
length of the Teaching summarised in brief in 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 365 

the second stanza of the Dhammapada. Re- 
cording the old traditional exposition of this 
stanza, current in his days in the then centre 
of all Buddhist learning, the monasteries of 
Ceylon, the great Commentator tells us how 
The Master was accustomed, on each morning 
of His life, to search with inner higher vision 
over the length and breadth of all the land, to 
see what human hearts were nigh to grace or 
insight, so that they needed for their helping 
only such aid as one who knows the "Way can 
sometimes render to some humbler, lowlier 
fellow-man, And it thus befell that on a 
day, as the Commentator with oriental 
imagery finely puts it, casting the net of His 
Compassion over the waters of life's ocean, 
He found therein poor Mattakundali, son of a 
wealthy but miserly Brahmana, nigh to the 
gates of death by reason of his Kamma, but, 
by that same reason, in the state to profit by a 
helping hand. The story we all well know, 



366 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

and here we are concerned in but the point of 
how, to the dying child, The Master made 
manifest a glorious apparitional image of 
Himself; and how the boy, dying there in 
solitude, turned to this Form with wondering, 
with unquestioning devotion, losing all sense 
of fear and suffering in the thought, that surely 
this Holy One could aid him and bring him 
peace. With that assurance in his heart, the 
potent life-determining dying thought grew 
calm, so that Mattakundali, dying on the earth, 
came to rebirth amidst the heavenly glories- 
was reborn in one of the bright Heavens of 
Form although the immediate cause of such 
high happiness was but a single act of adoration, 
namely the child's reliance on the Master's 
power to help. 

This little story is an excellent example of 
the place held by the lower, common form of 
devotion in Buddhism ; excellent as indicating 
at the same time both the power ascribed to 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 367 

this type of devotion, and the close limitations 
Buddhist Teaching sets on its power to help us 
and to change our destinies. For, be it noted, 
.that act of worship was, as it were, only the 
determining, the immediate, cause of that 
fortunate rebirth, in that the overwhelming 
flood of adoring thought could calm the 
usually trembling death-consciousness, and so, 
as it were, pave the immediate way for the 
operation of past meritorious Doing, the latter 
being the remoter, and yet more real cause. 

But, as we all know, the aim and goal that 
Buddhist Teaching lays before us is by no 
means the gaining of such heavenly birth as 
Mattakundali attained. Such birth may be 
regarded and in the case in hand the view 
applies as a nursery for the child-intelligence ; 
a life of peace and happiness, in the midst 
of which the dawning mind grows to greater 
heights of spiritual strength which enables 
it, in later lives on earth, better to face the 



368 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

pain and suffering which are at once so 
characteristic of our human life, and as such, 
sure guides or rather goads, to bring us to seek 
out the Path of Peace. But so rich in joy 
those heavenly mental realms are, and so great 
the length of life therein, that few amongst 
their denizens ever can win the comprehension 
of the Sorrow, or yet the Changefulness or 
Illusion dominant in life. So that in them is 
little opportunity for realising the truly 
Buddhist aim, the finding of the Path of 
Selflessness, whereof the first step lies in 
abnegation of all such personal desire, as the 
heavenly birth promotes. 

Thus we may define this lower species of 
devotion, this mere blind faith in what is high 
and holy, as able, indeed, when it finds support 
in Meritorious Doing (but not otherwise)., to 
conduce to lives of heavenly or earthly happi- 
ness, to afford, as it were, a period of rest and 
leisure for the growing but still undeveloped 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 369 

mind. Why this should be the case we well 
can see, who understand the teaching of 
Causation, as that second stanza of the 
Dhammapada calls to mind. In the devoted 
heart as in the mental child-life, there is firm 
and never- wavering assurance of the power of 
that devotion's object to give aid to us, to 
render grace and help. " All that we are" 
to quote our Dhammapada stanza, " All that we 
are is the result of what we have thought ; it is 
founded on our thought, made up of our 
thought : If a man speaks or acts with holy 
thought, then Joy shall follow him, sure as his 
shadow, never leaving him. " The world in 
which we find ourselves, that is, our world is 
but the wrought and moulded outcome of our 
thought in bygone lives. Given the moving 
power of Meritorious Act behind it, it will build 
for us lives filled with joy and happiness, but 
shaped and moulded just as our thought 
dictated. The dream, the ideal of heaven, 

24 



370 THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 

creates for us the very heaven whereof we 
dreamed, if behind the thought there be 
sufficient Punna, the life-giving Doing, the 
Good Kamma, which alone can thrill the 
dream to vivid life. 

Such is the power, and such the limitation, 
of devotion of this lower type. It can, in 
brief, bring happiness if vitalised by Eighteous 
Doing, but it is impotent to help us to enter and 
walk upon the Way of Peace. And if, because 
the Dhamma was enounced for the benefit 
of all humanity, of whom the majority are still 
in the childhood of mental growth, if in its 
lower, earlier Teaching we find that devotion 
still holds a place, we still can see how even 
that very usage of it is designed to pave the 
way for greater, nobler thought. Throughout 
The Master's Teaching, we find everywhere the 
same idea presented ; the idea, namely, that 
only our own Eight Act can serve to help us in 
the end; the constant attempt to wean the 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 871 

growing mind, from the dependence of that 
earlier stage of childhood, to the realisation 
that our Hope, our Light, our Way, lies in 
reality within ourself. We may hear, indeed, 
the words of the Teaching of a Very Buddha ; 
but they can avail us only to the extent 
to which we follow their advice. "Be ye 
Lamps unto yourselves ; look for Refuge to 
yourselves, seeking no other Refuge." 
The thought that Refuge lies in Truth 
alone, is the fundamental dictum of The 
Master to whomsoever seeks to put an end to 
all this Cycle of Becoming and of Suffering 
and to find the Way of Peace. 

And thus we come to the second, the higher 
and peculiarly Buddhist thought and attitude, 
to which the name Devotion can be applied. 
As the child grows older, Thought begins to 
take the place of Faith. No longer accepting 
with perfect trustfulness, all that the elders or 
parents tell it 5 it begins to question things, to 



372 THE RELIGION OF BTJflMA 

endeavor to investigate ; it begins, in short, to 

think its own thoughts, rather than, as 

heretofore, to take all its concepts ready-made. 

With the dawning comprehension of life 

resulting from this changed attitude, it ceases 

to be naught but a mental mirror wherein the 

thoughts of its environment are reflected. 

Beginning to think for itself, it passes into 

the period of mental adolescence ; and with 

this 'awakening of independent thought the old 

blind faith soon disappears, at least with those 

more progressed individuals who in past lives 

have already gone through the childhood 

stage. 

Here, for our present human development, 
the parallelism which so far has obtained 
between the individual and the racial develop- 
ment appears to cease ; for there always exist 
some few rare minds already far ahead of the 
general development. Such pass onwards, 
individually, from this stage of mental youth, 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 373 

this Age of Questioning, to the final stage of 
full maturity, the Age of Wisdom, of full 
Understanding. But as yet the mass of even 
the most civilised of races can scarcely be said 
to have advanced even to adolescence. 

To that full stage of mental growth, in 
matters of worldly knowledge, we may regard 
the greatest of mankind as having more or 
less completely attained. In the world of 
literature a Shakespeare, in the sphere of 
science a Newton, a Spencer, and a Maxwell, 
have reached so far in one or more of the 
departments of mental life. Of such are 
the master-minds of all humanity, the leaders 
of civilisation; and in our present era of 
transition the number of these great thinking 
ones is being added to each day. Such 
progress at present is abnormal, is indeed far 
beyond the growth and the attainment of the 
body of mankind, who, as we have seen, are 
lagging still, even in the most progressed of 



874 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

races, on the verge of mental infancy, are but 
slowly passing from the Age of Faith. So, 
such attainments as a Newton or a Spencer 
have reached can, in our present age, be won 
only by the hardest work and the intensest 
application; and, even then, such mental 
manhood, such maturity as these may have 
reached are found, as has been said, only in one, 
or in a few departments of mental action. 

But, from our Buddhist point of view, we 
may regard all these attainments, in respect 
of merely worldly art and science, as being 
simply side-shows, specialised realms of know- 
ledge only collaterally connected with the 
real advancement, the true maturity, that is, 
maturity of general development ; maturity in 
respect of those deeper things of life which 
we sum up in the one word Religion. 
True progress, basic to the whole field of mental 
life, is what we Buddhists term attainment of 
the Paths ; and this because the more worldly 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 375 

knowledge, the specialised attainment in respect 
of some one, or some few mental kingdoms only, 
dies with the death of the individual who has 
attained to it, so far, at least, as he himself is 
concerned therewith. Truly, its results, 
especially in this age when the general wisdom 
has so far advanced that the wise publish their 
discoveries broadcast throughout the world, 
remain for the benefit of mankind at large ; this 
is the special virtue and the boon such sort of 
mental achievement wins. None of us are 
Newtons, even in process of becoming, of that 
we mav be sure, at least so far as this life is 

/ * 

concerned. None of us, therefore; to touch but 
one department of the many that that master- 
mind was master in could of our own 
intelligence infer from an apple's fall the Law 
of Gravitation. But, ^ince the actual Newton 
not only made that great inference and the 
consequent application, but published his dis- 
covery for the benefit of all, the merest tyro 



376 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

amongst us can apply, ean use the principle he 
discovered; thus, if lost for Newton as a being, 
the knowledge still remains to benefit mankind. 
But the deeper, the more spiritual 
attainment summed up in the word Eeligion, 
the attainment of growth upon the holy Path 
leading to Insight, Understanding, to the Peace, 
to Sorrow's End, or that Higher Wisdom, is 
no mere side-show ; it is basic to the whole 
great field of life itself, of that no smallest gain 
is ever lost to the being that wins it, or, for that 
matter s is ever lost to life at large. Such 
growth is fundamental, basic* it implies the 
fulfilment of the very Hope, the meaning of 
our life. In respect of that deep wisdom, we 
to-day may fairly place ourselves as having 
passed out of the Age of Faith ; as standing 
now somewhere within the limits of the Age of 
Investigation ; and our great hope now lies in 
being able a little to move forwards in our 
present life; to attain, in the life that lies 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 877 

before us, a little nearer to the full maturity of 
life. We in the Buddhist term are 8ekha, 
students or learners, trying so to understand 
and to apply to our own lives the greatest 
body of the deeper wisdom ever given to 
the world, that the life of which we form an 
integral part may come a little nearer to the 
Peace. 

What, then, is the manner of devotion that, 
for us thus situated in respect of the deeper 
growth, can serve to help us further on the 
Path? This is the specifically Buddhist form of 
it. We have seen how the earlier form consists 
in blind faith only ; we have seen how necessary 
that is to the undeveloped mind ; but, since to- 
day we are endeavoring to investigate, to think 
for ourselves and to apply our thought to life, 
we obviously have passed beyond the age when 
mere blind faith could help us ; such, for us, 
who have reached adolescence, would be a 
retrogression, not an advance. 



378 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

We are here concerned with finding, with 
progressing on, the Inward Path ; and, as we all 
know, that sort of progress has been well 
summed up as " making pure the Mind ". How 
can devotion help in that direction ? and, if not 
the old type, mere blind devoted Faith, what 
fashion of it here can help us as we stand ? 

To take the latter question first, the Buddhist 
answer is that it is not Faith indeed, so far as faith 
is blind, unreasoning, based on no principle or 
fact in life, but only on our hope and our desire. 
Bather it is the maturer Love, the devotion that 
comes in the train of Understanding ; the true 
heart's adoration that springs from within us 
when we have gained a little self-mastery ; when, 
this delusion of the self seeming no longer all 
our hope in being, we begin to understand the 
value of self-sacrifice, when we attain some 
glimpse of the tremendous meaning of the Love 
that has for us resulted in the knowledge of the 
Law we have. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 

So long as self alone seems of importance, it 
appears to us of little value that another should 
have given all His life, even the all of many- 
lives, for the sake of helping life at large 
to find the Peace. Then, when self rules 
supreme, it seems derogatory to its glory that we 
should kneel in adoration of whatever greatest 
being has existed, whether on earth or in the 
heavens beyond. But, with the progress of 
our heart's cleansing, understanding how in 
that thought of self lies the root-cause of all 
the pain of life which now we seek to help to 
end, with that progression comes the under- 
standing of the utter worthlessness, nay, more^ 
the very evil of the self -thought ; and yet, to 
each of us, how difficult the least poor act of self- 
renunciation seems ! Knowing that, and setting 
beside our knowledge of the sacrifice which 
this discovery of the Path involved for One, the 
holiest and greatest of our human kind, our 
paltry efforts in that same direction, we turn 



880 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

with shame from the thought of it, so mean and 
poor do our greatest efforts seem when so 
compared. 

Thus the devotion we should cultivate springs 
from no less significant a thought than that of 
our own true place in life's progression ; as 
compared with the heights of selflessness 
won by the Holy and the Great of old. 
Seeing, by the clear logic of the Law, how self 
is the cause of all the pain of life ; seeing how 
difficult for us is each poor feeblest act of 
sacrifice of self, our hearts are filled with wonder 
and with love at the thought of one who could 
give all that men hold dear, not in the sure 
knowledge of success, but only in the Hope of 
finding a Way of Peace for all. That is the 
sort of Faith, of Love, of Devotion, that 
can help us on, and why ? Because it means 
another conquest over self -hood ; a further 
achievement of the deeper, vaster, universal 
Love. 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 881 

Without it, without this reasoned sure devo* 
tion to the Hope that now is guiding our life's 
ship over the darkling waters of the ocean of 
existence, we can never win the fire, the 
power, the earnestness which alone can for- 
ward our high aim. Brightly on our mental 
horizon, and more brightly yet s as one by one the 
mists of self -hood roll aside, shines the beacon- 
light upon the Further Shore ; the reasoned 
Understanding : " Once has One achieved, and 
still on earth His Light is shining, to guide 
the lives of all that lift up eyes to see." Athwart 
the darkling waters of life's ocean, marking 
the Path that each must travel to the Peacej 
gleams clear the Way that that beacon-fire 
shows. By Understanding of the Truth He left 
to us, by comprehension of Causation's Law, we 
may guide indeed our bark of life, straight and 
sure on the gleaming roadway marked on the 
waves by that still distant beacon-fire. But 
all the guidance of our intellect applied, aided 



382 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

albeit by all our knowledge of that very 
Truth, the Law The Master found for usit 
all were useless, unless we could find the motive 
power to drive our ship. That power, that 
fire within the furnace of our hearts, is Devo- 
tion which we must cultivate. We know how, 
if we wish for bodily strength, we must practise 
lifting heavy weights, or in some way using 
the set of muscles that we wish to strengthen. 
Just so with Thought. It is not enough once 
to have seen that "such-and-such thought 
is good, beneficent, tending to ease the bitter 
agony of life," and, having so seen, to set aside 
the potent thought, or never think of it again. 
We must use it, practise thinking it, make, in 
respect of it, Sankharas more and more potent 
till it has become truly a living fire within us, 
certain, all-overcoming, sure. Therefore it is 
not alone those lowly hearts who, yet in 
mental childhood, find in blind faith new 
mental strength, that need to kneel before The 



DEVOTION IN BUDDHISM 383 

Master's shrine, to offer humble gifts of light, 
and flower, and scent. We, too, need that, not 
less than those our humbler human brethren, 
but vastly more ; for the power of self is still 
upon us, and only a right grasp of our ideal 
can antidote its poison in our hearts. We, too, 
need recitation of the Namaskara; but our 
adoration must be paid, not to a Person, for in 
truth all personality is but a dream, but to 
our Heart's Ideal. We, too, can find ever new 
strength in kneeling at The Master's shrine ; 
but we must understand our worship rightly, 
and build a fitting shrine in our own lives, 
cleansing our hearts till they are worthy to 
bear that Image in their inmost sanctuary of 
love. And, lastly, we also need to offer gifts 
upon that altar daily ; but gifts, not of these 
swiftly waning lights, these dying flowers of earth 
or evanescent incense-scents. Our gifts must be 
in deeds of love ; of sacrifice and self-surrender 
to those about us must be our daily offerings 



884 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

in worship of the Exalted Lord. Making His 
life our pattern, our ideal, we must strive to 
be His followers not in name alone, but must 
so rule our hearts and lives that men may 
understand the meaning of that noblest holiest 
life that ever human being lived ; how it 
has the power to call us and to conquer, until 
Love's Empire shall have spread through all 
the world. 



BUDDHIST SELF-GULTUEB 

THE teaching of the higher evolution set 
forth by The Buddha has as its chief character- 
istic the pursuance of what is termed in 
Buddhist phraseology the Middle Way, or, as 
we might otherwise express it, the golden mean 
between all extremest views. The Middle 
Way itself is indeed concerned only with fixing 
the standard of life for the follower of The 
Buddha ; it consists in the avoidance, on the 
one hand, of the extreme of self "torture, of 
unnecessarily ascetic practices; and on the 
other, of the life of the worldly man, altogether 
given over to self-indulgence and the seeking 
after pleasures of the senses. But all through 
that Teaching we find everywhere the same 
principle of the Middle Way ; and nowhere is 

25 



386 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

this more marked than in the Buddhist attitude 
to the question of predestination or free will. 

Teaching as it does that the character and 
destiny of any being are, with one exception, 
absolutely determined for any given moment, 
and are the necessary resultants of the long 
line of mental doings which constitute his whole 
past, Buddhism appears at first sight to teach 
fatalism, determinism, pure and simple. But 
it is an equally prominent part of Buddhist 
doctrine that, however determinate, for the 
present moment, is the Kamma, the character 
and destiny of a given being, yet that being 
may, if he has but wisdom and knows how to 
utilise it, alter his whole future in whatever 
direction pleases him. In other words an 
intelligent being, such as man, is, for the 
immediate moment, ruled by his destiny ; he is 
bound by all the forces of his past to react in a 
definite fashion to any given set of circum- 
stances that may arise. But over the future 



BUDDHIST SELF-COLTURE 387 

he is himself ruler within very wide limits 
indeed ; he can, if he have knowledge, so pro- 
foundly alter, by dint of culture, his own 
character, as to produce results obviously 
manifest even in the short span of this life. 
This circumstance is, of course, at the root of 
all education; and the life of a George Stephen- 
son is a living example of the profound effect 
on character and destiny which a man can bring 
about by dint of mental culture. 

Thus we may put the Buddhist position as 
to the free will or predestination discussion by 
saying that a man is determined for the 
immediate present, but that he has choice as to 
his way in life as regards the future. 

Now all Buddhism is simply a system of 
culture, directed to the one end of lessening 
the suffering of life. According to this religion, 
all evil, all suffering, all that opposes our free 
progress towards the Peace beyond All Life, 
lies only in Avijja, in Nescience ; or, to put it in 



388 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 



terms of the human life, the true source of evil 
lies in Ignorance in not knowing, not under- 
standing, the nature or the meaning of life. 
In us this Nescience is said to have three great 
manifestations Craving, Hatred, and Self- 
delusion ; of these we may regard the latter as 
the most fundamental, the others being merely 
necessary outcomes of it. It is because we 
look not on life, as being what in fact it is, one 
great unity, but as divided into self and the 
not-self, that we entertain thoughts of Craving 
and of Hate. So Buddhism, going to the root 
of the matter, directs our attention to the 
undermining of this fundamental delusion of 
the permanent self -hood ; and all its long course 
of self-discipline is simply directed to this one 
end. 

That course of discipline is conveniently 
divided into three sequent steps : the Discipline 
in SUa or Conduct ; in Samddhi, or Mental 
Attainment ; and in Panna, the Higher 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 389 

"Wisdom. The first of these, Sila, includes 
both the active and the negative sides of moral 
culture ; the negative being the five prohibitions 
not to kill, steal, commit impurity, lie, or use 
intoxicants; the positive being Charity or 
universal love. This Sila, simple though it 
may sound in words, and well though we all 
know the nature of its injunctions, is the 
essential preliminary ; there is no Samddhi, no 
mental Oneness, to be obtained without it. And 
for those who are weak in it to undertake the 
practices of mental culture leading to Samadhi, 
in the case of most of them, would involve a 
serious risk of grave mental alienation. Similar- 
ly, it is only by Samadhi rightly directed and 
used that Panna, the Higher "Wisdom, Insight, 
may be gained. 

I propose to set before you a rough outline 
of certain of the practices whereby this Samadhi 
is to be won, and must therefore first endeavor 
to make clear the meaning of the word. There 



390 THE EBLIGION OP BURMA 

is, unfortunately, no one word in English which 
conveys the meaning, the fact being that in 
western countries the practices which create 
the link whereby its attainment is registered in 
the mind are but little known. The word has 
been variously translated Mental Concentration, 
Meditation, Ecstasy, and so forth ; the last, 
Ecstasy, being perhaps the most nearly accurate 
rendering of the meaning. But, whilst the 
conscious recollection of the attainment of 
Samadhi is rare in the West, we are of course 
not to understand that the attainment itself is 
lacking. In one direction many varieties of 
what is called " Religious Experience " the 
attainment of a more or less high Samadhi is 
not only relatively common, but also leaves 
behind it a more or less distorted memory of 
some great happening ; whilst what we call the 
inspiration of genius is in very many cases the 
direct outcome in thought of an attainment of 
Samadhi itself forgotten. Even in the more 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 391 

active functioning of the mind in this our waking 
state, Samadhi in a sense may be said to exist 9 
but, in this case, its continuance is for exceed- 
ingly short periods of time only. 

Perhaps the best way of explaining what 
Samadhi is will be to use the familiar Buddhist 
simile of the lamp flame. The mind or thought 
is said in Buddhist phrase to be Pabhassara 
having the nature of light, or, as we should 
put it, it is a radiant form of energy. Likening, 
then, the mind of man as a source of this 
.radiant thought to the flame of a lamp, we are 
taught by Buddhist psychology that, in the 
ordinary man, the flame is not steadily burning 
not even for the duration of a single second 
of our time. The emission of the thought- 
energy is said to alternate between the full 
flaming of the lamp and well-nigh complete 
extinction, as though the lamp were flickering ; 
and this flickering is said to occur at a 
very great rate indeed the time-terms are 



392 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

unfortunately very vaguely expressed, but the 
rate must be of the order of millions per second 
so that what we call a single thought in reality 
consists of an exceedingly large effort of 
consciousness, each alternated with a lapse into 
almost complete unconsciousness. Apart from 
the rapid flickering of the flame, the flame may 
be regarded still in the ordinary manas 
being constantly blown about as a whole ; every 
incoming sense-impression, each wave of sense 
or of emotion or interest that passes through 
us, is like a wind which blows about the flame 
of our mind. 

Now it is just to continue our simile by 
this light of the mind that we live and 
know. It naturally follows that, the more our 
flame is blown about by the winds of sense and 
passion and interest, and the more profound is 
the plunge into unconsciousness between the 
flickers of the lamp, the less accurate will be the 
view which we shall obtain of the world 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 393 

revealed to us by this so intermittent light. 
Before we can truly judge the nature of the 
world, the light, the mind's light by which we 
see that world, must be brought to burn steadily ; 
else we must always continue to see distorted 
shadows cast by the flickering flame and wind- 
blown light, and never catch a glimpse of the 
reality about us. 

And this Samadhi this steady burning of 
the flame of life and all the practices that 
lead thereto, are designed to the sheltering, 
even though it be but momentary, of the 
flickering flame ; it is only in its steady-burning 
ardor that the higher wisdom, the true under- 
standing of the Oneness of Life that makes for 
Peace, can be won. Just as we may use an earthly 
light to aid us in the doing of good deeds, so is 
the acquirement of high and holy knowledge ; or, 
on the other hand, just as we employ it for the 
commission of crime, or the perversion of our 
minds by studying foolish literature, so can the 



394 THE RELIGION OP BUEMA 

light of Samadhi itself be employed either for 
good or for evil ; it is just here that the danger 
lies for one who gains Samadhi without first 
submitting himself to a long and careful moral 
and mental training. 

There are two chief methods by which 
Samadhi may be won : these are Samatlia and 
Vipassana, what we may term Quietism, and 
Insight, Penetration. In the first, the attention 
is aroused to the utmost stretch of tension 
possible, but it is directed, not towards the 
outer world, but inwards on the mind itself. 
The idea is to keep intensely watchful, and to 
beat down, as it begins to arise, every incoming 
message of sense, every wave of recollection or 
emotion ; just to watch and wait, permitting 
yourself to entertain no thought but watchful- 
ness. If Samatha happens to be the best 
method for you, then one day, when you are 
doing this practice, you will suddenly, as it 
were, wake up -wake to a mental state 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 395: 

indefinitely more intense and active than that 
in which we normally function. That is 
obtaining Samadhi by means of Quietude. 

The other method, Vipassana, Insight or 
Penetration, is exactly the opposite. Here^ 
instead of keeping the mind fixed in attention 
onlyj and suppressing every thought of the 
outer, the objective world, you fix your 
attention upon some thought itself, and keep it 
so fixed as long as possible, bringing it back,, 
every time it breaks away, to the particular 
subject you have chosen as your mind's 
dwelling-place. Of the two methods this latter 
is much the easier for the occidental mind ; for 
the simple reason that all our mental training 
is on lines pertaining to Vipassana, that 
complete mental quietude of the other method 
is exceedingly difficult for us "Westerns to attain. 
The fruits also are in a sense different : in 
Quietude, what we are doing is, as it were,, 
just sheltering our lamp, and accordingly when 



396 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

it burns steady its light will be of one or other 
nature, accordingly as the fuel fed to it in our 
past lives has been of one sort or another ; in 
Insight the Samadhi attained will be the complete 
and clear understanding of the underlying law, 
the inherent nature of the particular object of 
our meditation. A Newton, watching the 
fall of his apple, gets Samadhi on the fact 
of its falling ; he himself, very likely, has no 
clear recollection, on his return to normal con- 
sciousness, of having attained to any beyond 
the normal mental state. That is, for lack of 
a, bridge, of a path between the two realms of 
consciousness, the waking mind is simply 
unable to remember anything of that experience 
itself, just as a man, newly fallen asleep, cannot 
in his dream remember the more vivid con- 
sciousness of the waking state. But what he 
does carry over from that state is the resultant 
in the mind ; and so we have the discovery of 
gravitation. For this is the nature of Samadhi 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTTJBE 397 

when directed to any fact, that the mind 
attaining it perceives ultimately, not the fact, 
but the law, the truth underlying that fact. 
It is as though by Samadhi on a thing you 
could become that thing itself, and hence see 
clearly the interior nature of it. 

Now it is only, as has been implied, the 
right use of this power of Samadhi that can 
lead to the goal of the Buddhist life. If we 
can attain Samadhi in respect of either the 
transitoriness, the suffering, or the absence of 
reality in all that we know as life, the fruits of 
that sort of Samadhi are Bight Ecstasy, the 
Higher Wisdom which leads to Peace. As 
we have seen, it is in the end to the delusion of 
separateness the belief in an immortal in- 
dividual self within us, apart from other life- 
that Buddhism attributes all the evil in the 
world. But it unfortunately happens that it is 
just this sort of Samadhi which is the most 
difficult to obtain, for the simple reason that 



398 THE RELIGION OF BUEMA 

most of our mental elements have, in 
arising, been contaminated by one or other 
of the Three Forms of Nescience Graying, 
Hatred, Self-delusion. If, for example, a 

* 

man unprepared by long training stumbles, 
as it were, into Samadhi, so vast is the 
mental universe in which he finds him- 
self, so intense and clear, in comparison 
to what we know of thought, is his mental 
functioning, that he is liable to become alto- 
gether unbalanced ; to imagine that he is God, 
or to become in some direction or other intense- 
ly vain and self -laudatory. And so attaining, 
so doing Samadhi on his own greatness^ eternity., 
or what not, is indefinitely worse for that being 
than never attaining Samadhi at all. For 
Kamma, the reproductive force which exists in 
thought, whereby our minds and worlds are 
builded, is the more intense that is the more 
active the nearer to Samadhi the mind is, 
which sets it in motion. As it is the I-making 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 399 

faculty in thought which is the principal element 
in earth-binding Kamma, it is better, from the 
point of view of the Buddhist, who seeks 
liberation from this Kamma, never to attain 
Samadhi at all than to attain it in respect of 
the self-hood ; as the rebirth-causing Kamma 
produced by even a moment of Samadhi is as 
potent as that which, in our vastly less active 
normal waking state, could be made by the 
selfish thought of whole years of life, 

As the bulk of our mental elements from past 
lives are so largely component of self -hood, it 
becomes of prime importance that before 
starting on the practices leading to Samadhi, 
we should undertake some form of mental 
culture which leads to the subversion of the 
I -making elements. To this end the Buddhist, 
before attempting to attain Samadhi itself, 
enters on a preliminary training known 
as Eight Recollectedness (Sammdsati). The 
object of this practice is twofold- first, to 



400 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

suppress the existent self -forming elements in 
the mind ; and, secondly, to link up in a more 
or less continuous stream the divers items of 
his mental life. This practice is protective, it 
can be done at all times, and in fact greatly 
enhances one's powers of memory and observa- 
tion, and it is therefore perfectly safe and most 
advantageous for anyone to do. It consists of 
sitting, as it were, alert and watchful at the 
mind-door, watching every sensation, percep- 
tion, memory, or thought as it arises, and inhibit- 
ing the self -idea from seizing on that particular 
thought. You watch, and you record on your 
mind; and you do not permit the ideas of 
craving, hatred, self -hood to come in. Suppose, 
for example, you are walking ; you think : 
" There is a lifting of the right foot, a leaning 
forward of the body, the foot is set to the 
ground," and so on, letting only quite impersonal 
thoughts arise, but carefully watching and 
making a mental record of what you are doing* 



BTJDDHIST SELF-OULTURE 401 

To put it in other words, you concentrate 
your whole Attention on whatever .act, bodily 
or mental, that you happen to be engaged in, 
but as though the being's actions you are 
considering were no more of yourself than are 
those of any other man. Each time you make 
a slip and that, at first, is very frequently 
you pull up; recall the thought about which 
you thought " I," or "mine," and think of the 
associated action or thing : This is not I, this 
is. not mine, there is no self herein. Thus .you 
produce, in respect of that particular thought, 
very powerful associated thoughts which tend 
to neutralise it. 

Very much of the Buddhist mental training 
depends on the power we have of altering 
certain classes of thoughts by producing in 
respect of them powerful .associated tendencies 
in a new direction. Suppose, for example, 
a man is irritable, easily vexed over trifling 
matters. That is the form of Ignorance called 

26 



402 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

Hatred ; it is a great obstacle to all high 
attainment. The man so troubled, if he be a 
Buddhist, sets out to overcome that failing by 
producing, in respect of the objects which 
commonly arouse his irritability, powerful 
associated thoughts of Love the mental 
opposite. Say certain persons commonly irritate 
him ; it will generally be found that their mental 
images are associated in the mind with some 
careless or foolish action towards him on the 
part of those persons. As there exists this 
powerful tendency of thought to make links, to 
form large groups in which all the associations 
are connected on to the central image, whenever 
the mere image, whether physical or mental, of 
those persons rises in the mind, there rise also 
those ideas of irritation, of all the causes for 
irritation that person has given him. Taking, 
then, the image of those selfsame persons who 
annoy him, the irritable man, when each 
day he commences his day's mental practice, 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 403 

directs, with the whole intensity of intention 

at his disposal, thoughts of love towards that 

image. Thus he makes a very powerful set of 

mental elements of Tendencies, full of thoughts 

of well-wishing and love, associated with the 

image of those persons. Then, next time that 

image arises, there rise, as before, the associated 

thought-elements of hatred into consciousness ; 

but there also arise those powerful tendencies 

of love which the meditation built up ; one 

cannot entertain simultaneously thoughts both 

of hatred and of love towards the same image ; 

so, before long, the practitioner masters his 

irritability by love. 

The method of Sati of watching and record- 
ing may also be applied to the same problem. 
For, think why it is that we entertain thoughts 
of hatred, of annoyance, of dislike. It is really 
only because we imagine that the object of our 
dislike is a being essentially other and apart 
from and opposed to ourselves. Suppose, for 



404 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

instance, you are in a boat on a river, and you 
see another boat coming down the stream and 
threatening to collide with you and upset you. 
If you see another man in that boat you at 
once get very angry with him ; not improbably 
you waste precious time and energy in stating 
your opinion of him ; you abuse him for his 
Carelessness in thus risking both your lives. 
But if there is no person there ; if the boat is 
empty ? Then you do not get angry at all ; it 
is only children and the mentally unsound who 
get angry with things. You realise that it is 
the force, the flow of the river, that causes the 
threatened collision ; that it depends on your 
efforts, and yours alone, to get out of danger ; 
and the energy you might have wasted in being 
angry and saying things if there were a person 
ip the other , boat you now spend on securing 
your safety. 

Now, once you arrive at the mental position 
aimed at by the Right Recollectedness practice, 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 405 

it is just as in tlie latter case that -you look 
on all the world. In the light of the higher 
wisdom there is no such thing as a true persona 
at all; the boats of life are empty, every one. 
Bach is but a given set of mental tendencies, 
urged by a given portion of the life-stream 
through a myriad lives. "When, then, a person 
falls athwart of your life> threatening danger, 
you do not get angry with him ; you recognise 
.that there is really no "him" to get angry 
with; but that the forces that built up your 
respective lives are now in train for a disaster. 
You keep your temper, and so have the more 
strength to avoid the threatened collision. 

On similar lines, just another such applica- 
tion of Eight Recollectedtiess, runs the method 
prescribed by The Master to a certain monk 
who was angered with another, and came to 
Him to complain of that intractable one's abuse. 
"With what, Brother, art thou angered?" 
asks The Buddha. "Is it the hair of that one's 



406 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

head" and so ... through, the thirty -two com- 
ponent structures of the Form-group" or 
with his sensations, his perception, memories, 
thoughts ? " So soon as you begin to apply the 
Sati-analysis, you find there is nowhere any- 
thing to get angry with. 

When a man has for some time practised this 
Right Recollectedness, he finds he has acquired 
a state of mental poise, of firmness of balance, 
that is not to be obtained in any other way. 
Then, and not till then, is it safe for him to go 
.on to those other practices which lead to 
Samadhi in the various wider realms of thought 
to which reference has been made. 
* In conclusion I would wish to impress upon 
you that you must not confuse progress into 
the more active states of consciousness with 
progress on the Path that leads to Peace. 
Samadhi, rightly directed to the transitoriness 
and so forth of life, may indeed bring us that 
Higher Wisdom which constitutes progress on 



BUDDHIST SELF-CULTURE 407 

the Path ; but the direction, as it were, of that 
Path lies not in the plane of our life at all it 
is as though at right angles to it ; a new 
direction altogether. The true path-making 
consciousnesses are those that tend to the re- 
cognition of the great fact that Life is One ; 
that there is no separation between us and our 
fellows save what our own ignorance makes. 
We may indeed, through Samadhi, win, even 
in this life, to wider and more glorious realms 
of being, levels of consciousness, than here we 
know ; but, if such attainment should result in 
the exaltation of our self -hood, the magnification 
of our " I, " then we have done harm far 
greater than many lives of worldly ignorance 
could result in. And, on the other hand, every 
least act, here in this our world, which tends to 
abnegation of the self each deed of love and 
pity and helpfulness we do is another stepping- 
stone we have laid in the shallows of life, over 
which we may presently pass to life's Further 



408 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

Shore of Peace. ; To give up living for this 
false mirage of the self; to understand our 
life as but a part of all life's unity ; to live 
as far as we may, for the practical realisation 
of that unity that is the real object of all 
Buddhist Culture, whether it fall under the 
head of Conduct, or Samadhi or the Higher 
Wisdom. To realise the Oneness of life, and 
live accordingly that is the aim of every 
practice of the Buddhist Culture of the Mind. : 



KAMMA 

Before beginning and without an end, 
As space eternal, and as surety sure, 

Is fixed a power divine which moves to good -\ 
Only Its laws endure. 

ONE of the most important of the doctrines of 
the Buddhist religion is that which relates to 
the Law of Kamma; the teaching, namely, 
that the lives and destinies of men, and of all 
living creatures, are fashioned in accordance 
with a definite law of Nature, and are the 
outcome only of causes set in motion in the 
past by the being who experiences these effects. 
It is a doctrine of especial importance for us 
to consider, first, because the purport of this 
doctrine of Kamma is largely misunderstood 
here in Burma-^a misapprehension which has 
given rise to many a weakness in the national 
character ; and ; secondly, because the right 



410 THE RELIGION OP BURMA 

comprehension of that Law is one of the keys 
to all success in life. 

The misapprehension to which I have 
referred, lies in the wholly incorrect assumption 
that a man's life on earth is as it were 
predetermined for him by the Kamma which 
he inherits from his bygone lives ; and that no 
man has the power to depart, even by a hair's 
breadth, from the path in life which his past 
has prepared for him. It is owing to it also, 
and to the wrong view of life that results from 
it, that so much of Burmese energy is frittered 
away in the foolishness of astrology and of 
magic, in attempts to lift the veil of futurity, 
to change one's luck by spells, or to dis- 
cover hidden treasure by similar means. So 
it is that when some sudden misfortune falls 
upon a Burman, he, deeming that he is now 
reaping the inevitable penalty of bygone mis- 
deeds, abandons at once that vigorous effort 
which alone could save him; and thereafter, 



KAMMA 411 

* 

instead of setting to work to build again his 
fallen fortunes, lives idly hoping that his 
destiny may change again, for the good 
this time. So also is it with many a noble 
movement set on foot in Burma, as the 
hundreds of ephemeral Societies founded for 
this or that good purpose, and collapsing ere 
a year has passed, bear witness. At first, vast 
interest and excitement : strenuous effort on 
the part of the promoters to carry out their 
objects; and then so soon as those obstacles 
which exist in every walk in life appear, that 
good work is abandoned by the very promoters 
themselves. The times do not appear to them 
to be ripe for the movement; and all these 
obstacles, instead of spurring them to new and 
greater efforts, seem to your countrymen 
clearly to demonstrate that Fate itself is 
opposing their endeavors ; and so they 
abandon that good work, even though it be on 
the very threshold of success. It is the chief 



412 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

difficulty that you will find here in this work to 
which you have set yourselves, the chief 
obstacle in the way of every conceivable 
reform in Burma. And yet it is not only a 
belief altogether at variance with the Buddhist 
doctrine of Kamma, but one specially pointed 
out in the Buddhist Scriptures as a false belief. 
For Kamma is indeed the power which 
makes or mars the life, the works, the destinies 
of man. It is true that every living being 
save the Arahan himself lives as the Law of 
Kamma shall determine ; and in each moment 
of his life he follows the good or evil way, works 
or is idle, lives happily or in sorrow, as his 
destiny determines. But this necessitarian 
view is only half the truth ; and as we all 
know, a half-truth is often more powerful for 
evil than deliberate falsehood, for the half-truth 
lives by virtue of the truth it contains, while 
falsehood is by its very nature destined to a 
speedy end. 



KAMMA 

It is, then, to the complementary part of 
this half -truth that we need specially to devote 
attention ; and to do this, we need only consider 
the very derivation .of the word itself. For 
this Kamma, looked upon in Burma as Nemesis, 
as an inevitable necessity from which no man 
may escape, comes from the Pali root karck, 
the Sanskrit kri, both meaning action, work; 
and as it is used in Buddhist technicology> 
the word means at once Doing and the Thing 
Done, and thence, the power whereby an action 
is performed. And this Doing is to be regarded, 
not as the physical function which may accom- 
pany or result from a mental act, but as the 
mental act itself. 

Kamma in Buddhist philosophy therefore 
means three things, according to the moment 
at which we regard it. It means, first, the 
performance of a, mental action, whether 
that gives rise to external movement or to 
speech, or not. Secondly, it is applied to the 



414 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

effects of past action 3 as, in producing a definite 
mental state or environment. And thirdly, it 
means that force whereby the past action, 
regarded as a cause, gives rise to the state in 
question, which is its effect. To make this clear 
by the common analogy of the physical text- 
books exhibiting the transmission of energy, in 
which a number of billiard balls are placed in a 
groove, touching one another : A light blow on 
a ball at the end of the line, after a definite 
short period of time, results in the motion of 
one at the other end, whilst the intervening 
balls do not perceptibly move. The blow is 
comparable to the mental act. The resultant 
movement of the terminal ball corresponds to 
the effect of this act in producing a definite 
change in the position of that ball. And the 
energy transmitted without apparent effect on 
the intervening balls, corresponds to Kamma 
regarded as the force whereby the ultimate 
effect is produced. 



KAMMA 415 

It must here be borne in mind that the whole 
sequence covered by the term Kamma is purely 
a sequence of mental f unctionings ; or, in 
other words, this doctrine of Kamma is the 
application to the mental and moral worlds of 
the Law of the Conservation of Energy. At the 
same time, however, it must be remembered 
that, from the Buddhist point of view, all that 
we are and know and perceive is also only the 
outcome of our mental state. If a man, after 
partaking of indigestible food, goes to sleep, 
he will in the majority of cases be afflicted 
with terrible dreams ; that is to say, by 
reason of the wrong action of overeating, his 
mind will create about him a horrible environ- 
ment, so that in his dream he may imagine 
himself to be pursued by some fearful spectre, 
or to be falling from a precipice, or some 
similar unpleasant thing. So long as the 
nightmare lasts, it will appear to him that the 
world he is in that is to say, the state of his 



416 THE BBLiaiON OF BURMA 

environment is a thing apart from him, a 
world external over which he has no control. 
But, as soon as he is awakened, he sees 
clearly that the whole of his dream, spectre 
or precipice, and the time and spatial extension 
of his universe, the fear he suffered, the; 
attempts he made to escape from whatever 
terrified him he sees that all these things, 
once he is wakened out of his dream, then fall 
into their right perspective as merely function- 
ings of his own mind. 

And the Buddhist teaching, the Buddhist 
view of this Universe wherein we live our wak- 
ing lives, is that this also is a dream; that 
this also is the outcome of our past action,, 
even as the nightmare is understood by the 
awakened man to be but the natural effect of the 
food he has taken. All life is but a dream- 
a. dream more intense, more seeming-lasting, 
if you will, than any. vision of the night; but 
still a dreaming, an illusion, wherein all that 



KAMMA 417 

appears, this wide space and the duration 
of time, and sun and moon and star and all 
the manifold conditionings of life, are outcome 
of our character, the total of the outcome of 
our bygone thoughts, words, deeds ; a Uni- 
verse builded by ourselves and for ourselves 
alone, fruit of the heritage of immemorial lives. 
It is indeed the aim and hope of every 
Buddhist to awaken out of all this dream of life, 
to enter into that state which, The Master 
(He whom we call The Buddha, the Awakened) 
has taught us, lives and reigns beyond this 
ever-changing and conditioned life. That last 
awakening, the attainment of Nibbana, is, as 
it were, the very reason of our Buddhist faith. 
For the present, in following out the operations 
of Kamma, we must turn to the life we 
have and live, remembering always that if in 
the highest philosophy it is but a dream, it is 
the dream wherein just now our lives are cast. 
And the great question now before us is : Can 

27 



418 THE RELIGION .OF BURMA 

we mould the life we have so as to make to- 
morrow's vision nobler, greater, and truer 
than the life we lead to-day ? 

It is in the answer to this question that the 
complement to the half -truth of which I have 
spoken appears the understanding so lacking 
in this Buddhist land, which changes this 
fatality of Kamma into a power whereby each 
man may change, not his own destiny alone> 
but even, in less degree, that of all the world, 
For that answer is in the affirmative. We 
may, the Dhamma tells us, so far modify the 
cause of this our life, the power of Kamma 
itself, that even in this existence our destiny, 
our environment may all be changed. " It is," 
The Master tells us in the Pitaka, " it is 
through not-knowing and not-understanding 
that we have lived so long in this great ocean 
of existence, both you and I." And if " not 
knowing and not understanding" be indeed 
the source of all this suffering life, then, by 



KAMMA 419 

Bight Knowledge and Eight Understanding we 
may in all things change the life we live. The 
change is, not only substituting a brighter, 
nobler, grander life for the petty path we 
tread, but even passing beyond the veil which 
hides from us the Light Eternal, and entering 
into the Truth which reigns beyond all life. 
Only by knowing and by understanding ! In 
all our life we see how true it is, this Teaching 
of The Master; by knowing and by under- 
standing, if but rightly we apply our 
knowledge, we may command whatever power 
we in ignorance obeyed; we may turn every 
force of Nature to our service ; and we may find 
in each universal law the means to escape from 
its domination. Men of all ages knew that 
all things unsupported fell upon the earth, 
but of the How or Why of this phenomenon 
they knew naught at all. Then, with Newton's 
great discovery of universal gravitation came 
not indeed the understanding, the knowledge of 



420 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

the Why of gravitation, but somewhat at least 
of the knowledge of the How. For long, even 
after Newton's discovery of the nature of this 
law, it still seemed an impossibility for man to 
rise above the surface of the earth ; until at 
last it was discovered that gravitation acted 
also on the air about us, and that it acted 
=less on hydrogen and other gaseous bodies. 
Once that knowledge was arrived at, it soon 
was possible to apply it; so that now, by 
making use of this one piece of knowledge, we 
can rise by virtue of that very Law of Gravi- 
tation as far as there is air enough to balance 
our apparatus and to sustain our life. For it 
is the same force of gravitation which pulls the 
stone towards the earth, that, when directed 
by right understanding, pushes the balloon 
away from it. And, as it is in this simple 
instance, so is it with all right comprehension 
of each universal law. By knowing and by 
understanding we may use the very powers 



KAMMA 421 

of Nature to produce results seemingly opposite 
to those they commonly effect. : 

So is it also with this Law of Kamma 
which directs our lives. We may employ the 
very power which conditions us to free ourselves 
from these conditionings, if we but rightly 
understand how to apply our knowledge. We 
know that the chief outcome of that law is that 
as a man sows, even so shall he reap that 
good thoughts and words and deeds bring 
forth conditions of happiness, and evil ones 
the reverse. Whilst it is true that at any 
given moment a man is bound to act only as his 
character dictates to choose either good or 
evil according as the total of the myriad forces 
of his lives shall compel it is equally true that 
he is able, even now and in this life, 
profoundly to modify by the production of new 
Kamma and its right application, that very 
character itself. So that, if we but will and 
understand, we may alter the very destiny 



422 THE BBLIGION OP BURMA 

wherewith we are born alter and change it s 
whether for better or for worse, at every 
moment of our lives. 

This, then, is the other half of the Teaching 
about Kamma which is so neglected in Burma 
at the present day. True, a man's destiny 
is the inevitable outcome of his bygone action. 
But even here and now we may alter the very 
nature of that destiny itself, by hard work, 
by diligence, by application ; we may alter 
it by applying the knowledge that we have 
gathered from the Teaching of The Buddha- 
He whose last words were : Appamddena 
Sampddetka. Sometimes you see two men 
on whom a similar calamity say, the loss 
of all their wealth falls, and one of them sits 
down saying : " This is Kamma, my destiny 
has altered for the bad, it is of no use to strive 
or work to overcome it " ; and the other 
when that trouble comes, sets once again to 
work, and by earnest effort builds up a greater 



EAMMA 423 

fortune than he had before. Know then that 
of these two, the former has completely missed 
the meaning of the Law of .Kamma ; while the 
latter has understood it, and knowing thus that 
Kamma is the fruit of work and of work alone, 
has made that very affliction the source of new 
and greater wealth. 

And understand full well that this is no 
unusual case, no special application of the 
knowledge of what Kamma means. If you 
are in college, you are even now carrying out 
this principle into effect ; for, as you well 
know, on your present diligence depends 
the whole course of your future lives. It is 
by virtue of the knowledge that you now are 
gaining that later on you will be able to enter 
the professions ; and if, for any one of you the 
future shall bring success, that success will be 
the outcome mainly of your present work. You, 
even now, are making the destiny of your lives ; 
and as you now sow, so shall you later reap. 



424 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

You know how, when a new subject of study: 
comes before you, how hard it is at first to 
apply your minds to it, how great is the effort 
needed to understand it. It is as though each 
novel matter needed the making of a new 
pathway in the brain ; and all the difficulty 
of study, all the difficulty of every function of 
our lives, depends only on what one may term 
the inertia of the brain, its opposition to this 
making of new paths. But if at first you 
make clear, by hard and careful application, the 
pathways of a given sort of thought, later it will 
be always easy for your mind to follow that path 
so that at last a given mental process, full at 
first of all manner of difficulties, becomes 
so easy that one is scarcely aware of any effort 
in the doing. 

Now in this making of the mental pathways, 
one thing is noticeable above all others, namely, 
that the more difficult the process is at 
first or, in other words, the more effort 



KAMMA 425- 

you have to employ at first in clearing away 
the obstacles the easier it is later to repeat 
the process ; or, as we say, the better one 
has learned the thing. So it is also in life* 
The greater the obstacle to any given thing* 
as, for example, to such a movement as that to 
which you have set yourselves, the greater 
effort, it is true, is needed at first to do it. Bufe 
if you can but bring yourselves to make that 
effort, to overcome those obstacles, the success 
of your work in later life when, leaving this 
college you go forth into the world to put 
your principles into action, will be the greater 
in exact proportion to the very strength of the 
difficulties you have overcome. 

There is a word that is used in medical 
science which very aptly applies to the two 
great classes of Kamma -the Kamma coming 
from our past lives, and the Kamma that we 
even now are making whereby, as we have 
seen, the old-time Kamma may, if we but work 



426 THE EBLIGION OF BURMA 

hard enough, be altogether changed. That 
word is diathesis. Suppose a man is born of 
consumptive parents. That man may be 
said to have the consumptive diathesis. 
He has not the disease itself, but some 
condition of his physical structure pre- 
disposes him to contract that disease. Take 
the man with the consumptive diathesis, and 
another, born of non-consumptive parents ; 
expose both to the same chance of infection by 
the bacteria of that disease ; and the man with 
the consumptive diathesis will most likely get 
consumption and die of it ; whilst the other, 
equally invaded by the same bacteria, will 
have sufficient resistance to their invasion 
not even to get ill at all. But on the other 
hand, if the man with the consumptive 
diathesis, knowing his heritage, takes great 
care to avoid all those causes (supposing he 
knew them) whereby he may be exposed 
to the invasion of the bacteria, then he may 



' KAMMA 427 

pass through his whole life without any sign 
of that disease. 

Now, as those of you will know who may have 
studied the valuable article on the Forces of 
Character by Maung Shwe Zan Aung in Bud- 
dhism, there are two very important divisions 
of Kamma s in respect of the way in which 
it operates, which are respectively termed 
Eeproductive and Supportive. Reproductive 
Kamma may be roughly described as that where- 
with a man is born, his destiny or fate. This it 
is which in accordance with his bygone mental 
action, determines whether he is born rich or 
poor, noble or base, of great mental capacity 
or weak of wit ; and this Eeproductive Kamma 
corresponds exactly to our medical term 
diathesis. Setting aside the Supportive Kamma 
of the past life, and considering only that 
Supportive Kamma which is built up in the 
present existence, this latter will correspond to 
the circumstances under which the actual 



428 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

contagion of the disease may enter the man* 
Then, as we have seen, if there is already 
the diathesis, Reproductive Kamma of the 
right sort, the result will be that, just as 
the man in the illustration would have his 
consumptive diathesis developed into actual 
disease, so do we, by the Supportive Kamma 
we now are forming, develop those character- 
istics whether good or bad, with which we are 
born. Take a child with the most magnificent 
brain-development possible; place him on an 
island attended only by savages ; and the great 
possibilities latent in him will remain latent ; 
he will grow up into a savage but little more 
advanced than those who have nurtured him. 
Here we have Reproductive Kamma strong 
for good; but there is no Supportive Kamma 
present, and thereby the great possibilities are 
never realised. On the other hand, place the 
same child at school, and in the learning he 
there acquires, he will form Supportive Kamma 



KAMMA 429 

whereby his birthright may be developed into 
being; and thus it is always with operations of 
Kamma in general. JSTow, in the period of 
youth, you are making the Supportive Kamma 
which alone can nurture into life the dormant 
mental powers wherewith you were born. 
To the measure that you can by dint of 
application and hard work bring to fruitage 
the dormant powers of your Kammic 
heredity, to that measure your lives on 
arth will be great or petty, rich or poor 9 
powerful or weak. Your success will be only- 
according as you yourselves in this period when 
the powers of your several minds are being 
ripened by the sun of knowledge to the harvest- 
time of life shall work well in the fallow fields 
of your own hearts and minds, tending the 
growing seed with diligence, and uprooting 
the weeds of idleness, of passion, and of sin. 

So lies before each human heart; in this 
life's springtide, the potentiality of all that is 



430 THE EELIGION OF BHEMA 

to come. Kamma is not your ruler, or the 
blind arbiter of your destinies or ways ; it is 
your very selves ; it is the force which even now 
you are applying to the making or the marring 
of a human life. Bow down to it, and you 
will fall to the state of slavery, slavery to your 
own ignorance, your own idleness, your folly 
and despair. You will fall to the living of 
ignoble lives lives lived as the life of the 
brutes unlit by the privilege of reason 
whereby comes power to win to all things 
high. So long as you wrongly think : " Fate 
is greater than my will," so long shall you 
remain in servitude to fate, weak, helpless^ 
useless to your fellows, the prey of all those 
follies of astrology and magic which at this day 
are one of the most fruitful sources of the lack 
of stamina and stability of the Burmese race. 

But say, but realise in your hearts the Truth. 
Say : " I am the maker of my life, and builder 
of my destiny. It is my will to live greatly 



KAMMA 431 

and nobly in this world of men ; to bring 
forth happiness where now is suffering ; to 
help the fallen and support the weak. I am 
lord of this my life, the arbiter of all that life 
shall bring to me " ; and saying thus, work 
hard to make it true. And so you shall win 
throughout in the hard battlefield of being. So 
you shall overcome all obstacles, gaining new 
strength from each fond weakness set aside. 
So, most of all 9 as nearest to your hearts and 
to the welfare of your race, you shall win 
the power from Fate to mould the destinies 
of Burma, to bring new strength to this 
your nation; the power to carry out the 
multitudinous reforms among your countrymen 
which may yet be the salvation of Burma; 
whereof the foremost in importance stands 
the right apprehension of all that is involved 
in the meaning and the application of this 
Buddhist doctrine of Kamma. 



APPENDIX 

THE LATE ME. ALLAN BENNETT 

BY CASSIUS PEKEIRA 

WITH the death of Mr. Allan Bennett, (better known in 
Ceylon and Burma as the Bhikkhu Ananda Maitriya) on 
the 9th of March, in London, the Buddhist world loses 
one of its foremost protagonists of late years. 

Mr. Bennett was only 50 years old, having been born 
in London in 1872. He was educated at Bath. His 
father, a Civil and Electrical Engineer, dying early, the 
boy was adopted by a Mr. McGregor, whose name the 
lad took till the former died some years ago. From his 
childhood a keen student of science, Allan Bennett took 
up the profession of an Analytical Chemist. He had 
also done much electrical work, which was just coming 
to fruition, when his health broke down, and he decided, 
on medical advice, to go " out East ". Always a lover of 
the East, the forced holiday was not displeasing. He 
had already become a Buddhist, about his 18th year, his 
introduction to Buddhism being Sir Edwin Arnold's 
masterpiece, The "Lighi of Asia. 

He came put to Ceylon in 1900, and with an introduc- 
tion from the late Mr. J. E, Richard Pereira, went to 
Kamburugamuwa, where he studied Pali, for some six 

28 



434 THE RELIGION OF BURMA 

months, under the "Ven. Revata Thera, and extended 
his knowledge of Buddhism. Such was the brilliance of 
his intellect that, at the end of this short period, he had 
mastered the ancient Pali sufficiently to converse fluently 
in that sacred tongue. He made many close friends 
amongst the Buddhists of Ceylon, who gave him much 
assistance in every way. 

In July, 1901, he delivered his first Buddhist address, an 
absorbingly interesting one on the " Pour Noble Truths," 
before the Hope Lodge of the Theosophical Society, 
Colombo. He then decided to enter the Buddhist 
Order, and as he wished to be ordained in Burma, 
he left for that country and " renounced the world " at 
Akyab, in 1901, on his birthday, the 8th of December, as a 
Samanera, or novice, under the name of Arianda Maitriya. 

At Akyab he continued his studies, being supported by 
Dr. Tha HU of that town, and on 21st May, 1902, the 
Wesak day, he received the higher Upasampada ordina- 
tion under the Yen. Shwe Bya Sayadaw. 

Going to Rangoon, where the philanthropical Mrs. Hla 
Oung was his chief supporter, Ananda Maitriya in- 
augurated the Buddhasasana Samagama, or International 
Buddhist Society, whose high-class illustrated quarterly 
magazine Buddhism, which he edited, was a credit to all 
the Bast. 

He visited Ceylon again, and delivered several inspir- 
ing addresses at the Maitriya Hall, Colombo, which was 
named after him. 



APPENDIX 435 

In 1908, on a visit to England, he helped in launching 
the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland. On his 
return to Burma, his health which was always very poor 
began to fail rapidly. Gall-stone trouble was superadded 
to the chronic asthma, which first sent him to the East. 
He was operated on twice, and on the urgent advice of his 
doctors, he reluctantly decided to leave the Order where 
he had now attained the seniority of Them, or Elder. 

He returned to England just before the Great War 
began, and was too ill to proceed to the healthful climate 
of California, as he intended doing. For some time he 
was extremely ill, but he recovered enough to resume his 
self-appointed life-work, in London, with the generous 
help of Mr. Clifford Bax. The Great War had 
disorganised the Buddhist Society there, but with the 
help of Mr. W. Arthur de Silva, it was reorganised, and 
its journal The Buddhist Review was restarted with 
Allan Bennett as editor. 

The work, however, was no sinecure. Some assistance 
was nobly given from Ceylon, Burma and the Anagarika 
Dharmapala ; but Mr. Bennett's health remained preca- 
rious, and the position of the Buddhist Society was again 
getting insecure when Dr. Hewavitarne's munificence, 
when he visited England last year, again set things 
right, and ensured regular support for Mr. Bennett. 

Advance copies of his latest work, The Wisdom of the 
Aryas, reached Ceylon just three days before his death. 

And now the worker has, for this life, laid aside his 
burden. One feels more glad than otherwise, for he was 
tired ; his broken body could no longer keep pace with 



436 THE RELIGION OF BTJBMA 

his soaring mind. The work he began, that of introduc- 
ing Buddhism to the West, he pushed with enthusiastic 
vigor in pamphlet, journal and lecture, all masterly, 
all stimulating thought, all in his own inimitably graceful 
style. And the results are not disappointing, to those 
who know. Operi&gretiu'ni est. 

y 

(From The Buddhist, Colombo, Ceylon, 

of 28th April, 1923.) 



BUDDH A-EOOD AS AN OFFICE 

By ANANDA METTEYYA 

WITH regard to The Buddha of the Tisarana, etc., refer- 
ring to the office rather than to the person, perhaps we 
should approximate the meaning of the Pali better if we 
read it : " I go for Refuge or Guidance to Buddha- 
hood." ... 

An important point is, that if a modern Christian 
apologist in like case were to say that " the Christ," the 
Bedeemer, etc., does not mean the historical person, but 
the " risen Christ," the redemption-miracle in the 
heart of the converted man, he would be giving a real 
twist to the clear meaning of the various passages in his 
Scriptures. In the Gospels, we nowhere find it 
stated by Christ save by the widest stretches of the 
imagination, and inferentially- that there have existed, 
or do, or will, exist, other " Chrisfcs " besides himself ; 
while the parallel statement is over and over again made 
by The Buddha in the Pitakas, often with detailed 
reference to a Buddha of such and such a name. This 
conception, then, of The Buddha in the technical sense 
being not a person, but a power, an office of Enlightenment 
is no new reading or interpretation of mine. (How, to 
one who has realised the Anatta-doctrine, could The 
Buddha, of all Teachers of Humanity, have appeared as 
representing the finality, the ultimate Guide and Refuge, 



438 THE RELIGION OP BUBMA 

as that personality which He so consistently stated was 
an illusion P) It is no Buddhist apologetic, a twist of the 
meaning of the Text to make some statement or idea 
more palatable and acceptable to the modern mind, but 
an idea which is over and over again detailed in the 
Buddhist Scriptures. We could hardly, therefore, be 
fairly accused, even by the most critical of minds, of 
attaching a meaning to this term which it did not originally 
possess. Just the contrary, in fact ! For The Buddha but 
seldom spoke of Himself as The Buddha save in the 
passages where the whole of the Buddha- concept is detailed 
in the various characteristic signs of Buddha-hood, as 
in the formula : " Iti pi so Bhagava Araham Sammasam- 
buddho," etc. While He often spoke of other Buddhas, 
such as " the Sambuddha Kassapa " or the like, His own 
usual way of speaking of Himself as the " office-holder," was 
as the TcbtJiagata, a word which itself enforces the very 
idea in question, meaning as it does, " He who follows in 
the footsteps of His predecessors," Tatha-agato : " He 
who has thus come," even as They came. The rendering 
is not mine; it is not only in the sources, but in the 
Commentaries, and in the present expositions of learned 
Monks. All of these tell us that the personal Gotama 
"passed into that utter passing-away which leaves 
nothing whatever behind ". All of them, obviously 
therefore, have another meaning in their minds when 
they recite the Refuge-formula. 



Printed by A. K. Sitarama Shastri, at the Vasanta Press, Adyar, Madras. 



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