In Buddhism the words kleṡa (kileso), ‘pain,’ and akuṡala, ‘demerit,’ take the place of ‘sin,’ and its perfect saint is said to be ‘free from pain’ (nishkleṡa) and from demerit, not from sin in our sense. By an unrighteous act it meant an act producing suffering and demerit of some kind (p. 113), and it bade every man act righteously in order to escape suffering and to accumulate merit (kuṡala), and thus work out his own perfection—that is to say, his own self-extinction. Doubtless Buddhism deserves credit for laying stress on right belief, right words, right work, instead of on ceremonial rites; and on the worship of Hindū gods; but it had its own idea of right. It urged householders to abandon the world, or else to be diligent in serving its monks for the working out of their own salvation; and while making morality, meditation, and enlightenment its indispensable factors in securing perfection, it made perfection consist in freedom from the delusion that ‘I am;’ and in deliverance from an individual existence inseparably bound up with misery. Mark, too, another contradiction. It inculcated entire self-dependence in working out this kind of perfection, and yet it set before its disciples three guides; namely, the Buddha’s own example, the Law (Dharma), and the example of the whole body of monks and perfected saints (Saṅgha). We now turn to its fuller moral system, keeping this distinct from its philosophy and metaphysics, and freely admitting that there are in Buddhist morality many things, true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. It is fair to point out at the outset that Buddhist morality was not a purely external matter. It divided men into the outwardly correct and internally sincere. The mere outwardly correct Buddhists might include monks as well as laymen, though a higher standard of profession was expected of monks. The internally sincere were the really earnest seekers after perfection (monks and laymen), and were divided into four classes, representing four conditions of the inner life, lower, higher, still higher, and highest, culminating in perfect Saintship, Arhatship, and Nirvāṇa (p. 132). At the same time there was not much hope of saintship except through celibacy and monkhood; for in true Buddhism the notion of holy family-life was almost a contradiction in terms. Of course the Buddhist moral code soon passed beyond the eightfold path propounded by Gautama in his first sermon (see p. 44), and Dr. Oldenberg has shown that in the absence of a systematically arranged code, we may still trace out amid a confusion of precepts the three leading duties of external moral conduct (ṡīla), of internal mental concentration (samādhi), and of acquiring true wisdom (paññā = prajñā). Compare Dr. Wenzel’s ‘Friendly Epistle,’ 53. The five fundamental rules of moral conduct (ṡīla), or rather, prohibitions, were promulgated very early:—