The method of salvation which was wrought out by Buddha has been admirably summarized by Rhys-David as follows: “So long as man is bound up by bodily existence with the material world he is liable to sorrow, decay and death. So long as he allows unholy desires to reign within him, there will be unsatisfied longings, useless weariness and care. To attempt to purify himself by oppressing his body would be only wasted effort; it is the moral evil of a man’s heart which keeps him chained down in the degraded state of bodily life--of union with the material world. It is of little avail to add virtue to his badness, for so long as there is evil, his goodness will only insure him for a time, and in another birth, a higher form of material life; only the complete _eradication of all evil_ will set him free from the chains of existence and carry him to the ‘other side,’ where he will be no longer tossed about on the waves of the ocean of transmigration. But Christian ideas must not be put into these Buddhist expressions. Of any immaterial existence, Buddhism knows nothing. The foundations of its creed have been summed up in the very ancient formula probably invented by its founder, which is called _the Four Great Truths_. These are: 1. That misery always accompanies existence. 2. That all modes of existence (of men or animals, in earth and heaven) result from passion or desire (tantra). 3. That there is no escape from existence except by destruction of desire. 4. That this may be had by following the fourfold way to Nirvāna. “Of these four prescribed stages called ‘_the Paths_,’ the first is an awakening of the heart. There are few that do not acknowledge that no man can be really called happy, and that men are born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but the majority glide through life filling up their time with business or with pleasure, buoyed up with ever-changing hopes in their mad pursuit of some fancied good. When the scales fall from their eyes, when they begin to realize the great mystery of _sorrow_, that pain is inseparable from existence, and that all earthly good leads to vexation of spirit, when they turn for comfort and for guidance to the Enlightened One, then they may be said to be awake, and to have entered the _first stage_ of the Buddhist way of salvation. When the awakened believer has gone further, and got rid, first, of all _impure desires_, and then of all _revengeful feelings_, he has reached the second stage; in the third he successively becomes free (1) from _all evil desires_, (2) from _ignorance_, (3) from _doubt_, (4) from _heresy_, and (5) from _unkindliness and vexation_. ‘As even at the risk of her own life a mother watches over her child, her only child, so let him (the Buddhist saint) exert good-will without measure toward all beings.’”