It should be noted here that there are different interpretations given to this tenet. Some understand by it not that all desires, but simply evil desires, cause and feed the flame of life; others interpret it as teaching that desires or longings of every kind whatsoever possess this sinister potency of recreating life and keeping one entangled in the meshes of the net of existence. [Sidenote: The truth of the destruction of pain] The truth of the destruction of pain is this: “Pain can be ended only by the complete extinction of desire.” Desire being the root which feeds life and causes the round of births, existence can be ended only by getting rid of desire. Here again there are different acceptations of the dogma. To most it means simply the getting rid of all unholy passions and desires, while to the thoroughgoing Buddhist it means freedom from every desire of whatsoever kind: “Not a few trees but the whole forest” of desires must be cut down, together with all “the undergrowth.”[272] [Sidenote: The doctrine of karma] Besides these three philosophical principles,--the truth of pain, the origin of pain, and the extinction of pain,--there are two other speculative doctrines of orthodox Buddhism, a comprehension of which is necessary to an understanding of the ethics of the system. The first of these is the doctrine of karma. This is a denial of the soul theory. Orthodox Buddhism denies that man has a soul separable from the body. It teaches that when a person dies there does not go out of his body a spirit which lives elsewhere a conscious life, a continuation of the life just ended, but that all that goes out is _karma_, that is, something which is the net product of all the good and evil acts of the person in all his various existences--a sort of seed or germ from which will spring up here on earth or in some heaven or hell another being.[273] There is no conscious identity, however, between the two beings. They stand related to each other as father to son. Some illustrations will help us to seize the thought. The Buddhist teacher likens the relation of the life going out here to the new life beginning elsewhere, to the relation of two candle flames, the second of which has been lighted from the first. Through the transmission of karma the flame of life is passed on from one being to another; but all these life flames are different. No abiding self-consciousness binds them together and makes them one. Again, this succession of lives is likened to the undulations of a wave in the ocean. The successive undulations are not the same, yet the first causes the second, the second the third, and so on.