The Life of Buddha and Its LessonsOlcott, Henry Steel
Religion
The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons
Olcott, Henry Steel
Gautama Buddha
4. What he taught may be summed up in a few words, as the perfume of
many roses may be distilled into a few drops of _attar_: Everything in
the world of Matter is unreal; the only reality is in the world of
Spirit. Emancipate yourselves from the tyranny of the former; strive
to attain the latter. The Rev. Samuel Beal, in his _Catena of
Buḍḍhist Scriptures from the Chinese_ puts it differently. "The
idea underlying the Buddhist religious system is," he says, "simply
this: 'all is vanity'. Earth is a show, and Heaven is a vain reward."
Primitive Buḍḍhism was engrossed, absorbed, by one thought--the
vanity of finite existence, the priceless value of the one condition
of Eternal Rest.
If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of
Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the
misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea
of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving
for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded
charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a
grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding
religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal
God--true: therefore--well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this,
its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical,
nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my
meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps
in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two
elements--matter and force; accounting for their phenomena by their
combinations, and making both eternal and obedient to eternal and
immutable law. The speculations of men of science have carried them to
the outermost verge of the physical universe. Behind them lie not only
a thousand brilliant triumphs by which a part of Nature's secrets have
been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom her
deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the
evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German
experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jäger, claims to have proved that
man's soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution
in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his
experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole,
but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate
elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent an
audience as this, that these highly interesting experiments of Dr.
Jäger are corroborated by many facts, both physiological and
psychological, that have been always noticed among all nations; facts
which are woven into popular proverbs, legends, folk-lore fables,
mythologies and theologies, the world over. Now, if thought is matter
and soul is matter, then Buḍḍha, in recognising the impermanence
of sensual enjoyment or experience of any kind, and the instability of
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