The root of all human miseries is ignorance. It is the generating principle of concupiscence and other passions. It is the dark but lofty barrier that encircles all beings and retains them within the vortex of endless existences; it is the cause of all existences, and of all those illusions to which beings are miserably subjected; it causes those continual changes which take place in the production of all beings. This great cause once found and proclaimed by Buddha, it was necessary to procure a remedy to counteract the action of ignorance, and successfully oppose its progress. Another antagonistic and opposite principle had to be found, adequate to resist the baneful agency of ignorance and stem its sad and misfortune-creating influence. That principle is science or knowledge. Ignorance is but a negative agent: it is only the absence of science. Let knowledge be, and ignorance shall vanish away in the same manner as darkness is noiselessly but irresistibly dissipated by the presence of light. All beings in this universe, says our author, are doomed to be born and die. We quit this place to go and live in another; we die here to be born elsewhere. We can never be freed from pain, old age, and death. Whether we like it or not, we must suffer and always suffer. But why is it so? Because we do not possess the perfect science. Were we blessed with it, we would infallibly look towards Neibban, and then, escaping from the pursuit of pain and miseries, we would infallibly obtain the deliverance from those evils which now incessantly press upon us. It rests with us only to perfect our intelligence, so that we might gradually attain to the perfect science, the source of all good. But by what means is so desirable an end to be obtained? By the exercise of meditation, answers, with a decided tone, our philosopher. This word implies, besides, our intellectual operations of a superior order, such as contemplation, visions, ecstasy, union, &c., which are the more or less complete results of that intellectual exercise. The act of meditating can take place but in the heart, where resides the _mano_, or the faculty of knowing. Its object can never be but the _nam-damma_, literally the name of the thing; or, in other terms, the things of a purely intellectual nature. But it can by no means happen in the seats of the other senses or organs, such as the eyes, the ears, &c., which are only channels to communicate impressions to the faculty of _mano_.