both in the Pitakas and in later books; but so difficult is it for a mind impregnated with Christian ideas to recognize it, fully and freely, as a fundamental tenet of the widely adopted religion of Gautama, that must I ask attention to the following authorities. The first will be from the Sutta Pitaka, the second division of the Buddhist scriptures, and is also found in a Sanskrit work of the Northern Buddhists, from which Burnouf drew a great deal of his information. Gautama is there reported to have said:

"Mendicants, in whatever way the different teachers (Sramanas or Brahmins) regard the soul, they think it is the five Groups or one of the five. Thus, mendicants, the unlearned, unconverted man, who does not associate either with the converted or the holy, or understand their law, or live according to it, such a man regards the soul either as identical with, or as possessing, or as containing, or as residing in the material properties (Rupa); or as identical with, or as possessing, or as containing, or as residing in sensation (Vedana)

And so on of each of the three other Groups.

"By regarding soul in one of these twenty ways he gets the idea ‘I am.' When that idea has arisen, each of the five senses enters into it; and so of the fifth Group, and the second, third, and fourth Groups, and ignorance. Mendicants! it is from sensation, the offspring of contact and ignorance, that the unlearned man derives the notions I am,' 'This I exists,' I shall be,' I shall not be,' 'I shall or shall not have the first Group;' 'I shall or shall not have, or shall be neither with nor without, the third Group.'

And so on.

Gogerly quotes the following passages from the Pitakas: †— "Mendicants, the first Group is not the soul, the second Group is not the soul."

And so on of all the five Groups.

"Mendicants, the eye is impermanent, but what decays is grievous; what is grievous is not the soul; of what is not the soul it cannot be said, 'This is I,' or 'I am this."

And so on of each of the five senses and of the mind. There is more of a similar and still more emphatic kind, but I am afraid the reader may grow weary, and I turn therefore to a different mode of argument.

This belief in the soul, this delusion of self, is regarded so distinctly as a heresy that two well-known words in Buddhist terminology have been coined on purpose to stigmatize it.

* The Abhidharma Kosha Vyakhya partly quoted by Burnouf, Introduction à l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien, pp. 263, 508. The original Pali is in the 5th Sutta of the Khanda Vagga of the Sanyutta Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka; apud Alwis, Buddhist Nirvana, p. 71.

Journal of the Ceylon Asiatic Society (1867), 120, 121. Repeated almost word for word in the Avadāna Sataka, a late Sanskrit work of the Northern Buddhists. Burnouf, Introduction, 509.

The first of these is Sakkaya-diṭṭhi," the heresy of individuality," the name given to it as the first of the three primary delusions (the others being doubt about the Buddhas, and belief in the efficacy of rites and ceremonies), which must be abandoned at the very first stage of the Buddhist Path of Holiness. The other is Attarāda," the doctrine of soul or self," the name given to it as a part of the chain of causes leading to the origin of evil: and it is instructive to notice that it and two similar delusions are there classed with sensuality and ritualism as the immediate cause of birth, decay, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. Another proof of the prominence of this doctrine of the nonexistence of a soul is the fact that the Brahmins, who have misunderstood many less important, or less clearly expressed, tenets of Buddhism, recognize this as one of its distinctive features.*

It is expressed in a more popular manner in the Milinda Prashnaya or "Questions of Menander," a Ceylonese translation of a very ancient Pāli work, professing to elucidate that view of Buddhism taught by Nagarjuna, one of the founders of Northern Buddhism. It is a series of conversations between the Greek king Menander, of Sagala in the Punjab, and Nāgarjuna (also called Nāgasena); and at the very beginning of the series is placed the following dialogue.

The king said, "How is your reverence known? What is your name."

Nagasena replied, "I am called Nagasena by my parents, the priests, and others; but Nagasena is not a separate entity."

To this the king objected, very much as a modern Christian might, that in that case there could be no virtue nor vice, no reward nor retribution (in other words no "sanction"). He then mentioned one after another all the parts of the body and mind, and the Groups just described, and asked of each whether it was Nagasena. All these questions were answered in the negative. "Then," said the king, "I do not see Nagasena. Nagasena is a sound without meaning. You have spoken an untruth. There is no Nāgasena."

The mendicant asked, "Did your Majesty come here on foot or in a chariot?"

"In a chariot," was the answer.

"What is a chariot?" asked Nagasena. "Is the ornamented cover the chariot? Are the wheels, the spokes of the wheels, or the reins, the chariot? Are all these put together (in a heap) the chariot? If you leave these out, does there remain anything which is the chariot?"

To all this the king said, "No."

Colebrooke Essays, vol. i. 417 (ed. Cowell).

"Then I see no chariot. It is only a sound, a name. In saying that you came in a chariot, you have uttered an untruth. I I appeal to the nobles, and ask them whether it is proper for the great king of all Jambudwipa to utter an untruth!"

Truly, not undeserved! But the king is not convinced. "No untruth have I uttered, venerable monk. The cover, wheels, seat, and other parts all united or combined (chariotwise) form the chariot. They are the usual signs by which that which is called a chariot is known."

"And just so," said Nāgasena, "in the case of man." And he quoted the words of the Teacher where he had said, "As the various parts of a chariot form, when united, the chariot, so the five Groups (skandhas) form, when united in one body, a being, a living existence."

Whatever we may think of the argument, it is at least clear that a soul is as little acknowledged in man as a separate substance is acknowledged in a chariot. It shows also that this. doctrine is not drawn from Buddhism by implication; but must have been clearly and consciously held, with some apprehension, more or less correct, of the possible objections to it.

To remove the last shadow of doubt I add the following curious. passage from the Brahma Jala Sutta in the second Pitaka, where the argument is quite ludicrously complete. To quote all that relates to our question would be quite impossible; but, in short, Gautama discusses sixty-two different kinds of wrong belief. Among these are those held by men who think—

"The soul and the world are eternal; (it is true) there is no newly-existing substance, but these remain as a mountain-peak, unshaken, immovable. Living beings pass away, they transmigrate, they die, and are born; but these continue as being eternal."

After showing how the unfounded belief in the eternal existence of gods or lords arose, Gautama goes on to discuss the notion of the future existence of the soul, and points out thirty-two beliefs. concerning it which he holds to be wrong. These are shortly as follows:

"Upon what principle or on what account do these Mendicants and Brahmins hold the doctrine of future existence? . . . (1.) They teach that the soul is material, and that it will for ever consciously exist after death. (2.) They teach that the soul is immaterial and will have an eternal conscious existence after death. (3.) They teach that the soul partakes both of materiality and of immateriality, and will have an eternal conscious. existence after death."

And so on; the rest of the condemned teachings are-(4.) That the soul will be neither material nor immaterial. (5-8.) That it will be finite or infinite, or both, or neither. (9--10.) With one, or

many modes of consciousness. (11, 12.) With few, or innumerable perceptions. (13-16.) Happy or miserable, or both, or neither. Then follow eight heresies, teaching that the soulmaterial or immaterial, or both, or neither, finite- or infinitely diffused, or both, or neither-has an unconscious existence after death. And finally eight others, teaching that the soul, in one of the same eight ways, exists after death in a state of being, neither conscious nor unconscious.

We are not to suppose that each of these thirty-two heresies was actually held by any school or teacher. This is merely a mode of denying, as completely and categorically as possible, the notion that there is any soul, any thing, of any kind, that continues to exist, in any manner, after the dissolution of the "Groups," or, in other words, after death.

But Gautama had not been able to give up his belief in transmigration. He had gradually formed his belief-not by working up from the simple to complex, from the well known to the less known, and pausing humbly where uncertainty begins-but by gradually rejecting or modifying those parts of his early creed which could be proved to his mind to be inconsistent with what he held to be fact. In such cases each surrender causes a wrench, each standpoint is more strongly defended than the last; and the ultimate belief is not necessarily more true than those which have been abandoned, but only less disprovable. It is natural, moreover, for the mind to resist the longest the disproof of those hypotheses which satisfy it most completely by the explanation they afford of otherwise inexplicable mysteries. Now the doctrine of transmigration, in either the Brahmanical or Buddhist form, is not capable of disproof; while it affords an explanation quite complete, to those who can believe it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution, here, of happiness or woe. A child, for instance, is blind; this is owing to its eye-vanity, lust of the eye, in a former birth; but he has also unusual powers of hearing this is because he loved, in a former birth, to listen to the preaching of the Law. The explanation can always be exact, for it is scarcely more than a repetition of the point to be explained; it may always fit the facts, for it is derived from them; and it cannot be disproved, for it lies in a sphere beyond the reach of human inquiry.

The reader will see that we have thus arrived at a dead-lock: to save what it holds to be psychological truth Buddhism rejects the notion of a soul; to save what it holds to be the necessity of justice, it retains the belief in transmigration. Where does it find the link of connection, the bridge between one life and another?

In order to do this, and thus preserve its "moral cause," it resorts to the desperate expedient of a mystery-one of the

four acknowledged mysteries in Buddhism* (which are also the four points on which it is most certainly wrong), the doctrine, namely, of Karma. I will state the doctrine as clearly as I can ; but, as it is inconsistent with orthodox Buddhism for any person not a Buddha to understand it, I shall not hope to make it intelligible.

When a sentient being (man, angel, or animal) dies, a new being is instantly produced in a more or less painful and material state of existence, according to the Karma, the Desert-merit or demerit-of the being who has died. The cause which produces the new being is Trishna, thirst, or Upādāna, grasping—expressions for very similar states of mind, which will be explained more fully further on. Sensations originate in the contact of the organs of sense with the exterior world; from sensation springs a desire to satisfy a felt want, a yearning, a "thirst" (Trishņā); from this, again, results a "grasping" after objects to satisfy that thirst. It is this grasping state of mind (Upādāna) which causes the new being-not, of course, a soul, but a new set of " 'Groups (Skandhas), a new body endowed with mental and moral tendencies and capabilities (Sanskāras).

One can attach some meaning to the saying "Sensation causes excitement, yearning; yearning causes grasping;" but the words in italics contain an unfathomable mystery, on which I can throw no light, except to add that the grasping state of mind is divided. (or explained) into four states-sensuality, the two great heresies.† ritualism, and the delusion of self-which are like the straws caught at by drowning men, the broken reeds on which they lean for happiness.

But though the mode of action of Karma is an incomprehensible mystery (simply because the force itself is a non-existent fiction of the brain), it is possible to find the foundation of truth on which the hypothesis rests-the same truth which lies at the bottom of the widely prevalent beliefs in fate and predestination. Not that fate and Karma are the same; the difference is very obvious. Fate is un-moral (neither moral nor immoral), and is an interruption to the law that effects are due to causes; the doctrine of Karma finds a moral cause for the effects it seeks to explain. But both depend on a perception of the fact that happiness and misery in this life are apportioned with an utter disregard of the moral qualities of men, according to the current notions of good or bad. When the innocent is oppressed, and his

These are:-1. The effect of Karma. 2. The supernatural powers of the Buddha (Iddhi). 3. The size and first cause of the Universe. 4. The omniscience of the Buddha. Hardy, Manual, p. 9.

These are very nearly the same as Materialism and Theism. The Pali words are kāma, ditthi (of two kinds, uccheda-vāda and sassata-vāda), sīlabbata, and attavāda. Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, 239.