ll departments of Hindu
religion and thought, even those nominally opposed to it. Secondly it
spread not only Buddhism in the strict sense but Indian art and
literature beyond the confines of India. The expansion of Hindu culture
owes much to the doctrine that the Good Law should be preached to all
nations.

The teaching of Gotama was essentially practical. This statement may
seem paradoxical to the reader who has some acquaintance with the
Buddhist scriptures and he will exclaim that of all religious books they
are the least practical and least popular: they set up an anti-social
ideal and are mainly occupied with psychological theories. But the
Buddha addressed a public such as we now find it hard even to imagine.
In those days the intellectual classes of India felt the ordinary
activities of life to be unsatisfying: they thought it natural to
renounce the world and mortify the flesh: divergent systems of ritual,
theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking
it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to
meditation and study. Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of
the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but human,
business-like and clear. We are inclined to see in the monastic life
which he recommended little but a useless sacrifice but it is evident
that in the opinion of his contemporaries his disciples had an easy
time, and that he had no intention of prescribing any cramped or
unnatural existence. He accepted the current conviction that those who
devote themselves to the things of the mind and spirit should be
released from worldly ties and abstain from luxury but he meant his
monks to live a life of sustained intellectual activity for themselves
and of benevolence for others. His teaching is formulated in severe and
technical phraseology, yet the substance of it is so simple that many
have criticized it as too obvious and jejune to be the basis of a
religion. But when he first enunciated his theses some two thousand five
hundred years ago, they were not obvious but revolutionary and little
less than paradoxical.

The principal of these propositions are as follows. The existence of
everything depends on a cause: hence if the cause of evil or suffering
can be detected and removed, evil itself will be removed. That cause is
lust and craving for pleasure[9]. Hence all sacrificial and sacramental
religions are irrelevant, for the cure which they p