se of us who
have every wish and every opportunity to understand, it seems sometimes
as if we should never know their hearts. It seems as if we should never
learn more of their ways than just the outside--that curiously varied
outside which is so deceptive, and which is so apt to prevent our
understanding that they are men just as we are, and not strange
creations from some far-away planet.

So when I settled down and sought to know more of the meaning of what I
had seen, I thought that first of all I must learn somewhat of their
religion, of that mainspring of many actions, which seemed sometimes
admirable, sometimes the reverse, and nearly always foreign to my ideas.
It is true that I knew they were Buddhists, that I recognized the
yellow-robed monks as followers of the word of Gaudama the Buddha, and
that I had a general acquaintance with the theory of their faith as
picked up from a book or two--notably, Rhys Davids' 'Buddhism' and
Bishop Bigandet's book--and from many inconsequent talks with the monks
and others. But the knowledge was but superficial, and I was painfully
aware that it did not explain much that I had seen and that I saw every
day.

So I sent for more books, such books as had been published in English,
and I studied them, and hoped thereby to attain the explanations I
wanted; and as I studied, I watched as I could the doings of the people,
that I might see the effects of causes and the results of beliefs. I
read in these sacred books of the mystery of Dharma, of how a man has no
soul, no consciousness after death; that to the Buddhist 'dead men rise
up never,' and that those who go down to the grave are known no more. I
read that all that survives is the effect of a man's actions, the evil
effect, for good is merely negative, and that this is what causes pain
and trouble to the next life. Everything changes, say the sacred books,
nothing lasts even for a moment. It will be, and it has been, is the
life of man. The life that lives tomorrow in the next incarnation is no
more the life that died in the last than the flame we light in the lamp
to-day is the same that went out yesternight. It is as if a stone were
thrown into a pool--that is the life, the splash of the stone; all that
remains, when the stone lies resting in the mud and weeds below the
waters of forgetfulness, are the circles ever widening on the surface,
and the ripples never dying, but only spreading farther and farther
away. All this s