a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it,
devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an
indivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and
then only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of
Nirvana.

With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
present in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turned
to the consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness;
Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own
happy life journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by the
sight of human disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto
he had been sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he
might find for it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceived
it, lay not in wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of
being. His quest for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active
enjoyment of life. In this negative way of looking at happiness,
he acted in strict conformity with the spirit of his world. For the
doctrine of pessimism had already been preached. It underlay the whole
Brahman philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly. Already the
East looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individual
spirit extinction to be happier than existence. The wish for an end
to the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for a
truism as undeniably as the Brahmans did. What he pronounced false was
the Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable impersonal
state. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the traveller where
it professed, since it began wrong, and ended nowhere. The way, he
asserted, is within a man. He has but to realize the truth, and from
that moment he will see his goal and the road that leads there. There
is no panacea for human ills, of external application. The Brahman
homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The slaughtering of men and
bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To mortify the body for
the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all
the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Man
himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha,
of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the
true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we know are
transitory: how can they be immo