all its forms,
whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a
religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that
have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet
ripe for it--): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and
cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain
hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering _beasts of prey_;
its modus operandi is to make them _ill_--to make feeble is the
Christian recipe for taming, for "_civilizing_." Buddhism is a religion
for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity
appears before civilization has so much as begun--under certain
circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.

23.

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to _justify_ its pains, its susceptibility
to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply
says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however,
suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of
all, is an explanation as to _why_ he suffers. (His mere instinct
prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in
silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an
omnipotent and terrible enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of
suffering at the hands of such an enemy.--

At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong
to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little
consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is _believed_
to be true. Truth and _faith_: here we have two wholly distinct worlds
of ideas, almost two diametrically _opposite_ worlds--the road to the
one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact
thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to _make_ one a sage.
The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows
it. When, for example, a man gets any _pleasure_ out of the notion that
he has been saved from sin, it is _not_ necessary for him to be actually
sinful, but merely to _feel_ sinful. But when _faith_ is thus exalted
above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and
patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a
forbidden road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more
powerful _stimulans_ to life than any sort of realized