eir roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission of
salvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was obliged
to borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had preceded
it in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as a
scaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and spirituality.
But this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent with
what was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity the
post-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of the
human will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with the
pre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence. The
doctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral responsibility; but in
making responsibility dynamic and all-explaining, the theory
discountenanced in advance the charitable efforts of Buddhism--the
desire to instruct and save every fellow-creature. For if all my
fortunes depend upon my former conduct, I am the sole artificer of my
destiny. The love, the pity, the science, or the prayers of others can
have no real influence over my salvation. They cannot diminish by one
tittle my necessary sufferings, nor accelerate by one instant the period
which my own action appoints for my deliverance. Perhaps another's
influence might, in the false world of time and space, change the order
or accidental vesture of my moral experiences; but their quantity and
value, being the exact counterpart of my free merits and demerits, could
not be affected at all by those extraneous doings.

Therefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains in
Buddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency;
and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can be
attributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind,
anything inconsistent with it is fundamentally repugnant to the whole
system. Yet on that repugnant and destructive dogma of Karma Buddhism
was condemned to base its instruction. This is the heavy price paid for
mythical consolations, that they invalidate the moral values they are
intended to emphasise. Nature has allowed the innocent to suffer for the
guilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die in some measure unpunished. To
correct this imperfection we feign a closed circle of personal
retributions, exactly proportionate to personal deserts. But thereby,
without perceiving it, we have invalidated all political and social
responsi