Note 48 — THE SEVEN WAYS TO NEIBBAN.

This is a consequence of the axiom established by our author, viz., that the principle of mutability pervades all the beings which reside in the thirty-one seats allotted to them. It cannot be supposed for a moment, according to Buddhists, that a being, whatever may be the amount of his merits and demerits, can ever be placed without the pale of the influence of his good or bad deeds. It accompanies him in all positions, and causes the vicissitudes that attend his existence. It works upon him in hell, as well as on earth, and in the seats of Nats and Brahmas. Fixity is to be found nowhere except in going out of the circle of existences, that is to say, in Neibban. When we speak of existence in a Buddhistic sense, we mean a state of being in any conceivable form or situation or place. Fixity in the enjoyment of reward or in the undergoing of punishment is a contradiction with the first principle of Buddhism. The awarder of reward or punishment is the above-named influence, which proceeds from the actions performed, and in its turn allots good or evil in exact proportion with the cause that has created it.

Gaudama, having wilfully and unwilfully ignored a first cause from which all the things that exist draw their being and life, has been forced to allow to an imaginary agent the very same attributes which belong exclusively to the supreme being. On the rock of atheism he has made a sad shipwreck. Apart from this capital error it is surprising to see him maintaining with an admirable acuteness the existence of many fundamental truths; such, for instance, as the reward of good actions and the punishment of bad ones. With him the doing of evil is ever attended with consequences fatal to the perpetrator, whilst the performance of good is always accompanied with beneficial results. One would be inclined to believe that Gaudama has appropriated to himself with a great tact all the truths emanating from the belief in a supreme being; and whilst he has, with a barefaced and impious audacity, denied to the eternal author of all things the very existence, he has been placed under the necessity of accounting, in a most unlogical manner, for the existence of this world.