Most of the gods that the world has seen have made a somewhat frantic claim that men should have faith in them, and have threatened with dreadful penalties such as could not (whatever their goodwill) believe. There is something pathetic in the violence with which they denounce those who thwart them in the bestowal of the great gifts they have to offer. They seem deep in their hearts to have felt that it was the faith of others that gave them divinity (as though their godhead standing on an insecure foundation every believer was as it were a stone to buttress it) and that the message they so ardently craved to deliver could only have its efficacy if they became god. And god they could only become if men believed in them. But Gautama made only the claim of the physician that you should give him a trial and judge him by results. He was more like the artist who does his work as best he can because to produce art is his function, and having offered his gift to all that are willing and able to take it, passes on to other work, shrugging his shoulders tolerantly if his gift is declined.
Buddhism is a way of life rather than a religion. It is terribly austere. It is like an unknown sea when the day breaks as though it had never broken before and the colours of the morning steal over the earth as though for the first time and you, your bearings lost, with none to point the way, look with dismay upon the water's desert wastes. All is passing, said the Blessed One, all is sorrow, all is unreal; and he never ceased to insist on the transitoriness that embittered life.
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But is it true that because things pass they are evil? For innumerable centuries moralists, divines and poets have repined because of the transitoriness of created things. But is it not the better part of wisdom to see that change in itself is good? There is a story that Monet, the founder of the impressionists, being troubled with his eyes went to an oculist and trying on some spectacles cried, Good heavens, with these I see the world just like Bouguereau. It is an instructive little anecdote. It is out of their limitations that men create beauty, and the new and lovely things that have been given to the world have been very often but the result of the conflict of the artist with his shortcomings. I hazard the suggestion that Richard Wagner would never have written the Ring if he had been able to compose as neat a tune as Verdi and that Cézanne would never have painted his exquisite pictures if he had been able to draw as well as the academic Ingres. And so with life. Everything changes, nothing remains in one stay, the rose that poured out its perfume on the air this morning is scattered this eve; and it is but good sense not to bewail this, the necessity of life, nor even to accept it with resignation, but to welcome it; it is the chief of the colours we have to work with, nay, it is the canvas on which we paint, and shall we ignore it, shall we deplore it, shall we complain that it makes it impossible to complete our picture? Does the rose smell less sweet because in an hour it dies, is love less precious because it passes, is a song less lovely because we tire of it? If all things are transitory let us find delight in their transitoriness.
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And that on the whole is what we of the West are at last learning to do. We welcome change for its own sake and because of the joy we take in it we have added a value to life. I think it is America that has taught us this lesson, and if that is so it is a greater benefit which that country has conferred upon the world than rag-time, cocktails, the phonograph and the Pullman car.
But I do not suppose that anyone can wander through these Buddhist countries, Burma, the Shan States and Siam, without being intrigued by the doctrine of Karma which is so inextricably interwoven with the habits, thoughts and affections of the peoples with whom he is thrown in contact. It is commonly thought that it was invented by the Blessed One, but in fact is was current in India in his time and he did no more than adopt it with such modifications as were rendered necessary by his disbelief in the soul. For as everyone knows the most important point of the Buddha's teaching was that there was no such thing as a soul or a self. Every person is a putting together of qualities, material and mental; there can be no putting together without a becoming different, and there be no becoming different without a passing away. Whatever has a beginning also has an end. The thought is exhilarating like a brisk winter morning when the sun shines and the road over the Downs is springy under the feet. Karma (I venture to remind the reader) is the theory that a man's actions in one existence determine his fate in the next. At death under the influence of the desire of life the impermanent aggregation of qualities which was a man reassembles to form another aggregation as impermanent. He is merely the present and temporary link in a long chain of cause and effect. The law of Karma prescribes that every act must have its result. It is the only explanation of the evil of this world that does not outrage the heart.
On a previous page I informed the kindly reader that it was my habit to start the day with a perusal of a few pages of a metaphysical work. It is a practice as healthy to the soul as the morning bath is healthy to the body. Though I have not the kind of intelligence that moves easily among abstractions and I often do not altogether understand what I read (this does not too greatly distract me since I find that professional dialecticians often complain that they cannot understand one another) I read on and sometimes come upon a passage that has a particular meaning for me. My way is enlightened now and then by a happy phrase, for the philosophers of the past often wrote more than ordinarily well, and since in the long run a philosopher only describes himself, with his prejudices, his personal hopes and his idiosyncrasies, and they were for the most part men of robust character, I have often the amusement of making acquaintance with a curious personality. In this desultory way I have read most of the great philosophers that the world has seen, trying to learn a little here and there or to get some enlightenment on matters that must puzzle everyone who makes his tentative way through the labyrinthine jungle of this life: nothing has interested me more than the way they treat the problem of evil. I cannot say that I have been greatly enlightened. The best of them have no more to say than that in the long run evil will be found to be good and that we who suffer must accept our suffering with an equal mind. In my perplexity I have read what the theologians had to say on the subject. After all sin is their province and so far as they are concerned the question is simple: if God is good and all-powerful why does he permit evil? Their answers are many and confused; they satisfy neither the heart nor the head, and for my part–I speak of these things humbly because I am ignorant and it may be that though the plain man must ask the question the answer can only be understood by the expert–I cannot accept them.
Now it happened that one of the books I had brought to read on the way was Bradley's Appearance and reality. I had read it before, but had found it difficult and wanted to read it again, but since it was an unwieldy volume I tore off the binding and divided it into sections that I could conveniently put in my pocket when, having read enough, I mounted my pony and rode off from the bungalow in which I had passed the night. It is good reading, and though it scarcely convinces you it is often caustic, and the author has a pleasant gift of irony. He is never pompous. He handles the abstract with a light touch. But it is like one of those cubist houses in an exhibition, very light and trim and airy, but so severe in line and furnished with such austere taste, that you cannot imagine yourself toasting your toes by the fire and lounging in an easy chair with a comfortable book. But when I came upon his treatment of the problem of evil I found myself as honestly scandalised as the Pope at the sight of a young woman's shapely calves. The Absolute, I read, is perfect, and evil, being but an appearance, cannot but subserve to the perfection of the whole. Error contributes to greater energy of life. Evil plays a part in a higher end and in this sense unknowingly is good. The absolute is the richer for every discord. And my memory brought back to me, I know not why, a scene at the beginning of the war. It was in October and our sensibilities were not yet blunted. A cold raw night. There had been what those who took part in it thought a battle, but which was so insignificant a skirmish that the papers did not so much as refer to it, and about a thousand men had been killed and wounded. They lay on straw on the floor of a country church, and the only light came from the candles on the altar. The Germans were advancing and it was necessary to evacuate them as quickly as possible. All through the night the ambulance cars, without lights, drove back and forth, and the wounded cried out to be taken, and some died as they were being lifted on to the stretchers and were thrown on the heap of dead outside the door, and they were dirty and gory, and the church stank of blood and the rankness of humanity. And there was one boy who was so shattered that it was not worth while to move him and as he lay there, seeing men on either side of him being taken out, he screamed at the top of his voice: je ne veux pas mourir. Je suis trop jeune. Je ne veux pas mourir. And he went on screaming that he did not want to die till he died. Of course there is no argument. It was but an inconsiderable incident the only significance of which was I saw it with my own eyes and in my ears for days afterwards rang that despairing cry; but a greater than I, a philosopher and a mathematician into the bargain if you please, said that the heart had its reasons which the head did not know, and (in the grip of compound things, to use the Buddhist phrase, as I am) this scene is to me a sufficient refutation of the metaphysician's fine-spun theories. But my heart can accept the evils that befall me if they are the consequence of actions that I (the I that is not my soul, which perishes, but the result of my deeds in another state of existence) did in past time, and I am resigned to the evils that I see about me, the death of the young, (the most bitter of all) the grief of the mothers that bore them in anguish, poverty and sickness and frustrated hopes, if these evils are but the consequence of the sins which those that suffer them once committed. Here is an explanation that outrages neither the heart nor the head; there is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible.
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