theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking
it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to
meditation and study. Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of
the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but human,
business-like and clear. We are inclined to see in the monastic life
which he recommended little but a useless sacrifice but it is evident
that in the opinion of his contemporaries his disciples had an easy
time, and that he had no intention of prescribing any cramped or
unnatural existence. He accepted the current conviction that those who
devote themselves to the things of the mind and spirit should be
released from worldly ties and abstain from luxury but he meant his
monks to live a life of sustained intellectual activity for themselves
and of benevolence for others. His teaching is formulated in severe and
technical phraseology, yet the substance of it is so simple that many
have criticized it as too obvious and jejune to be the basis of a
religion. But when he first enunciated his theses some two thousand five
hundred years ago, they were not obvious but revolutionary and little
less than paradoxical.

The principal of these propositions are as follows. The existence of
everything depends on a cause: hence if the cause of evil or suffering
can be detected and removed, evil itself will be removed. That cause is
lust and craving for pleasure[9]. Hence all sacrificial and sacramental
religions are irrelevant, for the cure which they propose has nothing to
do with the disease. The cause of evil or suffering is removed by
purifying the heart and by following the moral law which sets high value
on sympathy and social duties, but an equally high value on the
cultivation of individual character. But training and cultivation imply
the possibility of change. Hence it is a fatal mistake in the religious
life to hold a view common in India which regards the essence of man as