could equal but one-sixteenth part of such pain.(1)

The foregoing comparison is unnecessarily strong; but the
Buddhist teaching about heaven is in substance eminently logical.
The suppression of pain--mental or physical,--in any conceivable
state of sentient existence, would necessarily involve the
suppression also of pleasure;--and certainly all progress,
whether moral or material, depends upon the power to meet and to
master pain. In a silkworm-paradise such as our mundane instincts
lead us to desire, the seraph freed from the necessity of toil,
and able to satisfy his every want at will, would lose his wings
at last, and sink back to the condition of a grub....


(1) This statement refers only to the Heavens of Sensuous
Pleasure,--not to the Paradise of Amida, nor to those heavens
into which one enters by the Apparitional Birth. But even in the
highest and most immaterial zones of being,--in the Heavens of
Formlessness,--the cessation of effort and of the pain of effort,
involves the penalty of rebirth in a lower state of existence.


III

I told the substance of my revery to Niimi. He used to be a great
reader of Buddhist books.

"Well," he said, "I was reminded of a queer Buddhist story by the
proverb that you asked me to explain,--The silkworm-moth eyebrow
of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man. According