[Illustration: XXXIX. THE DAGOB OF THE BORO BUDOOR BEFORE ITS RESTORATION
Heart and head rebel against such a religion, which considers conscious life the great enemy to be destroyed, seeks life's meed in dissolution of energy, man's best part flickering out as the flame of a spent candle. With the gladdening odour of the garden of Java in our nostrils, rational instinct struggles free from the torment of imposed passivity and we rather take a more militant stand concordant with the Buddha's dying words: Work out your salvation with diligence. How is it to be done? Shall we turn for guidance to the creed of the men of power and pelf, who seem to think that their best recommendation to divine favour is the defacement, in their western theological mill, of the gospel they received from the East; whose mouths are filled with promises while their hands sow calamity; whose moral superiority is but a delusion; who mar impiously what they pretend to improve; who boast of investing their moral surplus in political efficiency, as King Siladitiya did, for the benefit of their wards, but whose greedy immorality spoils even the reckoning of their own selfishness! Not so: their deeds giving the lie to their words, their iniquities increasing, their trespasses growing up into the heavens, who can wonder that the glory of the deity they profess to worship, suffers in the estimation of the native? And yet, how might Christianity thrive in a soil prepared by the doctrine of elimination of self, by adherence to the three duties Buddhism laid down as far more important than Brahmanic sacrifice: continence, kindness, reverence for the life of all creatures. Insisting on man's obligations to his fellow-men, the Buddha anticipated by six centuries the precept: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. If he did not match it with the first and greater commandment of the Christian dispensation, his atheism, to quote Hunter, was a philosophical tenet which, so far from weakening the sanctions of right and wrong, gave them new strength from the doctrine of Karma or the metempsychosis of character. Teaching that sin, sorrow and deliverance, the state of a man in this life, in all previous and all future lives, is the inevitable result of his own acts, the Buddha applied the inexorable law of cause and effect to the soul: What we sow, we must reap. "All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil," as redemption flowers from straight vision, straight thought, straight exertion in truthful endeavour. The lesson might be profitably taken to heart in furtherance of a nation's Karma by statesmen who have no explanation for the unsatisfactory condition of dependencies oversea but evasive oratory backed by a dexterous shuffling of cooked colonial reports and doctored colonial statistics when the sinister farce of the colonial budget is on the boards. And each of us, however limited his sphere, finds his own opportunities for individual transition to a higher state: like Gautama we meet every day the poor and needy, the old and decrepit in want of assistance, the prostrate sufferer in agony of death.