The essential doctrine of the Buddha, however, is determined by the belief in transmigration. His cry of triumph at the time of his enlightenment is to the effect that the long series of suffering existences through which he has passed has now come to an end, and that he will not be born again. And what he preaches with constant iteration is the misery of this awful succession of births to renewal of suffering, and the infinite blessedness of escaping from this cycle. The disciple, when converted, is to be able to say: "Hell is destroyed for me, and rebirth as an animal or a ghost or in any place of woe. I am converted, I am no longer liable to be reborn in a state of suffering, and am assured of eternal salvation."
Now it rests with a man's own acts to end his sufferings. The chain of causation which ends with suffering begins with ignorance. The ignorance which is meant is that of the four noble truths, of the way of salvation. Let a man cease from ignorance, let him accept the Noble Truths and the insight they convey into the cause of suffering, then by ceasing to thirst, or to burn, or in our own language by turning his mind away from all desire, believing that what he does will be effective for his salvation, he sets up a chain of causation in an opposite direction, and having destroyed ignorance he may rest assured that he has destroyed suffering too and is in the right way. The burden he has inherited he will not need to carry any farther, but will, when he dies, lay down for ever.
When we look at the fourth Noble Truth, which tells what a man has to do in order to obtain this salvation, we are at first surprised. After the deep earnestness with which the nature of the disease and the cause and cure of the disease have been stated, we expect that stronger practical measures will be asked for than these eight forms of moderation. Christianity speaks of cutting off the right hand, plucking out the right eye, in order to cut off desire: and the Brahmanic method of union with the Deity was, as we have seen, that of the most extreme self-mortification united with contemplation. This Brahmanic method, the _yoga_ by which the devotee sought to escape from all the accidents of being and to make himself one with the great Self, the Buddha had tried for six years; but he had given it up for a year when the hour of his enlightenment struck, and he explicitly condemns for others the path he had found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution which works inexorably in one life the result stored up in previous lives, is that of a careful and unintermitted self-discipline, which does not run to extremes, but practices, with perfectly clear purpose and self-possession, the needful virtues mentioned in the fourth of the Noble Truths. What are these? There is to be--
