Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s1.1

c6.s1.1

THE most attractive and influential expositions of Buddhism in England and Germany present us with a simple and effective picture of an Indian sage, who spent a blameless life in the years 563 to 483 B. C. engaged in the development of a remarkably sane and modern ethical doctrine. This sage turned aside from idle metaphysical speculations; if he held views on such topics, he deemed them valueless for the purpose of salvation, which was his goal as it was that of his contemporaries, and declined to discuss these issues generally. But he had emancipated himself from the theory of the existence of any permanent entity in the nature of a soul, such as it was understood by his contemporaries; he had abandoned an ego-centric position, and found greater truth in the conception of constant change under a law of causality, thereby effecting a Copernican revolution in the tendency of philosophical thought. This realization of the unreality of the self led him to a wise and reasonable ethical system; the end of man, Nirvāṇa, consists not in strivings, inevitably painful, for the sake of a self which has no real existence, but in the eradication of passion of every kind, which brings man to supreme bliss, attainable and attained only on this earth, a view free from the delusion of a life of perpetual happiness after death.