Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.t1.10

c8.t1.10

∗ This sentence has become in later ages the briefly-expressed confession of faith of Buddhism; it is to be met inscribed on numerous monuments. Undoubtedly it refers to the doctrine of the concatenation of causes and effects, on which doctrine tradition, as we have seen (p. 114) represents Buddha’s thoughts as being fixed, when he sits under the sacred tree of the Buddhahood. The painful destiny of the world works itself out in the chain of operations, which flow from ignorance; the doctrine of Buddha tells us what these existences are, dependent one on another, springing from ignorance, and how they come to an end, i.e., how the suffering of the world is removed.