..續本文上一頁ncluding among such "acquisitions" the bodily and mental processes that we identify as our self. The achievement of this end is necessarily inpidual. It must be arrived at through personal purification and personal insight, as the fruit of sustained effort in fulfilling the entire course of training. Hence the Buddha did not set out to found a church capable of embracing all humanity within the fold of a single creed. He lays down a path — a path perfect in its ideal formulation — to be trodden by imperfect human beings under the imperfect conditions that life within the world affords. While the quest for the highest goal culminates in deliverance from the world, this same ideal "bends back" toward the world and spells out standards of conduct and a scale of values to guide the unenlightened manyfolk in their daily struggles against the streams of greed, hatred, and delusion. Nibbana remains the "chief point" and the omega point of the Dhamma. But as this goal is to be experienced as the extinction of greed, hatred, and delusion, it defines the condition for its realization as a life devoted to overcoming greed through generosity, to overcoming hatred through patience and loving kindness, and to overcoming delusion through wisdom and understanding.

　　In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul asserts that "the ”enlightenment” experienced by the Buddha comes down to the conviction that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and suffering for man" (p.85). No doubt the fact that the book consistently encloses the word "enlightenment" in quotation marks already suggests that the Pope”s attitude to Buddhism is not an appreciative one. This suggestion is confirmed by his manner of characterizing the content of the enlightenment, which reduces the Buddha”s great awakening beneath the Bodhi tree to a caricature.

　　By way of rejoinder it should first be said that Buddhism does not regard the world in itself as either good or bad, and the Buddha never described the world as "the source of evil" for man. The Buddhist texts scrupulously use terms with moral connotations, such as "good" and "evil," solely to evaluate intentional actions and the persons and states of mind from which such actions spring. They do not ascribe moral qualities to entities that are incapable of moral initiative. Thus actions are bad (papa, akusala) when they intend harm and suffering for oneself and others, good (kalyana, kusala) when they aim at promoting happiness and well-being. The Buddha”s analysis of the roots of good and evil also proceeds entirely within the sphere of psychological ethics without overstepping the bounds of that domain. According to the Buddha the roots of evil are the unwholesome springs of action: greed, hatred, and delusion; the roots of good are non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion, i.e., detachment, loving-kindness, and understanding. The process of spiritual development in Buddhism can be described, from one angle, as the attenuation and eradication of the unwholesome roots by the cultivation of their wholesome opposites. The entire process centers upon the mind as the sole source of both good and evil, with the world set well in the background of this striving for internal purification.

　　In his formula of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha does declare that worldly existence is dukkha, but dukkha does not mean evil. It means, rather, unsatisfactory, inadequate, subject to suffering. To understand why the Buddha states that all worldly existence is dukkha one must view this statement in its wider context. According to the Buddha”s teaching, our inpidual lives unfold within a beginningless cycle of rebirths, samsara, wherein all living beings except the enlightened ones wander on driven by the thirst for continued becoming…

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