..續本文上一頁perpetual impermanence, should not seem to be so very difficult to people who are used to discriminate. Yet most of those who even scientifically accept universal impermanence make a double exception, thereby breaking down their own logic. First of all there are those who are firmly convinced of the impermanent nature of all things, but who maintain at the same time an underlying substance that unchangingly supports the ever-changing pheno­mena. Secondly there are those who place themselves outside the field of observation, thus imagining to judge the phenomena objectively, as if they were the only fixed point in this raging ocean of change.

　　No, there is no exception to the law of nature that all component things are transient: sabbe sa.nkhaaraa aniccaa.

　　But why should suffering always be the result of impermanence

　　 Not all separation is bound up with sorrow.

　　The rays of the setting sun part with the landscape, clouds are dispersed by the blowing wind, yet there is no suffering. Only that separation, only that transience, which is experienced through the delusion of self, is expe­rienced as sorrow, But when there is no “self,” when soullessness, “anattaa,” is not only known but also realized, then there will still be transience, but no more sorrow. And transience too will be no more when all component things are decomposed.

　　Sorrow thus depends on transience, and on the mis­conception of “self.” As long as “self” is not understood as a misconception, as a delusion, as an act of ignorance, so long also impermanency will not be understood as suffer­ing. Here nothing can be learned by argument. Here nothing can help, but to pass, over and over again, through the crucible of suffering and thus to learn by experience. This is the meaning of sa.msaara. It is our egoism that makes us suffer, and suffer direly all the more, because we suffer in ignorance.

　　The fact of suffering is admitted by all, but it is not by all understood in the same way.

　　There are some, (like the Hindus) who do not see sorrow as real, but as an illusion; it is an illusion indeed to see sorrow as an illusion, not as real. There are others, (like the Christians,) who admit the widespread fact of sorrow in human life, but they consider it as a pine favour: “Blessed are the sorrowful.” It is the sickly effect of an over-worked imagination.

　　There are others again, (like the Moslems) who do not see much evil in the world at all and submit to it fatalistically. It is contrary to actuality.

　　But in Buddhism sorrow is not accepted as a blessing in disguise, but as an evil to get rid of; sorrow is not an illusion, but real enough, though it is dependent on igno­rance; sorrow is not to be submitted to, but to be over­come. And Buddhism alone teaches how to overcome in a final victory which needs not to be fought again, because it teaches how to uproot the evil and cut down the root by the overcoming of craving, through which alone an escape from “self,” from sorrow and transience is possible. If the breadth and the depth of a religion may be measured by the keenness of its analysis of evil and by the appro­priateness of the salvation that it offers, then certainly the prize should go to Buddhism. For, when sorrow is identical with life, the only solution lies in no-more-rebirth. But rebirth and all the evil resulting therefrom will occur as long as there is the will to live.

　　Thus that will to live, that desire to be, that lust to enjoy, that craving to possess, that clinging to keep, has to be rooted out so that it will not grow again.

　　“Through not understanding the Noble Truths of Suffering, its origin, its cessation and the way to its cessa­tion, we have been wandering in this beginningless sa.msaara, both you and I,” said Lo…

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