..續本文上一頁o Deliverance by the avoidance of both extremes.
Now, after more than 2,500 years, that same discourse is still applicable, word for word, because only a few have understood and seen, whose ears and eyes were only slightly covered with the dust of ignorance and lust.
The doors to the Deathless are opened wide still for everyone who cares to see.
But also the two extremes are there, more attractive than ever. One extreme is “being intent upon luxurious living in sensuous pleasures, which is despicable, vulgar, ordinary, base, leading to no good.” It is the extreme of materialism, which sees but one origin, matter; and which strives but for one end, material well-being.
The other extreme is “being intent upon self-mortification which is painful, ignoble, leading to no good.” It is the extreme of idealism, which sees but one reality, that of thought; and strives but for one end, the liberation of that thinking “self.”
It was again at the end of the last century that scientific materialism and idealistic monism confronted one another as two independent modes of thought. Theoretically opposed like two extremes, they practically converge both in their starting point and in their goal. “Self” is their beginning and satisfaction is their end.
There is very little difference between the materialists, condemned by the Lord Buddha, the-Epicureans of 300 B.C. denying an external agency as the cause of matter and hence concluding that the highest good was pleasure, and the later materialists like Hobbes, or the Positivists like Comté and Stuart Mill, holding that only the sensuous can be an object of knowledge.
Though cautious thinkers have abandoned the attempt to explain the entire universe in terms of matter and motion—though the frank materialism of Moleschott (1852), relegating all the phenomena of life and mind to the changes of matter, is dead to all appearances—yet this scientific thinking had deep repercussions, the effects of which will long still be felt.
As soon as science became applied, human craving monopolized it for the sake of its own satisfaction. Inventions have been utilized for the increase of comfort. But increase of comfort has only led to desire for still more; and the desire for more has led and will always lead to conflict and conquest. “Over-civilization has brought us to a point where the work of getting food is so strenuous that we lose our appetite for food in the process of getting it” (Lin Yutang).
Life has become unnatural because it has become mechanized; man is reduced to the position of a cogwheel in a machine. Like a cogwheel is moved on and on by other, sometimes smaller, wheels, and thus by turning round and round merely passes on that movement to the next, thus man, to find his place in society must move on with society, and in his whirling round gets hold also of others, whom he drags along with him in the vortex of materialism.
Surely, that is “despicable, vulgar, ordinary, base, leading to no good.”
The other extreme is idealism, which expresses itself in different ways. Yet at bottom they are outgrowths from one root—self.
Fichte in his subjective idealism held that it is the “I” alone who exists; all the rest is a modification of my mind. Schelling and Berkeley tell us in their objective idealism that all, including the “I,” are mere manifestations of the Absolute. Finally Hegel informs us in his absolute idealism that only the relation between subject and object is real.
Has all this anything to do with the extreme against which the Buddha warned us when showing his Middle Path
Addiction to self-mortification is merely the practical side of the speculation of idealism. In idealism the “self” is sublimated, with the natural consequence that the “self” must…
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