..续本文上一页ct from two different viewpoints. One is the view of those who believe in a supernatural cause and thus maintain an ultimate beginning or creation. To them the Buddha repeat­edly declared that an absolute first beginning of existence is something unthinkable, and that all such like specula­tions may lead to imbecility (AN 4:77). We shall revert to this view after having explained the Buddha”s doctrine of origination.

　　His doctrine is not fruitless speculation, but is based on actuality. Hence it will be understood best, when as starting point is taken not some imaginary time in the un­traceable past, called “In the beginning …” but an actual fact of the present, which is open to investigation and ex­periment.

　　The fact of suffering and the fact that all is suffering, because all is impermanent, is indeed the actual basis from which one can start the reconstruction pointing towards origination; it is also the basis from which the work of Deliverance can be started.

　　Unless the fact of suffering is understood as universal, as explained on a previous occasion, it is impossible to find out its origin, impossible to find deliverance therefrom. Here is no revelation needed, and hence the supernatural signifies nothing; here mere argument avails nothing, for mere words cannot solve an actual problem. And thus we start not with the beginning, but with the actual, experi­mental fact that life is sorrow-fraught.

　　Now it is clear that this sorrow and disappointment, due to the impermanence of all things, is only possible where there is conscious life to perceive the same. Thus we have the well-known formula, jaati-paccayaa jaraa-mara.na.m: dependent on birth is old age, death and all kinds of woe. As death should be understood in the sense of dissolu­tion in the physical as well as in the psychical sense, so birth should be understood in the sense of conception, physical and mental. Thus rebirth and death do not occur only once at the beginning and the end of a lifetime re­spectively, but at every new thought-moment, so that the saying, “quotidie morior”: I die daily, (1 Cor. Xv.31) receives an unexpectedly new meaning in the Buddhist sense, It is the wrong view of seeing death only at the end of a lifetime which produces that misconception of a self, transmigrating from life to life.

　　Death is not caused by birth, neither is sorrow, but both are dependent in their arising on the fact of birth. Thus birth is the conditio sine qua non, the upanissaya paccayaa, the condition of sufficing efficiency. It is the natu­ral disposition (pakatuupanissayaa) of any birth to give rise to sorrow; not the cause thereof, but the necessary circum­stance under which that relation obtains, an indispensable, antecedent phenomenon. The characteristics of decline (jarataa) and impermanence (aniccataa) are natural to all matter. They are not produced by any principle at all, i.e. not by kamma, mind, season or nutriment (lak­kha.naani na jaayanti kehici ti pakaasita.m)

　　Where suffering is dependent on birth by which it is conditioned, birth itself is caused by kamma.

　　“Dependent on the kamma-process of becoming is rebirth” (bhava-paccayaa jaati). It is the active kamma process that produces the passive rebirth-process (uppatti-­bhava), where the reaction has to work out, where the result (vipaaka) has to be outlived. It is the will to live that makes one live again. It is this lust for life that con­ditions the kind of life to come. No other doctrine can explain the differences that appear, though outward con­ditions may be absolutely the same. This process of becoming is volition transmuted into action with skilful or unskilful consequences. As soon as the opportunity is favourable it will reproduce itself…

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