Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/323

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL
307

"eighteenth century" through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word "tao" underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word "Logos" in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word "Force" between Galileo's day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religion of educated people," Nature and Virtue — but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.[1] Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning. Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism[2] — both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field — recognized, as everyone knows, neither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little can now be ascertained — for it all appears in the colours of the later fellah-religion baptized by his name — but one of the unquestionably authentic ideas concerning "conditioned arising"[3] is the derivation of suffering from ignorance — ignorance, namely, of the "Four Noble Truths." This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the "Autarkeia" and "Eudaimonia" of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is.

The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage goes back to Nature — to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens or Indian groves — which is the most intellectual way of being a megalopolitan. The sage is the man of the Golden Mean. His askesis consists in a judicious depreciation of the world in favour of meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never interferes with comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a sacrifice, a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue with Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine intellectual egoism. And so the ethical teacher who is outside real religion becomes the Philistine. Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their

  1. ↑ Whereas "virtu" in Dante always carries a connotation of vital force, as also docs the older English use of the word; e.g., in Chaucer's "of which vertue engendred is the flour," (Canterbury Tales, Prol. 4) and in the Bible (Mark v, 30). In Mediæval Latin "virtutes" is used for miracles. — Tr.
  2. ↑ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Jains." — Tr.
  3. ↑ E.g., "Given eye and visible object, visual consciousness arises; the conjunction of the three is contact; whereby conditioned, arises feeling; whereby conditioned, arises perception. ..." Majjima Nikhaya, I, 111 (quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism). — Tr.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.