CONCLUSION
It is clear, without further need of demonstration, that with the Kamma teaching of the Buddha there is given the ferment of an actual morality as of an actual religion. A morality and a religion are actual when they are functions of cognition.
All morality rests upon selflessness. If selflessness is not to be blind asceticism or equally blind training, it must have a motive.
This is supplied by the Kamma teaching.
For where I apprehend myself as a process that sustains itself through itself, i.e. through its volitions, I know that in every moment I myself fashion the next moment, and with this present life, the life that shall follow it. In correct insight I become in the most literal sense the architect of my fate.
From this, selflessness follows as an evident necessity.
All religion consists in the need of looking beyond this life, of relating it to another, a higher. The Kamma teaching reveals to me that it is the succeeding life to which this life “is related.”
From this, morality and religion follow as functions of cognition.
One perceives that such a teaching as this perforce involves profound changes in the appraisement of life-values, and along with this, changes in the relations of the individual to his environment, which includes changes in his social relationships.
The perfumed brutality of our civilization has its root in false ideas of the meaning and significance of life, from which results a false appraisement of life-values. We take the symptoms for the things themselves, and are drowned in their inexhaustibility without once being able to win through to ourselves. That we are all steering a wrong course must be finally clear to every thinking man. But since none knows of any remedy this is sought practically in a combat with the symptoms—that is, one bails the water out of the sinking craft and forgets to stop the leak; and theoretically it is sought in the setting up of all sorts of artificial ideals—that is, in emotion-values.
Neither of these makeshifts is of any avail. Help can only come from thinking, through the acquiring of a correct idea as to the worth of our so-called life-values.
It is just here that the Buddha-thought comes in as teacher, as educator, as revolutioniser of values—in fine, as the gospel of thought, and gives a new turn to that terrible, blind “struggle for existence,” to which as to some dread mania, we all are subject.
Buddhism is the doctrine of actuality, the Kamma teaching, the outcome of thinking in terms of actuality. To render it accessible to the thinking of the modern man, to make it possible for him to let his glance rove free from out the mole-like existence of aims and objects himself has turned up, away past the overthrown barriers of a cramping ignorance—for this it is necessary that the non-actual and the re-actual forms of world-theory, which, as faith and science respectively, everywhere obstruct free outlook, should be swept clean away, or at the very least confined strictly to their own proper domain. Room must be made for actuality and for thinking in terms of actuality.
That was the main task of this book.
But of such sort is truth that it will not suffer that way be made for it by violent measures of any kind. One thing only here is permissible: to point it out, patiently and repeatedly point it out. Its way it makes of its own self.
“Over all gifts victorious is the gift of the truth.”
THE END
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