It is a consolation which a large proportion, probably more than half, of mankind shares with our politicians.  Like them, the greater part of mankind is aware that there is peace somewhere beyond these voices, that life with all its unsatisfied longings and its repetition of care is transitory as a summer cloud, and that the only way of escape from the pain and misery, the foulness and corruption, of this material universe is by the destruction of all desires, except the one engrossing desire for non-existence.  That is why the majority of mankind has set itself to overcome the unholy urgings of ambition, the pleasure of selfish and revengeful purposes, and the deeply-implanted delight in cruelty and unkindness.  Such conquest is the essential part of the Fourfold Path by which the bliss of extinction may be attained.  Let him cease to be ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a politician may slowly be extinguished.  Life follows life, and each life fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain of previous existences.  “Quisque suos patimur manes.”  The sin that most easily besets us fixes the shape of our next incarnation, and, did not a politician strictly follow the guidance of the Fourfold Path, the first election after his death might see him re-appear as a sheep, a cave-dweller, or a rat.

Never to have been born is best; never to be born again is the hope and motive of all good men among the greater part of mankind.  It is not only the teaching of the most famous Buddha which has told them so.  A Preacher more familiar to us has said the same, and our Western churches do but repeat an echo from the East.  “I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive,” he wrote; “yea, better is he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.”  Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery? asked Job.  From age to age the question has been asked by far more than half the human race, and yet the human race continues, miserable and unholy though it is.

But the widest expression of this common cry is found in Buddhism, and therein is found also a doctrine of peace that seeks to answer it.  From the turmoil of the street and market-place, from the atomic vortex of public meetings, ballot stations, and motors decked with flags, let us turn to the “Psalms of the Sisters,” those Buddhist nuns whose utterances Mrs. Rhys Davids has edited for the Pali Text Society.  In this inextricable error of existence—­this charnel-house of corrupting bodies wherein the soul lies imprisoned too long—­time and space do not seriously matter.  Let us turn from Haggerston and Battersea and the Parliamentary squabbles of to-day, and visit the regions where the great mountains were standing and the holy Ganges flowed within two or three centuries before or after the birth of Christ.