parts of his material personality fall apart, and a new complex is formed, of which the individuality is the effect of the karma of the preceding complex.  The new person is one’s karmic self, but it is not one’s identical ego.  There appears, therefore, even in the doctrine of Nirv[=a]na, to lie something of that altruism so conspicuous in the insistence on kindness and conversion of others.  It is to save from sorrow this son of one’s acts that one should seek to find the end.  But there is no soul to save.

We cannot insist too often on the fact that the religion of Buddha was not less practical than human.  He practiced, as he taught, that the more one worked for others, was devoted to others, the less he cared for himself, the less was he the victim of desire.  Hence he says that a true Nirv[=a]na may come even in one’s own lifetime—­the utter surrender of one’s self is Nirv[=a]na,[30] while the act of dying only draws the curtain after the tragedy has ended.  “Except,” Buddha says, “for birth, age, and death, there would be no need of Buddha.”

A review of Buddha’s system of metaphysics is, therefore, doubly unnecessary for our present purpose.[31] In the first place we believe that most of the categories and metaphysical niceties of Buddhism, as handed down, are of secondary origin; and, were this not so, it is still evident that they were but the unimportant, intellectual appendage of a religion that was based on anything but metaphysical subtleties.  Buddha, like every other teacher of his time, had to have a ‘system,’ though whether the system handed down as his reverts to him it is impossible to say.  But Buddha’s recondite doctrine was only for the wise.  “It is hard to learn for an ordinary person,” says Buddha himself.  But it was the ordinary person that Buddhism took to its bosom.  The reason can be only the one we have given.  For the last stage before Arhat-ship Buddha had ready a complicate system.  But he did not inflict it on the ordinary person.[32] It was not an essential but the completing of his teaching; in his own eyes truth as represented by the Four Great Truths was the real doctrine.

The religion of Buddha, for the mass of people, lies in the Four Great Truths and their practical application to others, which implies kindness and love of humanity.  For Buddha, whatever may have been the reluctance with which he began to preach, shows in all his teachings and dealings with men an enduring patience under their rebuffs, a brotherly sympathy with their weakness, and a divine pity for their sorrows.  Something, too, of divine anger with the pettiness and meanness of the unworthy ones among his followers, as when, after preaching with parable and exhortation to the wrangling brothers of the monastery of Kosamb[=i], he left them, saying, “’Truly these fools are infatuate; it is no easy task to administer instruction to them,’ and,” it is added simply, “he rose from his seat and went away."[33]