The European view of life differs from the Asiatic chiefly in attributing a value to actions in themselves, and in not being disturbed by the fact that their results are impermanent.  It is, in fact, the theoretical side of the will to live, which can find expression in a treatise on metaphysics as well as in an act of procreation.  An Englishman according to his capacity and mental culture is satisfied with some such rule of existence as having a good time, or playing the game, or doing his duty, or working for some cause.  The majority of intelligent men are prepared to devote their lives to the service of the British Empire:  the fact that it must pass away as certainly as the Empire of Babylon and that they are labouring for what is impermanent does not disturb them and is hardly ever present to their minds.  Those Europeans who share with Asiatics some feeling of dissatisfaction with the impermanent try to escape it by an unselfish morality and by holding that life, which is unsatisfactory if regarded as a pursuit of happiness, acquires a new and real value if lived for others.  And from this point of view the European moralist is apt to criticize the Buddhist truths of suffering and the release from suffering as selfish.  But Buddhism is as full as or fuller than Christianity of love, self-sacrifice and thought for others.  It says that it is a fine thing to be a man and have the power of helping others:  that the best life is that which is entirely unselfish and a continual sacrifice.  But looking at existence as a whole, and accepting the theory that the happiest and best life is a life of self-sacrifice, it declines to consider as satisfactory the world in which this principle holds good.  Many of the best Europeans would probably say that their ideal is not continual personal enjoyment but activity which makes the world better.  But this ideal implies a background of evil just as much as does the Buddha’s teaching.  If evil vanished, the ideal would vanish too.

There is one important negative aspect of the truth of suffering and indeed of all the four truths.  A view of human life which is common in Christian and Mohammedan countries represents man as put in the world by God, and human life as a service to be rendered to God.  Whether it is pleasant, worth living or not are hardly questions for God’s servants.  There is no trace of such a view in the Buddha’s teaching.  It is throughout assumed that man in judging human life by human standards is not presumptuous or blind to higher issues.  Life involves unhappiness:  that is a fact, a cardinal truth.  That this unhappiness may be ordered for disciplinary or other mysterious motives by what is vaguely called One above, that it would disappear or be explained if we could contemplate our world as forming part of a larger universe, that “there is some far off divine event,” some unexpected solution in the fifth act of this complicated tragedy, which could justify the creator of this dukkhakkhandha, this mass of unhappiness—­for all such ideas the doctrine of the Blessed One has nothing but silence, the courteous and charitable silence which will not speak contemptuously.  The world of transmigration has neither beginning nor end nor meaning:  to those who wish to escape from it the Buddha can show the way:  of obligation to stop in it there can be no question[441].