adequately repaid[473].  If a man were to carry his parents about on his shoulders for a hundred years or could give them all the kingdoms and treasures of the earth, he still would not discharge his debt of gratitude[474].  But whereas Confucius said that the good son does not deviate from the way of his father, the Buddha, who was by no means conservative in religious matters, said that the only way in which a son could repay his parents was by teaching them the True Law.

The Buddha defines the sixth section of the path more fully than those which precede.  Right effort, he says, is when a monk makes an effort, and strives to prevent evil states of mind from arising:  to suppress them if they have arisen:  to produce good states of mind, and develop and perfect them.  Hitherto we have been considering morality, indispensable but elementary.  This section is the beginning of the specially Buddhist discipline of mental cultivation.  The process is apt to seem too self-conscious:  we wonder if a freer growth would not yield better fruits.  But in a comparison with the similar programmes of other religions Buddhism has little to fear.  Its methods are not morbid or introspective:  it does not fetter the intellect with the bonds of authority.  The disciple has simply to discriminate between good and bad thoughts, to develop the one and suppress the other.  It is noticeable that under this heading of right effort, or right wrestling as it is sometimes called, both desire and striving for good ends are consecrated.  Sloth and torpor are as harmful to spiritual progress as evil desires and as often reprimanded.  Also the aim is not merely negative:  it is partly creative.  The disciple is not to suppress will and feeling, but he is to make all the good in him grow; he should foster, increase and perfect it.

What is right-mindfulness[475], the seventh section of the path?  It is “When a monk lives as regards the body, observant of the body, strenuous, conscious, mindful and has rid himself of covetousness and melancholy”:  and similarly as regards the sensations, the mind and phenomena.  The importance of this mindfulness is often insisted on.  It amounts to complete self-mastery by means of self-knowledge which allows nothing to be done heedlessly and mechanically and controls not merely recognized acts of volition but also those sense-impressions in which we are apt to regard the mind as merely receptive.  “Self is the lord of self:  who else should be the lord?  With self well subdued, a man finds a lord such as few can find[476].”

Although the Buddha denies that there is any soul or self (atta) apart from the skandhas, yet here his ethical system seems to assume that a ruling principle which may be called self does exist.  Nor is the discrepancy fully explained by saying that the non-existence of self or soul is the correct dogma and that expressions like self being the lord of self are concessions to the exigencies of exposition.  The evolution of the self-controlled saint out of the confused mental states of the ordinary man is a psychological difficulty.  As we shall see, when the eightfold path has been followed to the end new powers arise in the mind, new lights stream into it.  Yet if there is no self or soul, where do they arise, into what do they stream?