Pain; 4. The way to the annihilation of Pain. Now if existence was, as the Buddhists believed, the source of pain, it was important to discover the source of existence. This the theory of the Nidânas professes to do. It is therefore not only intimately related to the four great truths, but forms an essential supplement to them. A very ancient formula, discovered not only in books but on images, declares that, "Of all things proceeding from cause, the cause of their procession hath the Tathagata explained. The great Sramana has likewise declared the cause of the extinction of all things." Whether this formula refers to the four truths, or to the Nidânas, it is impossible to say. The Nidânas, however, might well be referred to in these terms. They are described in a passage which Burnouf has quoted from the Lalitavistara, in which the Bodhisattva (afterwards Buddha) is stated to have risen through prolonged meditation from the knowledge of each successive consequent to that of its antecedent. The Bodhisattva, we are told, collected his thoughts and fixed his intelligence in the last watch of night, just before the dawn appeared. "Then this thought came into his mind: The existence of this world, which is born, grows old, dies, falls, and is born again, is certainly an evil. But he could not recognize the means of quitting this world, which is nothing but a great accumulation of sorrows, which is composed but of decrepitude, illness, death, and other miseries, which are altogether formed of them.
"This reflection brought the following thought into his mind: What is the thing the existence of which leads to decrepitude and death, and what cause have decrepitude and death? This reflection came into his mind: Birth existing, decrepitude and death exist; for decrepitude and death have birth as their cause."
A similar process of reasoning led him to see that the cause of birth was existence; that of existence, conception; that of conception, desire; that of desire, sensation; that of sensation, contact; that of contact, the six seats of sensible qualities; that of the six seats, name and form; that of name and form, knowledge; that of knowledge, the concepts; that of the concepts, ignorance. "It is thus," exclaims the Bodhisattva when this great light had burst upon him, "it is thus that the production
