to ritual, not to morals. To place it along with prohibitions of murder and theft, is simply to confuse in the minds of hearers the all-important distinction between special observances and universal duties. Again, the fifth and tenth commandments require mere emotional conditions; respect for parents in the one case, absence of covetousness in the other. No doubt both these mental conditions have actions and abstinences from action as their correlatives; but it is with these last that law should deal, and not with the mere states of feeling over which no commandment can exercise the smallest control. Law may forbid us to annoy our neighbor, or do him an injury on account of his wife whom we love, or his estate which we desire to possess; but it is idle to forbid us to wish that the wife or the estate were ours.
These errors are avoided in the five fundamental commandments of Buddhism, which relate wholly to matters that, if binding upon any, are binding upon all. They are these:—
1. Not to kill.
2. Not to steal.
3. Not to indulge in illicit pleasures of sex.
4. Not to lie.
5. Not to drink intoxicating liquors.[1]
No doubt the fifth is not of equal importance with the rest; yet its intention is simply to put a stop to drunkenness, and this it accomplishes, like teetotal societies, by requiring entire abstinence. Probably in hot climates, and with populations not capable of much self-control, this was the wisest way. The third commandment, as I have presented it, is somewhat vague, but this is because the form in which it is given by the authorities is not always the same. Sometimes it appears as a mere prohibition of all unchastity; but the more probable view appears to be that of Burnouf, who interprets it as directed against adultery, in substantial accordance with Alabaster, who renders it as an injunction "not to indulge the passions, so as to invade the legal or natural rights of other men."
In the eight principal commandments of the Parsees, the
- ↑ R. B., vol. i. p. 434.—Lotus, p. 447.—Wheel, p. xliii,
