The Final Philosole of the Veda 263
their dead, goes hand in hand in all higher forms of Hindu religion with the apparently sincere eXpres- sion of a. desire to be released from life. I’cssimism, at first negative, in the end positive and profound, becomes the ruling theory of llindu life. With all the attractions. fascinntions, nnd beauties of life, life is felt to be e fetter, or a knot which ties the heart to the world of sense; and release (moire/2n) from the everlasting round of lives (mmsdm) is the Hindu salvation (nirodmz). Buddhism Inter on expresses the urgent need of salvation from existence in its well~known fourfold doctrine of suffering. Its first clause establishes the truth of suffering: Birth is suffering; age is suffering; disease is suffering; union with what is not loved is suffering ; separation from what is loved is suffering. The conviction that all life is futile is expressed hardly less distinctly in the Great Forest Upanishsd (3.. 5. 2 ), where hunger and thirst, woe and delusion, age and death, desire for children, and desire for possessions are lumped alike as the evils and vanities of life, before the highest knowledge has been nttz-tinedfil Anyhow, all the principal Hindu systems of religion and philosoPhy
1 “ How many births are past, I cannot tell ; How many yet to come. no men can say: But this alone I know. and know full well, That pain and grief embitter all the way.” (South-Indian Folk-song, quoted in the Rev. Dr. John Morrison’s
New [dam in India, p. 2I3.)
