by renouncing every accidental advantage, desires for himself no other lot than that of humanity in general cannot desire even this long. The clinging to life and its pleasures must now soon yield, and give place to a universal renunciation; consequently the denial of the will will take place. Since now, in accordance with this, poverty, privation, and special sufferings of many kinds are introduced simply by the perfect exercise of the moral virtues, asceticism in the narrowest sense, thus the surrender of all possessions, the intentional seeking out of what is disagreeable and repulsive, self-mortification, fasts, the hair shirt, and the scourge – all this is rejected by many, and perhaps rightly, as superfluous. Justice itself is the hair shirt that constantly harasses its owner and the charity that gives away what is needed, provides constant fasts.[1] Just on this account Buddhism is free from all strict and excessive asceticism, which plays a large part in Brahmanism, thus from intentional self-mortification. It rests satisfied with the celibacy, voluntary poverty, humility, and obedience of the monks, with abstention from animal food, as also from all worldliness. Since, further, the goal to which the moral virtues lead is that which is here pointed out, the Vedanta philosophy[2] rightly says that after the entrance of true knowledge, with entire resignation in its train, thus the new birth, then the morality or immorality of the past life is a matter of indifference, and uses here also the saying so often quoted by the Brahmans: "Finditur nodus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt, viso supremo illo" (Sancara, sloca 32).
- ↑ If, on the contrary, asceticism is admitted, the list of the ultimate motives of human action, given in my prize essay on the foundation of morals, namely: (1) our own good, (2) the ill of others, and (3) the good of others, must be supplemented by a fourth, our own ill; which I merely mention here in passing in the interests of systematic consistency. In the essay referred to this fourth motive had to be passed over in silence, for the question asked was stated in the spirit of the philosophical ethics prevailing in Protestant Europe.
- ↑ Cf. F. H. H. Windischmann's Sancara, sive de theologumenis Vedanticorum, pp. 116, 117, 121; and also Oupnekhat, vol. i. pp. 340, 356, 360.
