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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Of the Ways to Perfection|3-161}}
{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Of the Ways to Perfection|3-161}}
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{{Style P-No indent|oppressive that we can scarcely bear it with a tolerable''' '''amount of patience. Look at birth; examine existence during its duration, consider the senses, the organs of our life. In every direction our eyes will meet with an accumulation of pain, sufferings, and miseries; on every side we are beset with dangers, difficulties, and calamities; no where are lasting joy or permanent rest to be found. In vain do we go in quest of lasting health or happiness; both are chimerical: objects, no where to be met with. But everywhere do we find afflictions.”}}
And of illusion, or ''anatta, ''he speaks thus:
“If we consider this world with some attention, we shall never be able to discover in it anything but name and form; and, as a necessary consequence, all that exists is illusion. This is the manner in which we must carry on our reasoning. The things that I see and know are not myself, nor from myself, nor in myself. What seems to be myself is really neither myself nor belongs to myself. They are but illusions, or as nothing relatively to me. The form is not a form; the attributes of a living being are not attributes; beings are not beings. All is but an aggregate of the four elements, and these again are but form and name, and these only illusion, destitute of all reality. In a being, then, there are but two attributes, form and sensation, that appear to have a little more consistency than the rest; yet these have no reality; their very nature and condition is to be destitute alike of reality and stability. Penetrated with the absolute truth of these considerations, the sage declares at once that all things are neither himself, nor belong to himself. Nothing therefore appears worthy of his notice; he divorces himself from the world, and all that is therein. He would fain have nothing to do with it He holds it in supreme contempt, disgust, and aversion. He who hath reached this lofty pinnacle of sublime science is at once secure from the snares of seduction and the path of error. He will escape from the whirlpool of miseries, and infallibly reach the rest of Nirwana, The most perfect are so taken up with this view of Nirwana that they tend thither without effort.”
Christ does not say so clearly as Buddha did all this, yet his words imply a good deal thereof. He had to do with a lower, a less philosophical, a more degraded type of humanity. “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven." “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto the mountains,” etc. So also St. Paul: "For the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, is made subject to vanity, i.e. illusion," etc. “God made man in his own image"—a purely spiritual being; when man fell, he died to the spiritual world, i. e. he lost his spiritual attributes, and the first symptoms of this death—his false perception of his body—at once led God to diagnose his fall; “Who told thee that thou hadst a body requiring to be clothed? Hast thou eaten of the tree?" The serpent’s words were a quibble. He did not die materially, but he died spiritually; before he knew only good, he then came to know evil, i.e. pain, change, illusion, also. He became subject to the law of merit and demerit. Matter, time, and space are all delusions consequent on this spiritual death; false or relative perceptions, dependent on ''tseit, ''or state. Spirit, Eternity, and Infinity are the only realities perceptible only to the twice born man.