129. Why has the upright and just man often so much to suffer here on earth?
130. How is it that the wicked and unjust man often enjoys pleasures and honours?
118. What is a meritorious action?
109. Why is not a layman able to reach Nirvana?
We can hear you clamouring to know the answers to these exciting questions; they are right here before us; but our duty is not to solve problems, only to propound them.
But you must get it clearly in your minds that the Buddha is not a God. The Buddhist Catechism expressly rejects “a personal God-Creator,” and “distinctly denies the doctrine of a creation out of nothing. Everything owes its origin and development to its own inherent vitalism, or, what comes to the same, its own will to live.” The Buddha was not a God, but “a man far superior to ordinary men, one of a series of self-enlightened sublime Buddhas, who appear at long intervals in the world, and are morally and spiritually so superior to erring, suffering mankind, that to the childlike conceptions of the multitude they appear as Gods or Messiahs.”
This is all tremendously exciting and leads to many pure and thrilling speculations that are much too honourable to pursue here. They would get us into horrible trouble, we feel sure. Indeed we are not at all certain whether both Frank Shay and ourself are not already subject to possible legal duress for vending and discussing so dangerous a book. But a noble analogy occurs to us which we venture with humility. Charley Chaplin is a great comedian. But the simple-minded drama critics are not content to leave it at that. They will have it (although it is now vieux jeu) that he is really a Great Tragic Artist. And so the tradition will go down to posterity that he was a Secret Hamlet, an Edgar Poe in clown’s trousers. Charley himself, finding that his intellectual disciples insist upon this, perhaps acquiesces in the idea. Only by doing so, he may feel, can he get his stuff across.
It is really very astonishing; at this moment our Employer brings in to us a letter he has had from a publisher, which begins:
Do you agree with me that there is a need for a book on the fundamentals of public opinion, for a book that will endeavor to define the new profession of public relations counsel, its scope and its functions and its relations specifically to the press and to the public generally?
A Public Relations Counsel, of course, is simply the post-war name for a Press Agent. But we mustn’t be ribald. The press agent, if conscientious, may contribute a valuable function. We ourself have worked as a free-lance Press Agent for George Fox, Sir Thomas Browne, Herman Melville, Thoreau, Lao-Tse, Pearsall Smith, and various other people who have seemed to us to have the Right Idea. But one of the troubles is that there have been (and always will be) a lot of unauthorized Public Relations Counsels who get the ear of the crowd and limn upon the great canvas of the public a portrait of the Prophet which is very different from what that poor dreamer himself may have wished. Even the humblest of authors has frequently cursed the publisher’s man who writes the copy for his book-jacket. If you want a really pregnant speculation, weigh in your mind how many Public Relations Counsels there have been in the world of religion, and how amazingly they have interpreted and toned down the simple dissolvents of the founders of their creeds.