Jesus and Gotama have indicated how by the suppression of this "Tanha," how by detachment from the things of the world, we can approach that simple cellular life-stage which is on the road to Heaven, Nirvana, and the Unconditioned. It is easy to realize how much pleasanter it would have been for us all if the simple cellule from which we spring had not been so persistently ambitious in the direction of activities. Its relatively prescribed functions suggest a most desirable condition of peace compared to that "unrest which men miscall delight."
Human life is but a drop in the ocean of organic existences on this planet—about 1,500 millions only among countless myriads of beings. It cannot, then, be accounted strange in a world containing so great a variety of organisms, with their varying tastes and needs, that man should find much that is distasteful and unsuitable to him which is pleasant and acceptable to other beings. The vulture feasts on carrion loathsome to man. Man partakes of food at which a rhinoceros would shudder.
Morality, as a law and corollary of organized life, being confined to humanity, it follows that immorality, as subversive of this law, would be of necessity abhorrent to those who appreciate a law without which social life would become intolerable, and not worth living. But, when we come to consider why it should be that the exquisite process of the decomposition of flesh should be less pleasing to the senses than the formation and fading of a sunset, we are forced to the conclusion that the world was not made for man, but man for the world.
The "part" working indiscriminately with and for the "whole" is an ethical law observable throughout the universe. All individuals are, unconsciously for the most part, carrying into effect the will of God by the will of God. We speak about individual effort to attain this perfection or avoid that evil, because we cannot divest ourselves of the feeling of free-will. To speak and act under a sense of free-will is forced upon us by the delusion of separateness.
It is often the case that God is only recognized in the beautiful aspects of nature. St. Paul says: "There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God that worketh all in all." We have to see God, not only in the sweet waters, but also in the deadly swamp; in the healthy child as well as in the fœtid diseases of the sick. "That art thou," as the Buddhist truly says. The delicious and the disgusting are equally necessary as factors in the scheme of the universe; there is in both the same cosmic law fulfilling itself. "Dragons and all deeps: fire and hail fulfilling his word." A difference only exists in the appreciation of them.
This Monistic view of nature in no respect stands in the way of our regarding God as the sublimated reality of an ideal existence. Dr. Paul Carus, in his booklet on The Idea of God, says: "If the idea of God is an empty dream which we must expel from our minds, why not expel all ideas and all ideals? They are just as much and just as little real.... From this point of view a denial of the existence of God would, with consistency, lead us also to a denial of an integral, or a logarithm, or a differential. An integral is just as little a concrete object as is God. And the idea of God is just as important in the real life of human activity, human thought and emotion, as the idea of honesty is in the mercantile world, that of courage among warriors, and that of faith in science."
Buddha has taught that there are worlds more perfect and developed, and others less so, than this earth; and that the inhabitants of each world correspond in development with itself.[Z] Mr. Lafcadio Hearn says: "The Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively and subjectively.... The true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of feelings which are themselves unstable, and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong, perhaps impregnable."
Indian philosophers have attempted, with a fair measure of success, to overcome the perplexity presented by the idea of diversity in unity. They say that, "as an individual can conjure up visions of various phenomena in his waking state without destroying his sense of unity as an individual, so there may be a multiform creation in the One Absolute without any suppression of its unitary nature. To the Unconscious Absolute phenomena stand in the relation of dreams to the individual who is conscious of dreams on awaking. But the Unconscious Absolute does not awake; therefore 'It' remains unconscious of phenomena. The variety of the world is like the variety of a dream."
In a commentary on the Essence of the Upanishads the fictitiousness of emanations from unity is thus illustrated:—