All that is so abundantly related of the fortunate abodes of Nats in their sacred writings supplies the Buddhist religious with agreeable and inexhaustible topics of sermons which they deliver to their hearers, to excite them more effectually to bestow on them abundant alms. The credulous hearers are always told that the most conspicuous places in those regions are allotted to those who have distinguished themselves by their great liberalities. We think it idle and superfluous, uninteresting and fatiguing to repeat those fabulous accounts of the seats of Nats and abodes of hell, as given at great length by Buddhist authors. The only particulars deserving to be attended to are these: the reward is always proportionate to the sum of merits, and punishment to that of demerit. There is no eternity of reward or of punishment.[48]
This first article shall be concluded by an important remark bearing upon the system under consideration. The seats of happiness, as already mentioned, are divided into two great classes; the one including the superior, and the other the inferior seats. The latter are the six seats of Nats, and are tenanted by beings as yet under the influence of concupiscence and other passions. Those who observe the five general precepts have placed, and, as it were, established themselves on the basis whereupon stands perfection, but not yet in perfection itself; they have just crossed the threshold thereof. They are as yet imperfect; but they have prepared themselves for entering the way that leads towards perfection; that is to say, meditation, or the science of Dzan. The very reward enjoyed in those seats is, therefore, as yet an imperfection. The superior seats can only be reached by those who apply themselves to mental exercises. These exercises are the real foundation of the lofty structure of perfection and the high-road to it.
ARTICLE II.
OF MEDITATION AND ITS VARIOUS DEGREES.
This and the following articles contain subjects of so abstruse and refined a nature, that it would require one to possess the science of a Buddha to come to a right understanding of them. The difficulties arising from this study are due to the confused and very unsatisfactory ideas of the Buddhist philosophers respecting the soul and its spirituality, and perhaps to the inability of the writer to understand the vague and undefined terms employed to convey their ideas on these matters. The field of Buddhist metaphysics is, to a European, in a great measure a new one; the meaning of the terms is half-understood by the Burmese translators; definitions of terms do not convey explanations such as we anticipate, and ideas seem to run in a new channel; they assume, if we may say so, strange forms: divisions and subdivisions of the various topics have no resemblance to what a European is used to in the study of philosophy. The student feels himself ushered into a new region; he is doomed to find his way by groping. Finally, the false position assumed by the Indian philosophers, and the false conclusions they arrive at, contribute to render more complicated the task of elucidating this portion of the Buddhist system. That the difficulties may be somewhat lessened, and the pathway rendered less rugged and a little smooth, the writer proposes to avoid as much as it is in his power overcharging with Pali terms the explanations he is about to afford, under the guidance of the Buddhist author.
In the preceding article we have treated of meritorious actions that are purely exterior, and briefly alluded to the nature of the rewards bestowed on earth and in the six seats of Nats upon those who have performed these good actions. Now we leave behind all the exterior good deeds, and turn the attention of our mind to something more excellent, to those acts that are purely interior, and are performed solely by the soul and the right exercise of its faculties; that is to say, by meditation and contemplation.
The root of all human miseries is ignorance. It is the generating principle of concupiscence and other passions. It is the dark but lofty barrier that encircles all beings and retains them within the vortex of endless existences; it is the cause of all existences, and of all those illusions to which beings are miserably subjected; it causes those continual changes which take place in the production of all beings. This great cause once found and proclaimed by Buddha, it was necessary to procure a remedy to counteract the action of ignorance, and successfully oppose its progress. Another antagonistic and opposite principle had to be found, adequate to resist the baneful agency of ignorance and stem its sad and misfortune-creating influence. That principle is science or knowledge. Ignorance is but a negative agent: it is only the absence of science. Let knowledge be, and ignorance shall vanish away in the same manner as darkness is noiselessly but irresistibly dissipated by the presence of light.
All beings in this universe, says our author, are doomed to be born and die. We quit this place to go and live in another; we die here to be born elsewhere. We can never be freed from pain, old age, and death. Whether we like it or not, we must suffer and always suffer. But why is it so? Because we do not possess the perfect science. Were we blessed with it, we would infallibly look towards Neibban, and then, escaping from the pursuit of pain and miseries, we would infallibly obtain the deliverance from those evils which now incessantly press upon us. It rests with us only to perfect our intelligence, so that we might gradually attain to the perfect science, the source of all good. But by what means is so desirable an end to be obtained? By the exercise of meditation, answers, with a decided tone, our philosopher. This word implies, besides, our intellectual operations of a superior order, such as contemplation, visions, ecstasy, union, &c., which are the more or less complete results of that intellectual exercise.
The act of meditating can take place but in the heart, where resides the mano, or the faculty of knowing. Its object can never be but the nam-damma, literally the name of the thing; or, in other terms, the things of a purely intellectual nature. But it can by no means happen in the seats of the other senses or organs, such as the eyes, the ears, &c., which are only channels to communicate impressions to the faculty of mano.