The impermanence of Goliaths: How Buddhist philosophy defines the failure of centralized power

“ There are thousands of little and soft things still abundant in the world that have outlived the fearsome ravenous monsters of ages past; there were Goliaths in those days, but the Davids have outlived them, and Gath is not peopled by giants. The big and strong have not triumphed.
The struggle in nature is not a combat, as we commonly understand that word, and it is not warfare. The earth is not strewn with corpses. ”

“ Concentrated masses, impropriations gathered into a few hands, useless alike to the possessor and to the world, why is it that, by primary arrangements of nature, they have been frozen into vast, inert insulation? ”

“ Gautama Buddha taught that everything corporeal is material and therefore impermanent. Man in his bodily existence is liable to sorrow, decay, and death. The reign of unholy desires in his heart produces unsatisfactory longings, useless weariness, and care. Attempted purification by oppressing the body is only wasted effort. It is the moral evil of the heart which keeps a man chained down in the degraded state of bodily life, which binds him in a union with the material world. Virtue and goodness will only insure him for a time, and, in another birth, a higher form of material life. ”

“ Is there anything put together which shall not dissolve? But you, too, shall be free from this delusion, this world of sense, this law of change. Beloved,” added he, speaking to the rest of the disciples, “Ānanda for long years has served me with devoted affection.” And he spoke to them at some length on the kindness of Ānanda.
About midnight Subhadra, a brahmin philosopher of Kusinārā, came to ask some questions of the Buddha, but Ānanda, fearing that this might lead to a longer discussion than the sick teacher could bear, would not admit him. ”

“ When the Blessed One died, the venerable Ananda, at the moment of his passing away from existence, uttered this stanza:
"Then was there terror!
Then stood the hair on end!
When he endowed with every grace—
The supreme Buddha—died!"
When the Blessed One died, of those of the brethren who were not free from the passions, some stretched out their arms and wept, and some fell headlong to the ground, rolling to and fro in anguish at the thought: "Too soon has the Blessed One died! Too soon has the Happy One passed away from existence! Too soon has the Light gone out in the world!" ”

“ The soul theory, step by step, gained again the upper hand. The popular gods and the popular superstitions are once more favoured by Buddhists themselves. The philosophical basis of the old ethics is overshadowed by new speculations. And even the old ideal of life, the salvation of the Arahat to be won in this world and in this world only, by self-culture and self-mastery, is forgotten, or mentioned only to be condemned. The end was inevitable. ”

“ That which (the previous and subsequent career of the teacher being borne in mind) seems to be possible and even probable, appears to be somewhat as follows.
Disenchanted and dissatisfied, Gotama had given up all that most men value, to seek peace in secluded study and self-denial. Failing to attain his object by learning the wisdom of others, and living the simple life of a student, he had devoted himself to that intense meditation and penance which all philosophers then said would raise men above the gods. ”

“ It is now thirty years since the right interpretation, founded on the canonical texts, has been given, but outside the ranks of Pāli scholars the old blunder is still often repeated. It should be added that the belief in salvation in this world, in this life, has appealed so strongly to Indian sympathies that from the time of the rise of Buddhism down to the present day it has been adopted as a part of general Indian belief, and Jīvanmukti, salvation during this life, has become a commonplace in the religious language of India. ”

“ What will happen when the various divisions of this vast army of officials, united by interests common to officialism—the interests of the regulators versus those of the regulated—have at their command whatever force is needful to suppress insubordination and act as "saviors of society"? "Where will be the actual diggers and miners and smelters and weavers, when those who order and superintend, everywhere arranged class above class, have come, after some generations, to intermarry with those of kindred grades, under feelings such as are operative in existing classes ”

“ But vicious demonstrations are as the strongholds and defences of Idols; and those we have in logic do little else than make the world the bond-slave of human thought, and human thought the bond-slave of words. Demonstrations truly are in effect the philosophies themselves and the sciences. For such as they are, well or ill established, such are the systems of philosophy and the contemplations which follow. Now in the whole of the process which leads from the sense and objects to axioms and conclusions, the demonstrations which we use are deceptive and incompetent. ”

“ One favors the enlargement of the powers and scope of government, and another insists on the annihilation of all governments. Small wonder, therefore, that the reader, who has not time to penetrate far below the surface, should lack faith in the teachings of a system whose doctors so thoroughly disagree. ”

“ But that did not follow: for in the treasury of nature it turned out that there were other resources for modifying the powers of distance, for muffling and unmuffling the voice of stars. Suppose a world at the distance x, which distance is so great as to make the manifestation of that world weak, milky, nebular. Now let the secret power that wields these awful orbs, push this world back to a double distance! that should naturally make it paler and more dilute than ever: and yet by compression, by deeper centralization, this effect shall be defeated ”

“ It is a proposition requiring no argument that if by the aid of mineral bearing solutions the ores occurring in veins are to be enriched, these solutions must enter the veins. And if all the meteoric waters which fall upon the outcrop of a vein or upon rocks containing disseminated ore run off rapidly down the mountainside without remaining to oxidize, dissolve and penetrate the vein with their load of mineral, there can not be any enrichment caused thereby. ”

“ But their wants were numerous, they were forced to depend on others to supply them, and they were obliged to exchange the products of their own labor with the products of the labor of the rest of the world.
We could go on multiplying examples, but we might end by being statistical, and we must not forget the general principles which were to govern our decision. It is clear enough now that protection is a relic of barbarism; that it interferes with and often interrupts the interchange of human activities; that it is ruinous to justice, fraternity, and love ”

“ This is conduct that shocks the conscience. Illegally breaking into the privacy of the petitioner, the struggle to open his mouth and remove what was there, the forcible extraction of his stomach's contents-this course of proceeding by agents of government to obtain evidence is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities. They are methods too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation. ”

“ Stripped of all incidentals, the assertion is that, neglecting mental culture, we have been led to neglect man's higher interests; we have fallen into a slough where everything is subordinated to gain and the rights of man are not regarded; a grasping selfishness brings about combinations in manufacturing interests and makes possible the accumulation of vast fortunes; a base 'commercialism' pervades all society ”

“ It is the burden of dead-weight which every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, unknown to the world at large, before the world was electrified by his appearance as its genius. Let us examine it more closely: it will repay our scrutiny. Those of you who have been more or less successfully at work all your lives may get some satisfaction from the retrospect, and those who have commenced careers should hear what deadwork means, what its uses are, how indispensable it is, how honorable it is, and what stores of health and strength and happiness it reserves for them. ”

“ I dare to repeat it, it is hard, that being placed in a world so full of wants and necessities, where almost every being and element is either our foe or refuses its assistance ... we should also have our own temper to struggle with, and should be deprived of that faculty which can alone fence against these multiplied evils.
The fourth circumstance, whence arises the misery and ill of the universe, is the inaccurate workmanship of all the springs and principles of the great machine of nature. ”

“ Let the errors and deceits of our very senses be set before us; the insuperable difficulties which attend first principles in all systems; the contradictions which adhere to the very ideas of matter, cause and effect, extension, space, time, motion; and in a word, quantity of all kinds, the object of the only science that can fairly pretend to any certainty or evidence. When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines ”

“ Therefore, in a system satisfying the conditions of practical stability with respect to the possible formation of all kinds of homogeneous masses, negative tensions of the surfaces of discontinuity are necessarily excluded. ”

“ It is an unfortunate circumstance that conclusions in geology, arrived at by the most careful observation and induction, do not remain undisturbed, but require constant vigilance to prevent them from being overthrown. ”

“ Mahā-vīra was rather of the ordinary class of religious men in India. He may be allowed a talent for religious matters, but he possessed not the genius which Buddha undoubtedly had. . . . The Buddha’s philosophy forms a system based on a few fundamental ideas, whilst that of Mahā-vīra scarcely forms a system, but is merely a sum of opinions (pannattis) on various subjects, no fundamental ideas being there to uphold the mass of metaphysical matter. Besides this. . .it is the ethical element that gives to the Buddhist writings their superiority over those of the Jains. ”

“ Fortunately each word, each clause, each idea in the discourse is repeated, commented on, enlarged upon, almost ad nauseam, in the suttas, and a short comment in the light of those explanations may bring out the meaning that was meant. [2]
The passing away of pain or suffering is said to depend on an emancipation. And the Buddha is elsewhere (Vinaya ii. 239) made to declare: “Just as the great ocean has one taste only, the taste of salt, just so have this doctrine and discipline but one flavour only, the flavour of emancipation” ”

“ The Portuguese were an adventurous and energetic race in those days: it was the emporium of trade in Eastern Asia for three hundred years. To-day it is the most dead-alive place that I have ever visited, and its population is eighty thousand. It is a charming spot, with delicious sea breezes, making the climate far preferable to that of Hong Kong. Its industries (?) are gambling and opium smuggling, with their attendant vices.
An interesting detail is that the dominant colour of Macao is red. The dominant colour in China, on the other hand, is blue. ”

“ As to the "extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is "writ large" on the very title-page: "The Principles of Geology, being an Attempt to explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation." The essence of Lyell's doctrine is here written so that those who run may read ”

“ The argument in favor of uniformity of action has been put before us with so much skill and ability, and possessing as it does the charm of an infallible faith, that uniformitarianism has become the accepted doctrine of the dominant school of geology. ”

“ And this very consideration too, continued PHILO, which we have stumbled on in the course of the argument, suggests a new hypothesis of cosmogony, that is not absolutely absurd and improbable. Is there a system, an order, an economy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms which it produces? There certainly is such an economy; for this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order ”

“ The acute minds of the Buddhist pandits, no longer occupied with the practical lessons of Arahatship, turned their attention, as far as it was not engaged upon their hierarchy of mythological beings, to questions of metaphysical speculation, which, in the earliest Buddhism, are not only discouraged but forbidden. We find long treatises on the nature of being, idealistic dreams which have as little to do with the Bodhisatship that is concerned with the salvation of the world as with the Arahatship that is concerned with the perfect life. ”

“ For about three hundred years the Buddhist church of Tibet was left in peace, subjecting the country more and more completely to its control, and growing in power and in wealth. During this time it achieved its greatest victory, and underwent the most important change in The temporal sovereignty of the Lāmas. its character and organization. After the reintroduction of Buddhism into the “kingdom of snow,” the ancient dynasty never recovered its power. ”

“ There are two aims which he who has given up the world ought not to follow after—devotion, on the one hand, to those things whose attractions depend upon the passions, a low and pagan ideal, fit only for the worldly-minded, ignoble, unprofitable, and the practice on the other hand of asceticism, which is painful, ignoble, unprofitable. ”

“ Many are the pet names, the poetic epithets bestowed upon it—the harbour of refuge, the cool cave, the island amidst the floods, the place of bliss, emancipation, liberation, safety, the supreme, the transcendent, the uncreated, the tranquil, the home of peace, the calm, the end of suffering, the medicine for all evil, the unshaken, the ambrosia, the immaterial, the imperishable, the abiding, the farther shore, the unending, the bliss of effort, the supreme joy, the ineffable, the detachment, the holy city, and many others. ”

“ No evil speech will we utter. Tender and compassionate will we abide, loving in heart, void of malice within. And we will be ever suffusing such a one with the rays of our loving thought. And with that feeling as a basis we will ever be suffusing the whole wide world with thought of love far-reaching, grown great, beyond measure, void of anger or ill-will. ”

“ The relative importance of love, as compared with other habits, is thus described. “All the means that can be used as bases for doing right are not worth the sixteenth part of the emancipation of the heart through love. That takes all those up into itself, outshining them in radiance and glory. Just as whatsoever stars there be, their radiance avails not the sixteenth part of the radiance of the moon. ”

“ But, however much character in the making may be aided by prudential considerations, character in its perfection has left them far behind. Duty, at first a matter of conscious purpose, becomes confirmed as the habit of the soul, and flowers at last as impulses from which all sense of effort or calculation of gain has passed away. ”