that public teaching which, unlike the exclusiveness of Bráhmans, sought disciples not merely among the sacred caste but in all ranks and conditions of men. In the spirit of that old Hebrew prophet who, rising above the formalism of Israel's priests, asked "to what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices?" Buddha put in the place of the Bráhman sacrifices three great duties—control over self, kindness to other men, and reverence for the life of all sentient creatures. Just as the formalism of Hebrew priest-lawyers had reposed upon an ethical creed in which the individual's responsibility had been merged into collective, just as prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, nearly at Buddha's own date, were preaching personal responsibility against the worn-out clan morality of inherited guilt, so Buddha, preaching salvation equally to all men without the intercession of the Bráhman, insisted on individual responsibility, and taught that man's state, in this life, in all previous and in all future lives, must be the result of his own acts.
But if Buddha's teaching resembles the spiritual teaching of Isaiah, if it resembles the individual ethics of Ezekiel, it also contains something of the pessimism of Qôheleth. Human life, in Buddha's view, must always be painful, more or less; "the object of every good man is to get rid of the evils of existence by merging his individual soul into the universal soul." "Two souls," says Faust, "dwell within my breast; the one would fain separate itself from the other. The one clings to the world with organs like cramps of steel; the other lifts itself energetically from the mist to the realms of an exalted ancestry." Buddha, like Goethe, like Qôheleth, is living in an age when the contrast of the individual with the group, of the microcosm self with the macrocosm not-self, has forced itself on human thought. But
