The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING cackling over the future like hens over a china egg, and soon they would be back at the old game of counting their chickens before they were hatched. He also must have seen, that if he postulated a God, or First Cause, every unfledged rationalist in Pataliputta would cry, ‘Oh, but what a God, what a wicked God yours must be to allow all this sorrow you talk of . . . now look at mine . . .” little seeing that sorrow was just the same with the idea of God as without it, and that all was indeed Moha or MAaya—both God and No-God, Sorrow and Joy. But Buddha being a practical physician, though he knew sorrow to be but a form of thought, was most careful in keep- ing it as real a calamity as he could; for he well saw, that if he could only get people to concentrate upon Sorrow and its Causes, that the end could not be far off, of both Sorrow and Joy; but, if they began to speculate on its illusiveness, this happy deliverance would always remain distant. His business upon Earth was entirely a practical and exoteric one, in no way mystical; it was rational not emotional, catholic and not secret. What then is the Cause of Sorrow? and the answer given by Gotama is: Karma or Action, which when once completed becomes latent and static, and according to how it was accom- plished, when once again it becomes dynamic, is its resultant effect. Thus a good action produces a good reaction, and a bad one a bad one. This presupposes a code of morals, furnished by what?* We cannot call it Atman, Conscience, * Twenty-three centuries later Kant falling over this crux postulated his “twelve categories,” or shall we say “emanations,” and thereby started revolving once again the Sephirothic Wheel of Fortune. 131