"O Subhûti, if I had had an idea of a being, of a living being, or of a person, I should also have had an idea of malevolence.... A gift should not be given by any one who believes in form, sound, smell, taste, or anything that can be touched."--_The Diamond-Cutter._
The doctrine of the impermanency of the conscious Ego is not only the most remarkable in Buddhist philosophy: it is also, morally, one of the most important. Perhaps the ethical value of this teaching has never yet been fairly estimated by any Western thinker. How much of human unhappiness has been caused, directly and indirectly, by opposite beliefs,--by the delusion of stability,--by the delusion that distinctions of character, condition, class, creed, are settled by immutable law,--and the delusion of a changeless, immortal, sentient soul, destined, by divine caprice, to eternities of bliss or eternities of fire! Doubtless the ideas of a deity moved by everlasting hate,--of soul as a permanent, changeless entity destined to changeless states,--of sin as unatonable and of penalty as never-ending,--were not without value in former savage stages of social development. But in the course of our future evolution they must be utterly got rid of; and it may be hoped that the contact of Western with Oriental thought will have for one happy result the acceleration of their decay. While even the feelings which they have developed linger with us, there can be no true spirit of tolerance, no sense of human brotherhood, no wakening of universal love.
Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizing no permanency, no finite stabilities, no distinctions of character or class or race, except as passing phenomena,--nay, no difference even between gods and men,--has been essentially the religion of tolerance. Demon and angel are but varying manifestations of the same Karma;--hell and heaven mere temporary halting-places upon the journey to eternal peace. For all beings there is but one law,--immutable and divine: the law by which the lowest _must_ rise to the place of the highest,--the law by which the worst _must_ become the best,--the law by which the vilest _must_ become a Buddha. In such a system there is no room for prejudice and for hatred. Ignorance alone is the source of wrong and pain; and all ignorance must finally be dissipated in infinite light _through the decomposition of Self._