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METAPHYSICS
Notwithstanding this assent, when faced with the severity of parisha-jaya, which signifies cheerfully enduring all kinds of hardships incidental to asceticism, and finding them only leading to enfeeblement and emaciation, but not to the enlightenment that he sought, Buddha declared :
"Not by this bitter course of painful hardship shall I arrive
at that separate and supreme vision of all-sufficing, noble (Aryan) knowledge passing human ken. Might there be not another path to enlightenment ?"-ERE. Vol. II. p. 70.
He thenceforth began to look after the welfare of the body once more. At last the middle course that he was looking for occurred to him under the famous Bo tree. It was a compromise between rigid
asceticism on the one hand and the life of unrestrained licentiousness under the guise of karma-yoga (the doing of all worldly actions, but without attachment to their fruits) on the other. Whether the middle course thus arrived at was scientifically valid or not, was not the point; what mattered was the avoidance of pain in any form. If asceticism itself led to pain, how could it lead to its destruction? "Dukkha is evil", said the Enlightened One, "and must be removed. Excess is Dukkha. Tapas is a form of excess, and multiplies Dukkha. It does not even lead through suffering to any gain; it is unprofitable" (ERE. Vol. II. p. 70). What Buddha would have thought or said on the subject if he had known that he was
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