________________
THE CULT OF ASCETICISM & RENUNCIATION
met his royal disciple Asoka who distributed eleven lakh pieces of gold coins to the assembled mendicants. The number of religious beggars attending king Harsha's charitable feasts at Prayag, about a thousand years later, was still larger. A very substantial percentage of the adult population must have swelled the monastic order during those thousand years. It is recorded that the best part of the manhood of the kingdom of Magacha entered the monastic life. Buddhist monasticisin was analogous to its Christian prototype. Both represented despair caused by the collapse of the old social order, and a vain effort to solve the problems of life by running away from it.
Asceticism is a perverse ideal-of a morbid mentality. Individual suicide is generally considered to be a reprchensible act. Throughout history, there has been difference of opinion regarding the morality and legality of the act of individual self-destruction. With all the arguments for and against suicide, it is an incontestable psychological deduction that suicide is committed as a rule in a state of temporary insanity. The virtue of asceticism represents an epidemic of this mental malady. It implies the spread of suicidal mania on a large scale. In other words, the holy man is an assassin. One may be granted the freedom to destroy his tormented self, and his morbid action may be excused as a token of individual insanity. But the cult of asceticism, if practised widely, becomes an
253
