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OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY remains the same, the idea for which it stands is different. Avidyā is not conceived here as a cosmic power explaining how the nisprapanca Brahman shows itself as the empirical world, but merely as the ground of individual existence as is shown by the first place assigned to it in the 'chain of causation' to which we shall soon refer. Nor is it here, to look at it from another side, as in the Upanişads, ignorance of the essential unity of all existence, but the failure to recognize the hollowness of the so-called self. It is generally stated that this ignorance is of the Four Noble Truths (ārya-satya)—those concerning suffering, its origin, its removal and the way to remove it. 'Not seeing the four sacred truths as they are, I have wandered on the long path from one birth to another. Now have I seen them: The current of being is stemmed. The root of suffering is destroyed: there is henceforward no rebirth.': It is evident that in formulating this four-fold truth, Buddha was guided by the medical view of the time in regard to the curing of diseases, such transference of the method of current science to philosophy being not at all uncommon in its history. Buddha, who is sometimes styled the Great Healer, looked upon life with its suffering as a disease and his method was naturally that of a doctor seeking a remedy for it. We might say that the first three of these truths constitute the theoretical aspect of the teaching and the last, its practical. That suffering predominates in life, as we commonly know it, was admitted by practically all the Indian thinkers. The peculiar value of Buddhism lies in the explanation it gives of the origin of suffering, in the manner in which it deduces the possibility of its removal and in the means it recommends for doing so. To take these three in order:
(1) The origin of suffering.-That suffering originates follows from the belief that whatever is, must have had a cause. Buddha found this cause to be ignorance in the last resort, as we have just stated. His foremost aim was to discover how it brings about evil; for if we once know the process, he said, we are on the highway to get rid of the
* Oldenberg: op. cit., p. 240. * See BP. PP. 56-7. Cf. BUV. P. 15. st. 28.
