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SEPARATION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER
157
and fatigue, and under-exertion will lead to no good results, in the same way with the training of the will one must exert oneself to one's full capacity, avoiding both the over-straining of excess and the ineffectuality of shirking.
Even among the Christians of the second century this moral discipline was carried out under systematic rules.
"It was not left to a student's option. He must undergo hardships, drinking water rather than wine, sleeping on the ground rather than on a bed; and sometimes even subjecting himself to austerities "-(Ibid., pp. 148-149).
This is, indeed, the ancient doctrine; it is certainly as old as Religion itself, which means nothing if not the attainment of Divine Perfection by the complete eradication of the lusts and appetites appertaining to embodied existence. This practical aspect of Religion was not kept in view as seriously and vigorously elsewhere as in India; but even in countries like Greece, which have not produced any true ascetics, philosophers tried to carry out the principle of renunciation in their lives. We learn from Dr. Hatch that Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school (Ibid., 151).* Dr. Hatch also quotes Dio Chrysostom, who says (Ibid., 151) :
"The life of one who practises philosophy is different from that of the mass of men; the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings."
Askesis, the term which was in use for bodily training, was also employed to denote this special discipline of the philosopher who aimed at the voluntary repression of desire. But the emphasis in asceticism is not on mere bodily hardships.
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"The true ascetic is he who disciplines himself against all the suggestions of evil desire "-(Ibid., 149).
Abstinence from marriage and animal food was urged and practised as counsels of perfection (Ibid., 155). It was also distinctly
* See also the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. IX, p. 859.
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