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In so far, then, as we suffer the Buddhist culture of the fifth century to interpret the canon for us, 'good,' in the earlier ethics, meant that which insures soundness, physical and moral, as well as that which is felicific. The further question immediately suggests itself, whether Buddhism held that these two attributes were at bottom identical. Are certain * states ' intrinsically good, i.e., virtuous and right, independently of their results ? Or is * good,' in the long-run at least, felicitous result, and only on that account so called? Are Buddhists, in a word, Intuitionists, or are they Utilitarians ? Or is not a decidedly eclectic standpoint revealed in the comprehensive interpretation given of kusalana? These are, however, somewhat modern — I am tempted to say, somewhat British — distinctions to seek in an ancient theory of morals. They do not appear to have troubled Buddhism, early or late. The Buddhist might possibly have replied that he could not conceive of any thought, word, or deed as being intrinsically good and yet bad in its results, and that the distinction drawn by the Commentator was simply one of aspects. If pressed, however, we can almost imagine the Buddhist well content with the relative or dependent good of Utili- tarianism, so closely is his ethics bound up with cause and effect. Good, for him, is good with respect to karma — that is, to pleasurable effect or eudcemonia. With respect to the supremely good effect, to arahatship 1 Cf. M. ii. 94. /2 Ixxxiv or Nirvana, he might, it is true, have admitted a difference, namely, that this state was absolutely good, and not good because of its results. It was the supreme Eesult or Fruit, and there was * no beyond.' But then he did not rank Nirvana exactly in the category of good, and precisely for this reason, that in it moral causation culminated and ceased. He spoke of it as Indeterminate, as without result — as a Freedom, rather than as a Good. He would not then have fallen in with Aristotle's definition of Good in terms of aim, viz., as ' that at which everything aims.' Good was rather the means hy and with which ice aim.. But that at which we aim is, in all lower quests, S u k h a m, in the one high quest, V i m u 1 1 i (emancipation), or Nirvana. Nor must the substitution of these two last terms for that well-being, that well-ness, * to ev ^tjv,' which is the etymological equivalent of s u k h a m,^ be taken as in- dicating the limit of the consistent Hedonism or Eudse- monism of the Buddhist. For he did not scruple to speak of these two also (Emancipation and Nirvana) in terms of pleasurable feeling. Gotama attaining his supreme enlightenment beneath the Bo-tree is said to have ' experienced Emancipation-bliss ' (vimutti-sukha- patisamvedi).^ And to King Milinda the Sage emphatically declares Nirvana to be * absolute (or entire) happiness' (ekanta-sukham).^ And we know, too, that Buddhism defined all right conduct and the sufficient motive for it in terms of escape from ill (d u k k h a m, the antithesis of s u k h a m) or suffering. Here then again their psychological proclivity is manifested. They analyzed feeling, or subjective experience, into three modes : sukham, dukkham, adukkharu-asukham. And in Good and Bad they saw, not ends or positions of attain- ment, but the vehicles or agencies, or, to speak less in abstractions, the characteristic mark of those kinds of 1 Cf. p. 12, n. 3. 2 Yin. i. 2, 3, quoted Jat. i. 77. ^ Mil. 313. Ixxxv conduct, by which well-being or ill-being might re- spectively be entailed. The Buddhist, then, was a Hedonist, and hence, whether he himself would have admitted it or not, his morality was dependent, or, in the phrase of British ethics, utilitarian, and not intuitionist. Hedonist, let us say, rather than eudsemonistic, because of the more subjective (psycho- logical) import of the former term. And he found the word s u k h a m good enough to cover the whole ground of desirability, from satisfaction in connexion with sense — compare Buddhaghosa's traveller refreshed obtaining both joy and ease^ — up to the ineffable ' Content ' of Nirvana.^ He did not find in it the inadequacy that some moral philosophers have found in our ' Pleasure.' His ethical system was so emphatically a study of consequences — of karma and v i p a k a (effect of karma) — of seeing in every phenomenon a reaping of some previous sowing — that the notion of good became for him inevitably bound up with result. As my late master used to say (ex cathedra) : If you bring forward consequences — how acts by way of result affect self and others — you must come to feeling. Thence pleasure becomes prominent. And did not folk suffer loose, lower associations to affect their judgment, there would be no objection to Hedonism. For pleasures are of all ranks, up to that of a good conscience.' A reflection may here suggest itself to readers in this country who have, at the feet of Spencer, Bain, and Leslie Stephen, learnt to see, behind Nature's device of Pleasur- able Feeling, the conservation of the species — ' quantity of life, measured in breadth as well as in length ' — as the more fundamental determinant of that which, in the long- run, becomes the end of conduct. Namely, that there seems a strange contradiction in a philosophic position which is content to find, in the avoidance of pain and the quest of pleasurable feeling, its fundamental spring of 1 Below, p. 12, n. 3. 2 Santutthi. See p. 358, n. 2. Ixxxvi moral action while, at the same time, it says of life — apart from which it admits no feeling to be possible — that the attainment of its last phase is the one supremely happy event,^ Pleasurable feeling, from the evolutionist's stand- point, means, and is in order to, the increase, ' intensive and extensive,' of life. Yet to the Hedonistic Buddhist, the dissolution of the conditions of renewed existence is a happy event, i.e., an event that causes pleasurable feeling in the thoughtful spectator. I believe that the modern ethics of evolution would have profoundly interested the early Buddhists, who after their sort and their age were themselves evolutionists. And I believe, too, that they would have arisen from a discussion with our thinkers on this subject as stanch Buddhists and as stanch Hedonists as they had sat down. I admit that with respect to the desirableness of life taken quantitatively, and in two dimensions, they were frankly pessimistic. As I have already suggested,^ and have put forward elsewhere,^ to prize mere quantity of living stood by Gotama con- demned as ignoble, as stupid, as a mortal bondage, as one of the four Asavas or Intoxicants.* The weary, heart- rending tragedies immanent in the life of the world he recognised and accepted as honestly and fully as the deepest pessimist. The complexities, the distractions, the burdens, the dogging sorrow, the haunting fear of its approaching tread, inevitable for life lived in participation of all that the human organism naturally calls for, and human society puts forward as desirable — all this he judged too heavy to be borne, not, indeed, by lay followers, but by those who should devote themselves to the higher life. To these he looked to exemplify and propagate and transmit 1 C/., e.g., M. P. S. 62 ; Maha Sudassana-sutta, S. B. E. xi. 240, 289. 2 See above, pp. Ixix, Ixx. 3 In an article * On the Will in Buddhism,' J. E. A. S., January, 1898. * Cf. below, p. 290 et seq. Ixxxvii his doctrine. Theirs it was to Hft the world to higher standpoints and nobler issues. Life in its fulness they at least could not afford to cultivate. But if we take life of a certain quality where selective economy, making for a certain object, cuts off some lines of growth but forces others on — then Buddhism, so far from ' negating the will to live ' that kind of life, pro- nounced it fair and lovely beyond all non-being, beyond all after-being. If final death, as it believed, followed inevit- ably on the fullest fruition of it, it was not this that made such life desirable. Final dissolution was accepted as welcome, not for its own sake, but as a corollary, so to speak, of the solved problem of emancipation. It merely signified that unhealthy moral conditions had wholly passed away. Keeping in view, then, the notion of Good in thought, word and deed, as a means entailing various kinds of felicific result, we may see in Book I.