THE HUXLEY-HEARD PARADISE
151
logical basis of the Heard-Huxley "path." The teaching of Gotama,
as has often been said, was a medical psychology of desire. Inor–
dinate craving, so it seemed to him, chained the live being to the
inexorable wheel of transmigration-the biological rhythm of
birth and death, made rigid and meaningless by the law of
Karma,
which held that the live being inherited a deterministic "condition"
from its predecessors. Gotama, as a reformer of Hinduism, denied
the existence of the
Brahman-the
infinite All of Hindu cosmology.
"Look upon the world," says the
Dhammapada,
"as a bubble, look
upon it as a mirage." What appears to the unenlightened to be
material is only a temporary pattern of sensations. The human
being is an "aggregate" of lusts whose senses (though this is only
one interpretation) the Buddha conceived as avenues of infection
from the outer world. The escape from the law of
Karma
(a doc–
trine, by the way, which somewhat parallels Jung's "primordial
images") can be effected by self-annihilation. Through the mystic
experience the slave of nature can enter
Nirvana,
"the void and
unconditioned freedom,"* or what to the Christian is the peace
of God, which passeth all understanding.
The reaction of Heard and Huxley to Darwinian evolution
and Freudian psychology is as radical as Gotama's to the doctrines
of his day. The popularized catchwords of the new mathematical
physics, which seem to indicate the immaterial nature of the uni–
verse and to confound mass with motion, are sufficient proof to
Heard and Huxley that materialism has been written off as false
doctrine. For, as Huxley says in his
Ends and Means,
individual
en*ies are now seen to be only "particular patternings" of "ulti–
mately identical units of energy." Experiments in hypnotism and
telepathy, such as those of Dr. Rhine, are taken by Heard and
Huxley to indicate the extra-sensory quality of perception. The
besetting obstacle in the way of regeneration, however, is the indi–
ridualized self. And in fact our particular crisis, so we are told,
makes the very survival of the race dependent upon our success in
aDDihilating the self, for if we do not succeed, our specialization
in
warfare may bring us to complete disaster. "In another war,"
wrote Heard in 1929, "what is to be dreaded even more than the
'From Irving Babbitt's translation of
Dhammapada.
Professor Babbitt was of
CIIIIUie
less interested in the abnormal psychological states of the Buddha than in his
llllrlint and urbanity. Buddhism was a "true" religion as opposed to the "false"
..cionalism of Christianity and Romanticism.
