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did not teach renunciation of the flesh, but renunciation of the spirit.
He did not tell us to stop eating meat, or drinking wine, or copulating,
but to stop wanting to be powerful, prominent, famous, or even wise
or saintly. Above all he told us to stop wanting to be different. To
want to be different was to interrupt the divine rhythm by self–
importance. To want to be admired was just as evil as to want to
be powerful, and once these higher appetites were given up we
could flow along like a drop of water in a river, and soon be back
in the great ocean.
This philosophy seems to me a great step forward in unselfish–
ness. Moreover, it opened the eyes of men to the impersonal rhythms
and vast harmonies of nature, and led, among other things, to the
greatest school of landscape painting that the world has known.
So we have, at the outset of the turn of the tide, two men,
Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, and Lao-tze, the founder of Tao–
ism, who had the first hints in their minds of a new direction for
humanity. I call them the first prophets of return-of return to the
source of Being.
Zoroaster was not such a prophet. His teaching, that good was
white and evil was black, that the two were in constant warfare with
each other, that white would eventually triumph, and that in the
course of the struggle the highest virtues were to tell the truth and to
shoot straight, is a teaching that takes us further from the source
rather than back to it. It is closer to our modern teaching of virtue
and progress. Most modern thinkers, including Nietzsche, have not
been able to get beyond Zoroaster in the fields of religion and morality.
Even our leaders of thought today have not caught up with the
thinking of Lao-tze.
The next great prophet was Jesus of Nazareth. He also was
against life: i.e. life in the form of fragments battling against each
other. He taught that the voluntary giving up of life was the only
sal–
vation. All three of these great thinkers (Gautama, Lao-tze, Jesus)
preached against the continuance of the struggle for existence. All
three taught the doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and Jesus went
even further and taught forgiveness of evil. He taught, like the other
two, that it was better to perish than to kill. He did not say that
pain was good, but he taught that it was a higher and happier
destiny to suffer pain than to inflict it.
If
his teachings were carried
