The Saint 61
each other, as they should with all living things. For everyone’s road
is a hard one. A latter- day Buddhist teacher recommends that when
one approaches another being, one must remind oneself in a sub-
liminal whisper of a simple fact: the person before me is suff ering;
he is suff ering and he desires happiness. She suff ers. She wishes to
be happy. He suff ers. He wishes to be happy. Achilles will forever be
known as the apogee of courage; Plato embodies the free exercise
of the mind in quest of Truth. The Buddha helps bring another
quality to the center of the world’s consciousness: compassion.
People continue to converge reverently on a fi gure they conceive
of as the compassionate Buddha. And compassion is inseparable
from the Buddha’s vision. But one must add that the Buddha’s teach-
ings begin with the individual being and his hopes of overcoming
the life of suff ering. It is a simple fact but a salient one. The Buddha’s
great legend is the legend of one person in search of enlightenment.
It is an individual story. What the Buddha achieves, he by and large
achieves alone: the path he opens is a path for single beings. Others
matter, of course; but this is not a story of collective change. “Be
lamps unto yourselves,” the Buddha says. Work out your salvation
for your own being. Envy, anger, competitiveness, malice: all these
fl aws are associated by the Buddha with selfi sh desires—as is the de-
sire to have and to be a Self. Yet it sometimes seems that the chief
objection to the vices of the Self is that they bring disquiet to the
individual spirit. They distemper the mind. They cause agitation
and so undermine the quality that Gautama seems to trea sure above
the rest, which is peace. Inner peace dies on the blade of strife and
anger. Inner peace requires the doctrine of loving compassion. Dis-
quietude is the primary enemy. And in this too some of the old aris-
tocratic spirit may persist. The aristocrat is beyond agitation. He is
regally calm, Gautama- like.
The traditional Hindu values persist beneath the Buddha’s
vision. The sense beautifully delineated in the Upanishads— that