Page 85 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

of which it can be said 'This is right. That is wrong. This is

perfect and that imperfect.'? If there is any such criterion,
where is it to be found? What is its nature? These are very
pressing and urgent questions, that concern all of us. Whether

we like it or not, we all have to act every day, every hour —
almost every minute. The question of how to act in the best

way, of what should be the criterion — what the guiding
principle or the motive — of our action therefore inevitably
arises.

The Decline of Morals

Churchmen and others are very fond of lamenting what they
call the decline of morals. In the course of the last few decades
everybody is supposed to have become progressively more

immoral, and I gather we are now in a pretty bad state. This
decline of morals is usually linked very firmly with the decline of

religion, especially orthodox religion. Having turned our back on
the Church, we are told, we have at once plunged into the pit,
the mire, of immorality. We may, in fact, agree quite frankly

that traditional ethics have, to a very great extent, collapsed.
Many people are no longer convinced that there are any fixed

standards of right and wrong. In the seventeenth century one
of the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth, wrote a book
which he called A Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality.

If anyone, even the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, were
to write a book with this title nowadays it would seem quite

ridiculous. Even the great humanists and freethinkers of the
nineteenth century, widely as they might range in their
intellectual questioning, continued to conform to Christian

ethics. When it came to their 'home life', as the Victorians
called it,

85