Idealism Is A Potent Medicine For Self-created Mental Disease

In so far as Buddhist idealism refers to the world of sense, in so

far as it does not assume that to to be known is identical with to

be, in so far as it does not assert that the phenomenal universe is a

dream and a vision, we may admit it as true. On the one hand, it

serves us as a purifier of our hearts polluted with materialistic

desires, and uplifts us above the plain of sensualism; on the other

hand, it destroys uperstitions which as a rule arise from ignorance

and want of the idealistic conception of things.

It is a lamentable fact that every country is full of such

superstitions people as described by one of the New Thought writers:

'Tens of thousands of women in this country believe that if two

people look in a mirror at the same time, or if one thanks the other

for a pin, or if one gives a knife or a sharp instrument to a friend,

it will break up friendship. If a young lady is presented with a

thimble, she will be an old maid. Some people think that after

leaving a house it is unlucky to go back after any article which has

been forgotten, and, if one is obliged to do so, one should sit down

in a chair before going out again; that if a broom touches a person

while someone is sweeping, bad luck will follow; and that it is

unlucky to change one's place at a table. A man took an opal to a

New York jeweller and asked him to buy it. He said that it had

brought him nothing but bad luck, that since it had come into his

possession he had failed in business, that there bad been much

sickness in his family, and all sorts of misfortune had befallen him.

He refused to keep the cursed thing any longer. The jeweller

examined the stone, and found that it was not an opal after all, but

an imitation.'





Idealism is a most potent medicine for these self-created mental

diseases. It will successfully drive away devils and spirits that

frequent ignorant minds, just as Jesus did in the old days. Zen

makes use of moral idealism to extirpate, root and branch, all such

idle dreams and phantasmagoria of illusion and opens the way to

Enlightenment.