Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/55

 “What will be done with him?” asks the prince. He is told that he will be buried in the ground. “Why?”—Because he will certainly never be alive again, and there will be only stench and worms. “And is this the fate of all men? And will the same happen to me? Shall I be buried, and will a stench rise from me, and will worms eat me?”—Yes. “Back! I do not wish to go out for pleasure, and will never be driven out again.”

And Sakya-Muni could not find any consolation in life, and he decided that life was the greatest evil, and used all the forces of his soul to free himself from it and to free others, and to do this in such a way that even after death it might not return in some manner,—to annihilate life with its root. Thus speaks the whole Indian wisdom.

So these are the direct answers which human wisdom gives when it answers the question of life.

“The life of the body is an evil and a lie, and so the destruction of this life of the body is a good, and we must wish it,” says Socrates.

“Life is that which ought not to be,—an evil,—and the transition into nothingness is the only good of life,” says Schopenhauer.

“Everything in the world, foolishness, and wisdom, and riches, and poverty, and merriment, and grief, everything is vanity and nonsense. Man will die, and nothing will be left. And that is foolish,” says Solomon.

“It is impossible to live with the consciousness of inevitable suffering, debility, old age, and death,—it is necessary to free oneself from life, from every possibility of life,” says Buddha.

And what these powerful minds have said, millions of millions of people have said, thought, and felt like them, and so think and feel I.

Thus, my wandering among the sciences not only did not take me out of my despair, but even increased it. One science gave no reply to the question of life, another