Page:The Praises of Amida, 1907.djvu/62

 sapphire vault of Heaven, yet it is but the reservoir in which are stored the rains and winds of perverse thoughts. We cannot tell when the poisonous dragons will come to the surface, nor when the floodgates will be opened, and the reservoir discharge its foul contents. We say in Buddhism that a single thought contains in it all Laws and all Nature, and this is no mere verbiage. It is a weighty sentence, teaching us the true depths of the human heart. 4. It cannot therefore suffice to dismiss Nicholas II with contempt, as having been first the originator of the Peace Conference, and then the author of the War with Japan. At the time when he issued invitations to the Hague Conference, the demon, which afterwards drove him to make a declaration of war, was lying low, hidden at the bottom of his heart. Conversely, when he become the instigator of the Russo-Japanese conflict, the light which had turned his mind to peace, was similarly concealed in the same place. Hence, if Nicholas II was a dissembler when, in the first case, he advocated