INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

...the misery is the transgression of the Law, and the cause of transgression is ignorance, which leads to desire.

The goal of religion is to open people's minds through a true enlightenment. Buddhism claims to be the religion of enlightenment above all others (prajñā original: prajñā. A Sanskrit term for "wisdom" or "insight." = gnosis original: gnosis. A Greek term for "knowledge," specifically spiritual or mystical knowledge.). When a person's mind is enlightened by perceiving the truth, they will naturally improve. Consequently, their condition at death will improve, and their next birth will be in a higher realm. Ultimately, they will achieve the full happiness of a Bodhisattva original: Bosatsu. In Japanese Buddhism, a "Bodhisattva" is a being who has reached enlightenment but remains in the cycle of rebirth to help others. or perfected saint—one who understands and has triumphed. When death comes to them once more, they will have no need to be born again into the miseries of this wicked world. They will be merged into the indescribable state of Nirvana, a state that must be blissful, considering it implies unity with God. The treadmill of life and death will stop spinning for them, replaced instead by peace and rest.

However, a person's fate may be quite different. If the evil in this life outweighs the good, they face nothing but a series of births in increasingly lower forms of life. A wise person in this life—let us take Lord Bacon Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an influential English philosopher and statesman. as an example, whom the poet Alexander Pope called "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind"—might be reborn as a lowly shopkeeper instead of the Lord Chancellor of England. A subsequent birth might see them in animal form, and another might find them as a demon in one of the many hells described in Buddhism. In such a case, the wheel of birth and death will continue to grind, alternating between growth and decay, pain and sickness, for countless ages and generations.

There is no mercy in that wheel and no justice—only a blind Law of Retribution driven by cause and effect, cause and effect. This is not "justice," because justice requires a ruler, and a ruler’s hand can always be moved by mercy or leniency. Instead, it is retribution, or Nemesis In Greek mythology, the goddess of divine retribution or vengeance.—a concept suited to anarchism, but unworthy of the dignity of a great empire or republic that unites the world of rational people.