Meditation, effort and the danger of delay
If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right.
Meditation does not necessarily mean contemplating that everything is already right. The Dhammapada joins meditation to effort: verse 276 requires practitioners themselves to strive; verse 280 warns that an idle person misses wisdom; verse 282 distinguishes advancement from decline. Verses 286–289 then make unanticipated death a reason for urgency. In these passages, the possibility of failure and the danger of delay motivate practice—precisely the structure Chesterton reserves here for the active West. Dhammapada, chapter 20, verses 276, 280–282, 286–289, Acharya Buddharakkhita's 1985 translation, inspected in the Access to Insight transcription.
These texts concern liberation and ethical training, not a programme of European revolution. They do not establish that Buddhist and Christian political histories are equivalent. They do show why Chesterton's narrower argument against complacency cannot, without further evidence, sustain his geographical division between contemplative Eastern saints and people who act because things may go wrong.
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