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33 Major Cunningham, Bbilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments of Central India, p. 168.

city of peace. On that road you are the guide of all beings. Begin your work and pursue it with fidelity." From that time until the day of his death he preached "the three laws of mortality, misery, and mutability." Every morning he looked through the world to see who should be caught that day in the net of truth, and took his measures accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths by which alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring, invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, as thick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty miles around the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze on him who had broken the circle of transmigration.34

The system of Gotama distinguishes seven grades of being: six subject to repeated death and birth; one the condition of the rahats and the Buddhaship exempt therefrom. "Who wins this has reached the shore of the stormy ocean of vicissitudes, and is in safety forever." Baur says, "The aim of Buddhism is that all may obtain unity with the original empty Space, so as to unpeople the worlds."35 This end it seeks by purification from all modes of cleaving to existing objects, and by contemplative discrimination, but never by the fanatical and austere methods of Brahmanism. Edward Upham, in his History of Buddhism, declares this earth to be the only ford to Nirwana. Others also make the same representation:

"For all that live and breathe have once been men, And in succession will be such again."

But the Buddhist authors do not always adhere to this statement. We sometimes read of men's entering the paths to Nirwana in some of the heavens, likewise of their entering the final fruition through a decease in a dewa loka. Still, it is the common view that emancipation from all existence can be secured only by a human being on earth. The last birth must be in that form. The emblem of Buddha, engraved on most of his monuments, is a wheel, denoting that he has finished and escaped from the circle of existences. Henceforth he is named Tathagata, he who has gone.

Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say of Nirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of their philosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion.

"The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, and from fear, where birth or death is not, that is Nirwana." "Nirwana puts an end to coming and going, and there is no other happiness." "It is a calm wherein no wind blows." "There is no difference in Nirwana." "It is the annihilation of all the principles of existence." "Nirwana is the completion and opposite shore of existence, free from decay, tranquil, knowing no restraint, and of great blessedness." "Nirwana is unmixed satisfaction, entirely free from sorrow." "The wind cannot be squeezed in the hand, nor can its color be told. Yet the wind is. Even so Nirwana is, but its properties cannot be told." "Nirwana, like space, is causeless, does not live nor die, and has no locality. It is the abode of those liberated from existence." "Nirwana is not, except to the being who attains it."36

34 Life of Gotama in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iii.

35 Symbolik and Mythologie, th. ii. abth. 2, s. 407.

36 For these quotations, and others similar, see Hardy's valuable work, "Eastern Monachism," chap. xxii., on "Nirwana, its Paths and Fruition."

Some scholars maintain that the Buddhist Nirwana is nothing but the atheistic Annihilation. The subject is confessedly a most difficult one. But it seems to us that the opinion just stated is the very antithesis of the true interpretation of Nirwana. In the first place, it should be remembered that there are various sects of Buddhists. Now, the word Nirwana may be used in different senses by different schools.37 A few persons a small party, represented perhaps by able writers may believe in annihilation in our sense of the term, just as has happened in Christendom, while the common doctrine of the people is the opposite of that. In the second place, with the Oriental horror of individuated existence, and a highly poetical style of writing, nothing could be more natural, in depicting their ideas of the most desirable state of being, than that they should carry their metaphors expressive of repose, freedom from action and emotion, to a pitch conveying to our cold and literal thought the conceptions of blank unconsciousness and absolute nothingness.

Colebrooke says, "Nirwana is not annihilation, but unceasing apathy. The notion of it as a happy state seems derived from the experience of ecstasies; or else the pleasant, refreshed feeling with which one wakes from profound repose is referred to the period of actual sleep."38 A Buddhist author speculates thus: "That the soul feels not during profound trance, is not for want of sensibility, but for want of sensible objects." Wilson, Hodgson, and Vans Kennedy three able thinkers, as well as scholars, in this field agree that Nirwana is not annihilation as we understand that word. Mr. Hodgson believes that the Buddhists expect to be "conscious in Nirwana of the eternal bliss of rest, as they are in this world of the ceaseless pain of activity." Forbes also argues against the nihilistic explanation of the Buddhist doctrine of futurity, and says he is compelled to conclude that Nirwana denotes imperishable being in a blissful quietude.39 Many additional authorities in favor of this view might be adduced, enough to balance, at least, the names on the other side. Koeppen, in his very fresh, vigorous, and lucid work, just published, entitled "The Religion of Buddha, and its Origin," says, "Nirwana is the blessed Nothing. Buddhism is the Gospel of Annihilation." But he forgets that the motto on the title page of his volume is the following sentence quoted from Sakya Muni himself: "To those who know the concatenation of causes and effects, there is neither being nor nothing." To them Nirwana is. Considering it, then, as an open question, unsettled by any authoritative assertion, we will weigh the probabilities of the case.

No definition of Nirwana is more frequent than the one given by the Kalpa Sutra,40 namely, "cessation from action and freedom from desire." But this, like many of the other representations, such, for instance, as the exclusion of succession, very plainly is not a denial of all being, but only of our present modes of experience. The dying Gotama is said to have "passed through the several states, one after another, until he arrived at the state where there is no pain. He then continued to enter the other higher states, and from the highest entered Nirwana." Can literal annihilation, the naked emptiness of nonentity, be better than

37 Burnouf, Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien, Appendice No. I., Du mot Nirvana.

38 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 353.

39 Eleven Years in Ceylon, vol. ii. chap. ix.

40 Tanslation by Dr. Stevenson, p. 23.

the highest state of being? It can be so only when we view Nothing on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small, quiescent nor moved; but it is, and it is not, all this."41

Furthermore, if some of the Buddhist representations would lead us to believe that Nirwana is utter nothingness, others apparently imply the opposite. "The discourses of Buddha are a charm to cure the poison of evil desire; a succession of fruit bearing trees placed here and there to enable the traveller to cross the desert of existence; a power by which every sorrow may be appeased; a door of entrance to the eternal city of Nirwana." "The mind of the rahat" (one who has obtained assurance of emancipation and is only waiting for it to arrive) "knows no disturbance, because it is filled with the pleasure of Nirwana." "The sight of Nirwana bestows perfect happiness." "The rahat is emancipated from existence in Nirwana, as the lotus is separated from the mud out of which it springs." "Fire may be produced by rubbing together two sticks, though previously it had no locality: it is the same with Nirawna." "Nirwana is free from danger, peaceful, refreshing, happy. When a man who has been broiled before a huge fire is released, and goes quickly into some open space, he feels the most agreeable sensation. All the evils of existence are that fire, and Nirwana is that open space." These passages indicate the cessation in Nirwana of all sufferings, perhaps of all present modes of existence, but not the total end of being. It may be said that these are but figurative expressions. The reply is, so are the contrasted statements metaphors, and it is probable that the expressions which denote the survival of pure being in Nirwana are closer approximations to the intent of their authors than those which hint at an unconscious vacancy. If Nirwana in its original meaning was an utter and infinite blank, then, "out of that very Nothing," as Max Muller says, "human nature made a new paradise."

There is a scheme of doctrine held by some Buddhist philosophers which may be thus stated. There are five constituent elements of sentient existence. They are called khandas, and are as follows: the organized body, sensation, perception, discrimination, and consciousness. Death is the dissolution and entire destruction of these khandas, and apart from them there is no synthetical unit, soul, or personality. Yet in a certain sense death is not the absolute annihilation of a human existence, because it leaves a potentiality inherent in that existence. There is no identical ego to survive and be born again; but karma that is, the sum of a man's action, his entire merit and demerit produces at his death a new being, and so on in continued series until Nirwana is attained. Thus the succession of being is kept up with transmitted responsibility, as a flame is transferred from one wick to another. It is evident enough, as is justly claimed by Hardy and others, that the limitation of existence to the five khandas, excluding the idea of any independent individuality, makes death

41 Elements of Physiophilosophy, Tulk's trans. p. 9.

annihilation, and renders the very conception of a future life for those now living an absurdity. But we are convinced that this view is the speculative peculiarity of a sect, and by no means the common belief of the Buddhist populace or the teaching of Gotama himself. This appears at the outset from the fact that Gotama is represented as having lived through millions of existences, in different states and worlds, with preserved identity and memory. The history of his concatenated advance towards the Buddhaship is the supporting basis and the saturating spirit of documentary Buddhism. And the same idea pervades the whole range of narratives relating to the repeated births and deaths of the innumerable Buddhist heroes and saints who, after so many residences on earth, in the hells, in the dewalokas, have at last reached emancipation. They recollect their adventures; they recount copious portions of their experience stretching through many lives.

Again: the arguments cited from Buddha seem aimed to prove, not that there is absolutely no self in man, but that the five khandas are not the self, that the real self is something distinct from all that is exposed to misery and change, something deep, wondrous, divine, infinite. For instance, the report of a debate on this subject between Buddha and Sachaka closes with these words: "Thus was Sachaka forced to confess that the five khandas are impermanent, connected with sorrow, unreal, not the self.42 These terms appear to imply the reality of a self, only that it is not to be confounded with the apprehensible elements of existence. Besides, the attainment of Nirwana is held up as a prize to be laboriously sought by personal effort. To secure it is a positive triumph quite distinct from the fated dissolution of the khandas in death. Now, if there be in man no personal entity, what is it that with so much joy attains Nirwana? The genuine Buddhist notion, as seems most probable, is that the conscious essence of the rahat, when the exterior elements of existence fall from around him, passes by a transcendent climax and discrete leap beyond the outermost limits of appreciable being, and becomes that INFINITE which knows no changes and is susceptible of no definitions. In the Ka gyur collection of Tibetan sacred books, comprising a hundred volumes, and now belonging to the Cabinet of Manuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, there are two volumes exclusively occupied by a treatise on Nirwana. It is a significant fact that the title of these volumes is "Nirwana, or Deliverance from Pain." If Nirwana be simply annihilation, why is it not so stated? Why should recourse be had to a phrase partially descriptive of one feature, instead of comprehensively announcing or implying the whole case?

Still further: it deserves notice that, according to the unanimous affirmation of Buddhist authors, if any Buddhist were offered the alternative of an existence as king of a dewa loka, keeping his personality for a hundred million years in the uninterrupted enjoyment of perfect happiness, or of translation into Nirwana, he would spurn the former as defilement, and would with unutterable avidity choose the latter. We must therefore suppose that by Nirwana he understands, not naked destruction, but some mysterious good, too vast for logical comprehension, too obscure to Occidental thought to find expression in Occidental language.

42 Hardy, Manual, p. 427.

At the moment when Gotama entered upon the Buddhaship, like a vessel overflowing with honey, his mind overflowed with the nectar of oral instruction, and he uttered these stanzas:

"Through many different births I have run, vainly seeking The architect of the desire resembling house. Painful are repeated births. O house builder! I have seen thee. Again a house thou canst not build for me. I have broken thy rafters and ridge pole; I have arrived at the extinction of evil desire; My mind is gone to Nirwana."

Hardy, who stoutly maintains that the genuine doctrine of Buddha's philosophy is that there is no transmigrating individuality in man, but that the karma creates a new person on the dissolution of the former one, confesses the difficulties of this dogma to be so great that "it is almost universally repudiated." M. Obry published at Paris, in 1856, a small volume entirely devoted to this subject, under the title of "The Indian Nirwana, or the Enfranchisement of the Soul after Death." His conclusion, after a careful and candid discussion, is, that Nirwana had different meanings to the minds of the ancient Aryan priests, the orthodox Brahmans, the Sankhya Brahmans, and the Buddhists, but had not to any of them, excepting possibly a few atheists, the sense of strict annihilation. He thinks that Burnouf and Barthelemy Saint Hilaire themselves would have accepted this view if they had paid particular attention to the definite inquiry, instead of merely touching upon it in the course of their more comprehensive studies.

What Spinoza declares in the following sentence "God is one, simple, infinite; his modes of being are diverse, complex, finite" strongly resembles what the Buddhists say of Nirwana and the contrasted vicissitudes of existence, and may perhaps throw light on their meaning. The supposition of immaterial, unlimited, absolutely unalterable being the scholastic ens sine qualitate answers to the descriptions of it much more satisfactorily than the idea of unqualified nothingness does. "Nirwana is real; all else is phenomenal." The Sankhyas, who do not hold to the nonentity nor to the annihilation of the soul, but to its eternal identification with the Infinite One, use nevertheless nearly the same phrases in describing it that the Buddhists do. For example, they say, "The soul is neither a production nor productive, neither matter nor form"43 The Vishnu Purana says, "The mundane egg, containing the whole creation, was surrounded by seven envelops, water, air, fire, ether, egotism, intelligence, and finally the indiscrete principle"44 Is not this Indiscrete Principle of the Brahmans the same as the Nirwana of the Buddhists? The latter explicitly claim that "man is capable of enlarging his faculties to infinity."

43 Sankhya Karika, pp. 16–18.

44 Vishnu Purana, p. 19.

Nagasena says to the king of Sagal, "Neither does Nirwana exist previously to its reception, nor is that which was not, brought into existence: still, to the being who attains it, there is Nirwana." According to this statement, taken in connection with the hundreds similar to it, Nirwana seems to be a simple mental perception, most difficult of acquirement, and, when acquired, assimilating the whole conscious being perfectly to itself. The Asangkrata Sutra, as translated by Mr. Hardy, says, "From the joyful exclamations of those who have seen Nirwana, its character may be known by those who have not made the same attainment." The superficial thinker, carelessly scanning the recorded sayings of Gotama and his expositors in relation to Nirwana, is aware only of a confused mass of metaphysical hieroglyphs and poetical metaphors; but the Buddhist sages avow that whoso, by concentrated study and training of his faculties, pursues the inquiry with adequate perseverance, will at last elicit and behold the real meaning of Nirwana, the achieved insight and revelation forming the widest horizon of rapturous truth ever contemplated by the human mind. The memorable remark of Sir William Hamilton, that "capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence," should show the error of those who so unjustifiably affirm that, since Nirwana is said to be neither corporeal nor incorporeal, nor at all describable, it is therefore absolutely nothing. A like remark is also to be addressed to those who draw the same unwarrantable conclusion of the nothingness of Nirwana from the fact that it has no locality, or from the fact that it is sometimes said to exclude consciousness. Plato, in the Timaus, stigmatizes as a vulgar error the notion that what is not in any place is a nonentity. Many a weighty philosopher has followed him in this opinion. The denial of place is by no means necessarily the denial of being. So, too, with consciousness. It is conceivable that there is a being superior to all the modes of consciousness now known to us. We are, indeed, unable to define this, yet it may be. The profoundest analysis shows that consciousness consists of co ordinated changes.45 "Consciousness is a succession of changes combined and arranged in special ways." Now, in contrast to the Occidental thinker, who covets alternation because in his cold climate action is the means of enjoyment, the Hindu, in the languid East, where repose is the condition of enjoyment, conceives the highest blessedness to consist in exemption from every disturbance, in an unruffled unity excluding all changes. Therefore, while in some of its forms his dream of Nirwana admits not consciousness, still, it is not inconsistent with a homogeneous state of being, which he, in his metaphysical and theosophie soarings, apprehends as the grandest and most ecstatic of all.

The etymological force of the word Nirwana is extinction, as when the sun has set, a fire has burned out, or a lamp is extinguished. The fair laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases like this, to receive the severest literal significance of a word as conveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the minds of its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness, metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in its strictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished, it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substance of the flame, whatever it was, has not ceased to be, has not been

45 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxv.

actually annihilated. It has only ceased to be in a certain visible form in which it existed before; but it still survives under altered conditions. Now, to compare the putting out of a lamp to the death of a man, extinction is not actual destruction, but a transition of the flame into another state of being. That other state, in the case of the soul, is Nirwana.

There is a final consideration, possibly of some worth in dealing with this obscure theme. We will approach it through a preliminary query and quotation. That nothing can extend beyond its limits is an identical proposition. How vast, then, must be the soul of man in form or in power!

"If souls be substances corporeal, Be they as big just as the body is? Or shoot they out to the height ethereal? Doth it not seem the impression of a seal Can be no larger than the wax? The soul with that vast latitude must move Which measures the objects that it doth descry. So must it be upstretch'd unto the sky And rub against the stars."

Cousin asserts that man is conscious of infinity, that "the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known in consciousness by difference, plurality, and relation." Now, does not the consciousness of infinity imply the infinity of consciousness? If not, we are compelled into the contradiction that a certain entity or force reaches outside of its outermost boundary. The Buddhist ideal is not self annihilation, but self universalization. It is not the absorption of a drop into the sea, but the dilatation of a drop to the sea. Each drop swells to the whole ocean, each soul becomes the Boundless One, each rahat is identified with the total Nirwana. The rivers of emancipated men neither disembogue into the ocean of spirit nor evaporate into the abyss of nonentity, but are blended with infinitude as an ontological integer. Nirwana is unexposed and illimitable space. Buddhism is perfect disinterestedness, absolute self surrender. It is the gospel of everlasting emancipation for all. It cannot be that a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepest desire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is not negation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil.

Some light may be thrown on the subject by contemplating the successive states through which the dying Gotama passed. Max Muller describes them, after the Buddhist documents, thus: "He enters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedom from sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, and has no desire except that of Nirvana. But he still feels pleasure; he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use of these powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, when nothing remains but a desire after Nirvana, and a general feeling of satisfaction arising from his intellectual perfection. That satisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage. Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self consciousness, and a certain amount of physical pleasure. In the fourth stage these last remnants are destroyed; memory fades away, all pleasure and pain are gone, and the doors of Nirvana now open before him. We must soar still higher, and, though we may feel giddy

and disgusted,46 we must sit out the tragedy till the curtain falls. After the four stages of meditation are passed, the Buddha (and every being is to become a Buddha) enters first into the infinity of space, then into the infinity of intelligence, and thence he passes into the third region, the realm of nothing. But even here there is no rest. There is still something left, the idea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must be destroyed; and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region, where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and where there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not nothing."47 Analyze away all particulars until you reach an uncolored boundlessness of pure immateriality, free from every predicament; and that is Nirwana. This is one possible way of conceiving the fate of the soul; and the speculative mind must conceive it in every possible way. However closely the result resembles the vulgar notion of annihilation, the difference in method of approach and the difference to the contemplator's feeling are immense. The Buddhist apprehends Nirwana as infinitude in absolute and eternal equilibrium: the atheist finds Nirwana in a coffin. That is thought of with rapture, this, with horror.

It should be noticed, before we close this chapter, that some of the Hindus give a spiritual interpretation to all the gross physical details of their so highly colored and extravagant mythology. One of their sacred books says, "Pleasure and pain are states of the mind. Heaven is that which delights the mind, hell is that which gives it pain. Hence vice is called hell, and virtue is called heaven." Another author says, "The fire of the angry mind produces the fire of hell, and consumes its possessor. A wicked person causes his evil deeds to impinge upon himself, and that is hell." The various sects of mystics, allied in faith and feeling to the Sufis, which are quite numerous in the East, agree in a deep metaphorical explanation of the vulgar notions pertaining to Deity, judgment, heaven, and hell.

In conclusion, the most remarkable fact in this whole field of inquiry is the contrast of the Eastern horror of individuality and longing for absorption with the Western clinging to personality and abhorrence of dissolution.48 The true Orientalist, whether Brahman, Buddhist, or Sufi, is in love with death. Through this gate he expects to quit his frail and pitiable consciousness, losing himself, with all evil, to be born anew and find himself, with all good, in God. All sense, passion, care, and grief shall cease with deliverance from the spectral semblances of this false life. All pure contemplation, perfect repose, unsullied and unrippled joy shall begin with entrance upon the true life beyond. Thus thinking, he feels that death is the avenue to infinite expansion, freedom, peace, bliss; and he longs for it with an intensity not dreamed of by more frigid natures. He often compares himself, in this world aspiring towards another, to an enamored moth drawn towards the fire, and he exclaims, with a sigh and a thrill,

46 Not disgust, but wonder and awe, fathomless intellectual emotion, at so unparalleled a phenomenon of our miraculous human nature.

47 Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims, p. 19.

48 Burnouf, Le Bhagavata Purana, tome i. livre iii. ch. 28: Acquisition de la Delivrance, ch. 31.

Marche de l'ame individuelle. "Highest nature wills the capture; 'Light to light!' the instinct cries; And in agonizing rapture falls the moth, and bravely dies. Think not what thou art, Believer; think but what thou mayst become For the World is thy deceiver, and the Light thy only home." 49

The Western mind approaches the subject of death negatively, stripping off the attributes of finite being; the Eastern mind, positively, putting on the attributes of infinite being. Negative acts, denying function, are antipathetic, and lower the sense of life; positive acts, affirming function, are sympathetic, and raise the sense of life. Therefore the end to which those look, annihilation, is dreaded; that to which these look, Nirwana, is desired. To become nothing, is measureless horror; to become all, is boundless ecstasy.

49 Milnes, Palm Leaves.