"The Lord spoke not of God, because the good law that becomes incarnated in Buddhahood is not a somebody, not an entity, not an ego, not even a ghost. As there is not a ghost-soul, so there is not a ghost-God."

Said Charaka: "Now I understand the picture of the Lord Buddha with his two attendants, Love as Particularity on the elephant and Wisdom as Universality on the lion. Ananda, the disciple of loving service, and Kashyapa, the disciple of philosophical intellectuality, have approached their master and grasped the significance of his doctrine from two opposite and contrasting sides."

"Those who mortify their bodies," continued Acvaghosha, "have not understood the doctrine. We are not ego-souls. For that reason the thought of an individual escape, the salvation of our ego-soul, is a heresy and an illusion. We all stand together and every man must work for the salvation of mankind. Therefore I love to compare the doctrine of the Buddha to a great ship or a grand vehicle

[paragraph continues] --a Mahayana--in which there is room for all the multitudes of living beings and we who stand at the helm must save them all or perish with them."

Charaka extended his hand and said: "I thank you, venerable sir, for the light you have afforded me. I sought peace of soul in a monastery, but the love of life, the love of God, the love of knowledge, the love of my heart, drove me hack to the world. I have proved useful to King Kanishka as a physician, perhaps also as a friend, and as a disciple of the Tathagata; and the problem before me is, whether it is right for me to remain in the world, to be a householder, to allow the particular, the sensual, the actual, a share in life by the side of the universal, the spiritual, the ideal."

"Do not despise the particular, the sensual, the actual," replied Acvaghosha. "In the material body the spiritual truths of goodness and love and veracity are actualised. Existence if it is mere existence, quantity of life and not quality, is worthless and contemptible. The sage despises it. The sensual, if it be void of

the spiritual, is coarse and marks the brute. But existence is not wrong in itself, nor is the sensual without its good uses. The sensual, in its very particularity, by being an aspiration that is actual, becomes consecrated in spirituality. Think how holy is the kiss of true love; how sacred is the relation between husband and wife. It is the particular in which the universal must be realised, mere abstract goodness will become apparent only in the vicissitudes of actual life."

"If I could serve the Buddha as a householder, my highest ambition would be to be a brother-in-law to King Kanishka," replied Charaka.