^64:*Upon reflection, I have substituted "personality" for "individuality" as written in the first edition. The successive appearances upon one or many earths, or "descents into generation," of the tanhaically-coherent parts (Skandhas) of a certain being are a succession of personalities. In each birth the personality differs from that of the previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, the deus ex , masks (or shall we say reflects?) itself, now in the personalities of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout the string of births. But though personalities ever shift, the one line of life along which they are strung like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that particular line, never any other. It is therefore individual--an individual vital undulation--which is careering through the objective side of Nature, under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of Tanha, and persists through many cyclic changes. Professor Rhys-Davids calls that which passes from personality to personality along the individual chain, 'character' or 'doing'. Since "character" is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the sum of one's mental qualities and moral propensities, would it not help to dispel what Professor Rhys-Davids calls "The desperate expedient of a mystery" [Buddhism, p. 101], if we regarded the life-undulation as individuality and each of its series of natal manifestations as a separate personality? We must have two words to distinguish between the concepts, and I find none so clear and expressive as the two I have chosen. The perfected individual, Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for a Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture. And, as countless generations--"four asankheyyas and a hundred thousand cycles"--Fausboll and Rhys-Davids' Buddhist Birth Stories, (13) are required to develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs throughout all the successive births, what shall we call that which thus wills and perseveres? Character, or individuality? an individuality but partly manifested in any one birth, but built up of fragments from all the births.