[paragraph continues] Nirvana is won, is not existence but passion and desire. In support of this thesis Dr Rhys Davids appeals to some verses in one of the Sacred Books of Buddhism, in which "we have an argument based on the logical assumption that if a positive exists its negative must also exist; if there is heat, there must be cold; and so on. In one of these pairs we find existence opposed, not to Nirvana, but to non-existence; whilst in another the three fires [of lust, hatred and delusion] are opposed to Nirvana." But, though Dr Rhys Davids is careful to distinguish Nirvana from annihilation, he is bound by his own assumption, that Buddha denied the Ego, denied "that there is anything of any kind which continues to exist, in any manner, after death," to regard Nirvana as the prelude to annihilation. For him, then, and for those who think with him, Nirvana, on which the Buddhist writings have ever "lavished" "awe-struck and ecstatic praise," is the twilight hour that precedes the night of Nothingness,--an hour in which the "Perfect One," having at last extinguished the fires of lust, hatred and delusion, enjoys the bliss of perfect peace. "Death, utter death, with no new life to follow, is a result of but it is not Nirvana."

It matters little whether Nirvana is itself the night of Nothingness, or the twilight hour which precedes that night. The goal of the Path is, in either case, the premature annihilation of him who walks in it. When the Perfect One has lifted the last veil of illusion and passed behind it into the reality which it hides from thought, he becomes absorbed into Nothing. It follows that the self-existent

[paragraph continues] Reality which underlies all appearances and which is therefore at the very heart of the Universe is, in a word, Nothing.