As the eagle, after long strain of upward flight, stays poised in mid-air, so the seer reaches the calm and severe heights of character. This is Nirvana in the present world: and Nirvana hereafter may be more mysterious, but it must be of the same kind.

Very much as the Christian, experiencing "the peace that passes understanding," interprets in the light of this experience the serenity and calm of the Hereafter, so the Buddhist "saint," having known the quiet and serenity of the unified will, projects this experience into the future.

To both alike this future is "ineffably sublime"; words fail men when they attempt to speak of the Beyond: and yet we can piece together a picture of their inmost thoughts from such fragmentary descriptions of their experience as they let fall.

Arahatship and Nirvana, then, form one ideal, and it is with this that the Dhammapada is concerned.

We have seen that Nirvana is ineffable (stanza 218 and note); but we have also to remember that it can be experienced here and now. In stanza 402 we read:

"He is the Brahmin who in this very world knows the end of sorrow, who has laid the burden aside and is free." [**]

For whilst "the burden" is ultimately bodily existence, yet it is the sinfulness and egoism and pride of the flesh which make that burden so intolerable: the body is in fact a good servant but a bad master, and he who masters his body is already as it were freed from it.

"Happy is he," says the Digha Nikaya, "who is free of lust and beyond its power: the highest bliss is freedom from pride and self-will."

"There is no sorrow like existence, no bliss like Nirvana," says the Dhammapada.

"The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, cries St. Paul...Unhappy man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?"

These and similar passages are a cry for deliverance; and both teachers insist upon the same great truth, that man's bodily life, in so far as it is dominated by self-will and lust, is an evil

to be escaped at any cost. Neither is Manichean: it is not the body that is evil, but the body enslaved by the tyranny of evil desires.

And for both teachers it is the perversity of the "flesh" that shapes the ideal of escape; though the one longs after the life of dissolution, and the other believes that he will be "clothed upon" with a "glorified body" hereafter. [**]

The salient feature of the Buddhist ideal is freedom:

"Him I call Brahmin who has cut the bonds, who thirsts not for pleasure, who has left behind the hindrances."

(See 397 and note on 398.)