The phrase "highest freedom" occurs more than once in these stanzas as a synonym for Nirvana, and, as Mrs. Rhys Davids has shown, it is this aspect of Nirvana which is most frequently hymned in the Psalms of the Sisters, that remarkable collection of verses attributed to the women-elders of the Sangha. [*+] (Cf. Dhammapada, 90, 92, 93, 96, etc.)

Inasmuch as this "highest freedom" is escape from lust and other "bonds," it is an

ideal for this life: inasmuch as it is escape from the round of rebirths it is an ideal for the future: here Arahatship passes over into Nirvana. [**]

And in both alike the way of escape lies in the mind of man:

"All that we are by Mind is wrought,
Fashioned and fathered by our Thought." [**]

The Arahat has mastered his mind (that "frail and fickle thing" that in the worldling "leaps hither and thither, like a monkey seeking fruit)"; and therefore he is already free from the tyranny of the flesh (cf. 89). For it is the mental "bonds"--lust, pride, self-will--which have bound him through the long waste of years to one body after another; and it is "knowledge" which sets him free:

"He is the Brahmin indeed who... has reached the end of rebirths, the sage whose knowledge is perfect, and who is perfect with all perfection."

This freedom of Nirvana is envisaged as Rest: and there is in these stanzas a cry for rest which runs through all the Buddhist books like some pathetic fugue: a desire so passionate as to be almost unintelligible to Western minds.

But to men obsessed heart and spirit with the

"weary weight of the intolerable years," life after life of suffering and care, it is a real longing which here finds rhythmic expression:

"All is fleeting, all is unreal, all is sorrowful." (277-9.)
"There is no sorrow, like to existence: no bliss like Nirvana, the Supreme Rest." (202.)

Worldly existence is wholly evil; but every man is free to cultivate the "otherworldly" frame of mind, and be at peace. For Buddhism is in a sense eudaemonistic; it does not flout man's desire to be happy: only it defines this happiness in terms of inward peace and self-control.