The last sentence, "I therefore say that it is empty and not permanent," is illustrated by appealing to the teaching of Buddha in one of the Sutras. He takes the eye as an example. There is no eye that does not move, that is not destroyed, that does not change. It is therefore empty and non-permanent. So it is with the other sensorial organs. The nature of them all is to change and decay.

The Buddhists in enumerating the organs of sense, after mentioning the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body, add the mind. Lung-shu does so in this passage. The mind, as the organ of consciousness, is viewed as a sense. We limit the term sensorial organs to those which are material, but the Buddhist, not believing in the reality of material things, calls every organ by which impressions are communicated a sense.

Buddha having thus expressed his opinion in the Sutras, it is added, we know that all acts are empty, non-permanent, and therefore without body. Thus we arrive at the doctrine that body does not exist.

It should be remembered that the Buddhists regard the acts of the thinking being as one with his substance. They do not distinguish between the agent and the act, but deny the reality and permanence of both in their unity. Thus they will say, as in this case, "all acts" (yih-ts'ie-fa) are without body, instead of predicating this of the actor.

Hence also he proceeds to say, that human nature is without body, resting his doctrine on the authority of the Sutras, and adding that it is the object of this entire treatise, "The Shastra of one Shloka," to illustrate it.

The same confusion of the agent with his acts presents itself in the closing sentences of the treatise, where it is

asserted that all kinds of action, including body, nature, acts, thing, being, are but different names for the same thing.

All these varieties in phraseology, he adds, are but differences in the term yeu, "being." The original word, adds the translator into Chinese, is subhava, which is variously explained "the substance which gives substance to itself," "without action and with action," and "the nature which has no nature of its own."

Bhawo, says Gogerly in his Essay on Buddhism, is twofold, consisting of moral causative acts and the state of being. Of these, he adds, kamma-bhawo, or "moral causative acts," are merit, demerit, and all those actions which lead to existence. The various worlds of the Buddhist universe are designated by the term bhawo. "Worlds of sensual pleasure and pain" are kama-bhawo. The "Brahma worlds" are rupa-bhawo. The "incorporeal worlds" are arupa-bhawo, and so on. Here the term bhava means "states of being."

The numerous modifications of meaning belonging to this word help to account for the three translations of the related word subhava, which close the treatise.