a very mistaken notion about the nature of Nirvana, and this allusion is made with the view to clearing their minds.)
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Supposing that I have made the Buddhist conception of God now somewhat intelligible to you, however broadly and sketchily, let me see what practical conclusion is drawn by the Buddhists from the above statement. If Buddhism teaches, as the Gospel of John declares, that "the Father is in me and I in him," or that "I and my Father are one," the practical ethics of Buddhism, it is evident, is to manifest the glory of God in all our conduct, in all our thoughts, in all our wishes and desires. It is evident, further, that as we are all one in God, his glory cannot be made manifest unless we break down the barrier of egoism which our ignorance and shortsightedness have built between mine and thine. Though this world, as it is, is manifesting the glory and love of God, the thought of selfishness which is so dearly cherished by our limited consciousness must be removed from the root, in order fully to appreciate the fact and truth. Buddhism does not exactly agree with Christianity when the latter emphasizes so much the distinction between the flesh and the spirit, as if they were altogether antagonistic to each other in their fundamental nature.
Buddhism, on the other hand, declares that all such distinctions as thine and mine, ego and God,
soul and flesh, "old man" and "new man," come from our own subjective ignorance, and that when this darkness of nescience is eradicated the flesh becomes at once the spirit, the ego instantly assumes the aspect of the Holy Ghost, as Christians would say. For from the beginning there is neither flesh nor spirit, neither "I" nor "thou," but the infinite intelligence and love of the Dharmakaya. Therefore, Buddhists do not complain, "The spirit is willing, and the flesh is weak"; but of the evil influence of ignorance; and they concentrate all their spiritual energy on the eradication of this ignorance and on the bringing about of enlightenment. For enlightenment is Nirvana; and herein the doctrine of non-ego merges with the doctrine of Dharmakaya.
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I am not going here to draw a parallelism between Buddhism and Christianity, nor to present you a list of differences between the two: I wish to give you in a summary way the main points of the preceding discourse and conclude this address. In a word, Buddhism is the religion of enlightenment, in which the intellect and the sentiment are harmoniously blended together so as to realize the beatific state of Nirvana. Through the intellect Buddhists know that there is no ego-soul which hides itself snugly in the deepest recesses of the mind, that the universe is the immanent expression of an