IMMORTALITY

ONE of the many questions which I am very often requested to answer from the Buddhist point of view concerns the immortality of the soul . Thinking that this will also interest you, I wish to present my view on the question here.

It seems, everything depends upon the conception of the soul. Both you and I may use the same term, but if it is understood differently we cannot expect to come to any definite conclusion. I often think that if every notion, every concept, every sentiment we may happen to have, is so clearly defined as not to leave any point in obscurity, a great bulk of philosophical and religious controversy, which seems almost to make up the history of thought, will vanish. However this may be, let me first try to show you what I understand by the soul.

Buddhism uses the term Atman in place of soul and makes it signify that mysterious something which lurks in the background of our mental activities, and which soars up to an

unknown quarter usually known as heaven after its departure from the body, within which it has been imprisoned, and on which account it used to long for liberation. The atman or soul, according to this conception, is not material, exactly speaking, but something very much akin to it, for it is an individual existence and therefore subject to the limitations of space and time as well as to the law of causation. Though it is impossible to think the soul other than material if it is at all individual as conceived by ordinary people, yet they make it at once spiritual and individual--two qualities impossible to reconcile. Therefore, in point of fact, they materialize the soul by their unwarranted--though pious enough--attempt to make it immaterial and spiritual. They are not indeed spiritualistic in spite of their persistent claim to be so. They are in fact materialistic. For if things are truly spiritual and immaterial, in them there must be the absence of all those qualities which make up materiality, that is, they must not be bound by the conditions of space and time. The existence of a soul of this nature is most positively denied by Buddhism. And those who aspire after its immortality are designated ignorant, however wise and intelligent they may be in affairs other than religious.

It needs a certain amount of reflective power to see in the popular conception of the soul a grievous error which Buddhism endeavors to