you will forever live in them. When we stand before a canvas painted by a great painter, do we not feel the presence of the artist, as his ideas and feelings are embodied in it? Cannot we say that the artist is still living in his work? We do not know whether his soul has gone up to the heavens and is enjoying the celestial happiness, but we do know for certain that he is still living among ourselves and inspiring us to higher ideals of life.

Do you prefer the immortality of the soul as popularly understood to this kind of immortality that I have endeavored to expound here? If you do, I have nothing further to say, but that the immortality of work or deed or thought or sentiment seems to be more in accordance with the result of modern scientific investigation--not only that, but to be more satisfactory to our religious consciousness.

Before concluding, there is one thing I should like to ask the believers in a materialistic, individual soul and its immortality; that is, What do you want to do up in heaven when you are ushered in there after you have finished your earthly career? Is it your wish to sit quietly beside your Father and among the host of celestial beings and passively enjoy inexpressible blessings? If this is your wish for individual immortality, I fail to see the purpose and significance of this life on earth. The history of civilization seems to lose its purport when you are away from here.

Buddhists think otherwise than Christians in this respect. We consider our existence here below as a sort of link in the eternal chain of the divine revelation in the universe. We have not come on earth, each singly and separately, to assert only our individuality; but our fates are most solidly linked to our ancestors and their civilization as well as to our successors and their destiny. What we are to-day is due to the karma of our predecessors and at the same time Will determine the fates of posterity. If we fail to enrich and ennoble our spiritual inheritance which originally came from the hand of the Dharmakaya, we entirely ignore the meaning of the history of humanity, we altogether disregard our responsibility to our forefathers and grandchildren. We must not go to heaven and selfishly enjoy our individual immortality. On the contrary, we must abide where we are, and co-operate with one another for the ennoblement and enrichment of our earthly life. We must not be ungrateful for what our ancestors did for us, nor must we be inconsiderate of the welfare and enlightenment of coming generations. We must behave nobly, we must think rationally, we must feel unselfishly, and let us live in this karma which endureth forever, even after the dissolution of this physical existence.

Again, according to Buddhism, this universe is a sort of spiritual laboratory, in which all our ideal possibilities are experimented upon and