The reader should remember that the Buddhist hypothesis does not imply either individuality or personality in Nirvana, but simple entity,--not a spiritual body, in our meaning of the term, but only a divine consciousness. "Heart," in the sense of divine mind, is a term used in some Japanese texts to describe such entity. In the Dai-Nichi Kyo So (Commentary on the Dai-Nichi Sutra), for example, is the statement:--"When all seeds of Karma-life are entirely burnt out and annihilated, then the vacuum-pure Bodhi-heart is reached." (I may observe that Buddhist metaphysicians use the term "vacuum-bodies" to describe one of the high conditions of entity.) The following, from the fifty-first volume of the work called Daizo-ho-su will also be found interesting:--"By experience the Tathagata possesses all forms,--forms for multitude numberless as the dust-grains of the universe. . . . The Tathagata gets himself born in such places as he desires, or in accord with the desire of others, and there saves [lit., 'carries over'--that is, over the Sea of Birth and Death] all sentient beings. Wheresoever his will finds an abiding-point, there is he embodied: this is called Will-Birth Body. . . . The Buddha makes Law his body, and remains pure as empty space: this is called Law-Body."]

The Absolute is conceivable only (according to any attempt at a synthesis of the Japanese doctrines) as composed of Buddhas. But here the student finds himself voyaging farther, perhaps, beyond the bar of the thinkable than Western philosophers have ever ventured. All are One;--each by union becomes equal with All! We are not only bidden to imagine the ultimate reality as composed of units of conscious being,--but to believe each unit

permanently equal to every other and infinite in potentiality.[1] The central reality of every living creature is a pure Buddha: the visible form and thinking self, which encell it, being but Karma. With some degree of truth it might be said that Buddhism substitutes for our theory of a universe of physical atoms the hypothesis of a universe of psychical units. Not that it necessarily denies our theory of physical atoms, but that it assumes a position which might be thus expressed in words: "What you call atoms are really combinations, unstable aggregates, essentially impermanent, and therefore essentially unreal. Atoms are but Karma." And this position is suggestive. We know nothing whatever of the ultimate nature of substance and motion: but we have scientific evidence that the known has been evolved from the unknown; that the atoms of our elements are combinations; and that what we call matter and force are but different manifestations of a single and infinite Unknown Reality.

[1. Half of this Buddhist thought is really embodied in Tennyson's line,--

"Boundless inward, in the atom; boundless outward, in the Whole."]