A STUDY IN SYNTHETIC BUDDHISM

I

"It is not possible, O Subhuti, that this treatise of the Law should be heard by beings of little faith,--by those who believe in Self, in beings, in living beings, and in persons."--The Diamond-Cutter.

THERE still widely prevails in Europe and America the idea that Nirvana signifies, to Buddhist minds, neither more nor less than absolute nothingness,--complete annihilation. This idea is erroneous. But it is erroneous only because it contains half of a truth. This half of a truth has no value or interest, or even intelligibility, unless joined with the other half. And of the other half no suspicion yet exists in the average Western mind.

Nirvana, indeed, signifies an extinction. But if by this extinction of individual being we understand soul-death, our conception of Nirvana

is wrong. Or if we take Nirvana to mean such reabsorption of the finite into the infinite as that predicted by Indian pantheism, again our idea is foreign to Buddhism.

Nevertheless, if we declare that Nirvana means the extinction of individual sensation, emotion, thought,--the final disintegration of conscious personality,--the annihilation of everything that can be included under the term "I,"--then we rightly express one side of the Buddhist teaching.

The apparent contradiction of the foregoing statements is due only to our Occidental notion of Self. Self to us signifies feelings, ideas, memory, volition; and it can scarcely occur to any person not familiar with German idealism even to imagine that consciousness might not be Self. The Buddhist, on the contrary, declares all that we call Self to be false. He defines the Ego as a mere temporary aggregate of sensations, impulses, ideas, created by the physical and mental experiences of the race,--all related to the perishable body, and all doomed to dissolve with it. What to Western reasoning seems the most indubitable

of realities, Buddhist reasoning pronounces the greatest of all illusions, and even the source of all sorrow and sin. "The mind, the thoughts, and all the senses are subject to the law of life and death. With knowledge of Self and the laws of birth and death, there is no grasping, and no sense-perception. Knowing one's self and knowing how the senses act, there is no room for the idea of 'I,' or the ground for framing it. The thought of 'Self' gives rise to all sorrows,--binding the world as with fetters; but having found there is no 'I' that can be bound, then all these bonds are severed."[1]