GOD AND THE KOSMOS.

"Differences veil a fundamental unity."—Bruno.

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Both Christianity and Buddhism can be set to the same music, the music of the unconditioned. The definition of the Christian God as invisible and eternal, and as that which has not parts, body, or passions, is incontestably an attempt to convert our thoughts to a belief in, and appreciation of, the unconditioned. The entire teaching of Jesus moves in this direction; and this will be recognized at once if we permit ourselves to interpret his symbolic utterances in the right and only logical sense. To be saved—that is, to realize the unconditioned—we must believe in Jesus; namely, in his teaching.

If humanity could assume this attitude of mind—if it could attune its thoughts to what Christian symbolism really means, or ought to mean—then all the magnificent ritual of the Holy Catholic Church, the realistic hymnology, even the shibboleths of the Salvationist, would no longer give rise to the supercilious contempt of the so-called intellectual world, but would everywhere be recognized as the expression of the most exalted philosophy, and consonant with the latest results of psycho-physiological research. "The proud have held me exceedingly in derision, yet have I not shrinked from thy law." Everything that teaches us that the end of all things and the goal of all men is a complete realization of the "unconditioned" is the acceptable word of God.

Gotama, using a symbolism of his own, and by means of parables not wholly dissimilar to those employed by Jesus, taught the self-same truth. The flesh has to be crucified—that is, the idea of separateness has to be eliminated—and then only will Heaven, Nirvana, at-oneness with the unproduced (with God), be a reality.

It is legitimate to speak of Jesus as God, and Gotama is known as Buddha. Here we have, then, Jesus-God and Gotama-Buddha. But God and Buddha are but two different terms used for the expression of one identical idea. The recognition of "Buddha" as an equivalent for "God" has been very generally ignored by interpreters of Buddhism; hence the confusion of thought which has existed in this connection. This in some measure may also be due to the fact that Gotama, in preaching to the Brahmins, made use of the word "Brahma" to denote God.

Jesus and Gotama were gnomic, or divinely wise—that is, they knew of the "unconditioned." They both ardently desired to communicate this knowledge to the world, and the way of escape from absolute bondage to the conditioned to a realization of the unconditioned. If, knowing the way, man still elects to continue in bondage to the conditioned state, in a hell of misery or through a series of incarnations, he can do so by disregarding the injunction, "Set not your affections on things on earth."

Gotama pointed out the straight path that leads to a union with Brahma (God); but there was also a circuitous path indicated by him, by which we can make "golden stairways of our weaknesses." To the different symbolism employed by Gotama, and the meaning attached to this symbolism by his exponents, may also be attributed the failure of many acquainted only with the outlines of Buddhism to assimilate the term "Buddha" with that of "God" in its universalist sense.

When we come to a careful and impartial study of the Gospel of Buddha, it is astonishing what a close connection is to be found therein between the God idea of the Christian community and the Buddha idea of the Asiatic world. Gotama does not, as many suppose, exclude the notion of God as that of all-pervading Love. "The whole wide world," he says, "above, below, around, and everywhere, will continue to be filled with Love, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure." "Buddha is the all-loving teacher, assuming the shape of the beings whom he teaches." This is the second person of the Buddhist triad, the apparitional body of Gotama.

The splendid symbolism of the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, common to both Christianity and Buddhism, falls like the cloudy hangings of a gorgeous sunset between us and the unconditioned. Many of the spectators are held spellbound and enslaved by the beauty of the phenomena alone; a few see its meaning, and realize the noumenon. The symbol is, as it were, a yearning of the visible to suggest the invisible, the conditioned speaking to us of the unconditioned. The small minority—the Blessed Ones, the Arhats of Buddhism, the saints of Christendom—they are those who know the Lord, who see God. Yet there remains for every being a sure hope of the deathless life.

After many a weary round of births and deaths or long sojourns in Purgatory, after many a climb up the dark ladder of life, every being at last will reach the desired goal, and see the fulfilment of prophecy when God will be all and in all.

A great Orientalist has pronounced Buddhism to be the most godless of all heathen religions. If this assertion means that the god of the heathens is anthropomorphic and that of the Buddhists is not so, then the statement of this distinguished scholar, though a little staggering at first sight, may be regarded as containing an element of truth, but not the whole truth.

The question whether the true Buddhism of Gotama recognized a god in any sense of the expression still exercises the minds of controversialists. At the very outset of our inquiry into the Buddhistic conception of a god or no-god, we are confronted by directly conflicting conclusions arrived at by two eminent authorities. Professor Rhys Davids regards the true Buddhism of Gotama to be nothing but blank Atheism, whereas Mr. Arthur Lillie unflinchingly pronounces it to be Theism pur et simple.

In my judgment, all the controversy that rages around the HinayÂna[O] and the MahayÂna, which represent respectively the Southern and Northern schools of thought, only confuses the issue; and the opinions of sectarian Buddhists, or even the edicts of Asoka, cannot, I think, be accepted in themselves as directly supporting any hard-and-fast theory regarding the Theistic or Atheistic tendencies in the teaching of Gotama.

With reference to the evidence of the edicts, it must not be overlooked that Asoka figured as a good Theist while Viceroy at Ujain, and for some years subsequent to his becoming Emperor of India—a fact which several of his edicts, I believe, confirm.

A God, one Person (yet three Persons in One), without body (yet walks), without parts (yet seen), without passions (yet with compassion), a spirit, an indefinable, an illocatable, incomprehensible substance in which we live and move and have our being, that cannot be known, yet can be found (those that seek after me shall find me), which some people have beautifully symbolized as a loving Father and others have debased into a jealous and vindictive tyrant—of such a God only, as an eternally conditionless mystery, it can surely be established, from a review of Buddhistic evidence, that it is not, and has not been, totally ignored.

It is difficult to see the force of denoting God as super-personal or super-anything. He or It is personal, and everything else as masked by materialities, and in the sense of all things being his contents. Particles of matter are the contents of form. Form cannot be manifest without matter. God is pure or shapeless form, as well as the formative power of form.

Dr. Paul Carus, in referring to the God idea of the Buddhists, says: "No religion can exist without belief in the existence of an ultimate authority of conduct; but in this sense Buddhism, too, teaches a belief in God. The Abhidharma, or Buddhist philosophy, distinctly rejects the idea of a creation by an Ishvara—i.e., a personal creator; but it recognizes that all deeds, be they good or evil, will bear fruit according to their nature, and they teach that this law, which is ultimately identical with the law of cause and effect, is an irreversible reality; that there are no exceptions or deviations from it. Thus law takes, to some extent, the place of the God idea, and Buddhists gain a personal attitude to it, similarly as Christians do when speaking of God, in quite a peculiar way. The doctrine of the TrikÂya, or the three bodies, teaches us that Buddha has three personalities. The first one is the Dharma-KÂya, or the body of the law; it corresponds to the Holy Ghost in the Christian dogmatology. The second personality is the NirmÂna-KÂya, or the body of transformations; it is transient in its various forms, and its most important and latest appearance has been Gotama SiddhÂrta. This corresponds to the second person of the Christian Trinity, to God the Son, or Christ.... The third personality of Buddha is called Sambhoga-KÂya, or the body of bliss. It is the Christian idea of God the Father. Buddha, in his capacity as Sambhoga-KÂya, is described as eternal, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He is the life of all that lives, and the reality of all that exists. Thus he is the All in All, in whom we live and move and have our being."[P]

General Forlong, in his Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religion, informs us that "the first great Hindu Creating Father was a real Praja-pati, 'Lord of Creations'—a true Hermaik Brahma; and, being depicted as a potent masculine Zeus, like to YahvÊ, Chemosh, Amon, etc., he in time naturally became distasteful to cultured and pious philosophic minds searching after a great ideal, and no magnified man, solar or royal governor. As did Vedantists, so have others developed a great neuter Brahm; even pious Christian philosophers have sought, and some few dared to own, a Brahm, despite the direct anthropomorphic teaching of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. Thus the Rev. Principal Caird, D.D. (Glasgow University), boldly says, in his Gifford Lectures, 1895-6, that in his view 'Christianity knows no such thing as a First Cause, or an Omnipotent Creator and moral governor of the world, a being framed after the image of man, an anthropomorphic potentate seated on a celestial throne and dispensing rewards after the manner of an earthly sovereign or magistrate.'"

It is remarkable to find a parallel conception of Law, as associated by Buddhists with the idea of divinity prevailing among the Egyptians, who "recognized a divinity in those cases only when they perceived the presence of a fixed Law, either of permanence or of change. This regularity, which is the constitutive character of the Egyptian divinity, was called Maat. Maat is, in fact, the Law and Order by which the universe exists. Truth and Justice are but forms of Maat as applied to human action."[Q]

In Mr. Arthur Lillie's book, The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity, there is struck a note of playfulness which almost leads one to suppose that the writer does not intend that he should be taken seriously everywhere in his fascinating pages. This is apparent even in his treatment of the Jewish conception of an Almighty ruler, when he takes for his text (Judges i. 19): "The Lord was with Judah, and He drove out the inhabitants of the mountains, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron." In a similar spirit in this connection he would probably handle rather roughly the notion of omniscience.

Mr. Lillie, further on in his book, quotes a conversation that is said to have taken place between Gotama and some Brahmins on the subject of ultimate union with the Eternal Brahma. Gotama points out that all their talk about union is foolish talk, because they know nothing about him. But this does not necessarily imply, as one would gather from the commentary, that Gotama knew nothing of a Brahma, or quality of the kosmos or Buddha, which was indefinable, and could only be adumbrated in language, and no more. His sole intention, it seems to me, was to impress on his audience that this Brahma could not be approached by a factitious asceticism, and that all speculations as to his nature and origin would be mere waste of time and energy. Subsequently, on p. 83, Gotama is made to refer to this Brahma as a non-Theistic "It"—evidently the neuter Brahm—the absolute, or the great "I am" of the Christian Bible.

Here I would refer en passant to the following passage which occurs on p. 84: "There are two schools of Buddhism, and they are quite agreed in this, that Buddhism is the quickening of the spiritual vision."

This, Buddhistically understood, is true enough, but there is a danger of the Christian reader associating with the expression "spiritual" the idea of the existence of a spirit in man as an ego-entity. Interpreted in this sense, the expression would be wholly inapplicable to any possible phase of Buddhistic thought or doctrine. Gotama knew of no independent spirit-entity in man, so there could be no such thing as animistic vision in Buddhism.

In the New Testament it is evident from the context that Jesus, when negatively describing a spirit as that which hath not flesh and bones, was not alluding to spirit in the sense given to it by modern psychologists as "ideas," or as applied to the SankhÂras by the translator of Professor Oldenberg's book on Buddhism, but had in view those presentations of matter of human shape, without flesh and bone development, the appearance of which from time to time has been confirmed by not a few rational and reliable people.

With reference to Mr. Lillie's comments on the Jewish conception of an Almighty Ruler, it may be remarked here that executive omnipotence and omniscience convey the notion of qualities that cannot be philosophically applied to the absolute as conceived by Brahmins. This is very clearly enunciated in the philosophy of the Upanishads.

Mr. A. E. Gough, in his book on this subject, writes: "The Self (Brahma, or Reality) is said to be omniscient, but the reader must not be misled; this only means that it is self-conscious.... The omniscience of the Reality is its irradiation of all things."

It (Reality) knows but knows nothing, it sees but sees nothing, it loves but loves nothing; because "It" is knowledge, sight, love, etc. It transcends the relation of subject and object. In the New Testament we meet with the expression, "God is love"—that is, a quality with no objective application. It is the unseen and eternal in contradistinction to the seen and temporal.

"Brahma is Beatitude. But we must be cautious. Brahma is not Beatitude in the ordinary sense of the term. It is a bliss beyond the distinction of subject and object.... The Indian philosophers everywhere affirm that Brahma is knowledge, not that Brahma has knowledge."[R]

This is very like Schelling's idea as portrayed in his account of the ultimate goal of the finite ego: "The ultimate goal of the finite ego is enlargement of its sphere till the attainment of identity with the infinite ego. But the infinite ego knows no object, and possesses, therefore, no consciousness or unity of consciousness, such as we mean by personality. Consequently, the ultimate goal of all endeavour may also be represented as enlargement of the personality to infinity—that is to say, as its annihilation. The ultimate goal of the finite ego, and not only of it, but also of the non-ego—the final goal, therefore, of the world—is its annihilation as a world."[S]

Mr. Gough, in the book already referred to, remarks "that Buddhism is the philosophy of the Upanishads with Brahma left out; that in Buddhism Brahma, or the inner light, is replaced by zero, or a vacuum; that there is no light of lights beyond the darkness of the world-fiction; that the highest end and final hope of man is a return into this vacuum, or aboriginal nothingness of things. This is Nirvana, the extinction of the soul; the path to it is the path of inertion, apathy, and vacuity."

Buddhism expounded in this fashion is likely to produce a very erroneous conception of what it really proves to be.

In the first place, such expressions as "vacuum," "emptiness," "voidness," must not be interpreted solely in a negative sense; there is a positive sense also to be taken into account. The positive aspect of such expressions has been very clearly set forth by the great Chinese philosopher, Lau-toze, in the following manner: "The thirty spokes unite in the one nave, but it is on the empty space (for the axle) that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels, but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment, but it is on the empty space (within) that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for positive adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness."[T]

Secondly, although Gotama preached a kind of quietism, it was not the quietism of inertion and apathy. He exhorted his followers to vigorous activity in the acquisition of knowledge: "He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to knowledge (enlightenment). If anything is to be done, let a man do it; let him attack it vigorously."[U]

Mr. Gough says that to gain this extinction the sage must loose himself from every tie and turn his back upon the world.

This is very much akin to the way in which a Christian must act, according to the teaching of the New Testament, if he would gain heaven, union with God, with Love, with a quality. But it would be doing injustice to the spirit of Christianity and Buddhism to describe their ultimate goals as annihilation, aboriginal nothingness, and extinction, and the path to it as one of inertion, apathy, and vacuity, in the ordinary sense of these terms.

The expression "annihilation" has much to answer for. It has been flaunted scornfully in the face of Buddhism by Vedantists of bygone ages and by Christians of this century; it has been hurled from pulpits with tremendous vehemence into the ears of bewildered congregations, and it has formed a text for delighted and triumphant denunciation in innumerable articles—in fact, with annihilation inscribed on its banners, the whole host of Buddha's army has been depicted as marching inevitably to utter and irretrievable ruin.

At this juncture let us turn to a later authority, Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, who, in answer to the question, What remains to rise above all forms and the total disintegration of body and final dissolution of the mind? sets forth the Buddhist conception in the following manner: "Unconsciously dwelling behind the false consciousness of imperfect man—beyond sensation, perception, thought—wrapped in the envelope of what we call soul (which, in truth, is only a thickly-woven veil of illusion), is the eternal and divine, the absolute Reality; not a soul, not a personality, but the All-self without selfishness—the Muga no Taiga—the Buddha enwombed in Karma. Within every phantom-self dwells this divine; yet the innumerable are but one. Within every creature incarnate sleeps the Infinite Intelligence, unevolved, hidden, unfelt, unknown, yet destined from all the eternities to waken at last, to rend away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, to break for ever its chrysalis of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and Time."[V]

There is no doubt, as General Forlong informs us in his Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religions, that Buddha's followers "finally revered him as a god, mixing up the first high and pure teaching of his faith with all the varied old and new doctrines, rites, and follies peculiar to each race and land which developed it. Every religion has to submit to this ordeal."

It cannot be too often reiterated that a personal moral ruler of the universe, "a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the imagination," or a sublimated edition of man located in the sky, is entirely foreign to true Buddhism; and, although Gotama deprecated as futile all speculations into the ultimate origin of things, he, in his "Buddha" capacity, was aware of the theory of an uncaused cause, whether called "AkÂsa" or "Dzyu," or anything else, from which everything has issued in obedience to a law of motion inherent in it.[W] This uncaused cause has its counterpart in the incomprehensible Uncreate of the Athanasian Creed. It is the God without and the kingdom of heaven within. A Buddha and It are one.

In the "White Lotus of Dharma" Gotama is made to declare that, though in the form of a Buddha, he is in reality the Self-existent.[X] On the other hand, from a purely phenomenal point of view, "a Buddha is simply a very wise man, and means 'The Awakened.'"

"Buddha, as a Buddha, knew all about the ultimate origin of the Kosmos. The personal Buddha, however, abstained from any such speculations, holding that, for the purposes of practical ethics, the wise man not only may, but must, avoid the distraction of speculation as to any ultimate cause" (Rev. Spence Hardy). "Self-conquest and universal charity, these are the foundation thoughts, the web and woof of Buddhism, the melodies on the variations of which its enticing harmony is built up" (Professor Rhys Davids). Such, too, according to the Christian Scriptures, is religion, pure and undefiled, before God and the Father.

The Rev. A. Sherring points out how the success of Gotama in overcoming the forces opposed to him "is unparalleled in human history.... That a solitary man, prince and ascetic, after pondering for five years over all the great doctrines of religions, priestcraft, falsities, the immoralities, shams, and confusions of those times, and the groans and miseries of his countrymen, that he should devise an entirely new system, think it out, and put it in order to meet objectors and overcome their arguments, and then go forth to the gradual conquest of India, and send forth missionaries who have converted 500 millions of people—that all this was the ultimate result of that one man's energy, sagacity, and resoluteness of will is assuredly one of the most astounding events in the annals of the world. He was a simple philosopher, reasoner, and calm disputant, employing no physical force whatever; while the morality which he enforced was the purest the world ever saw." General Forlong, in quoting this passage, says: "Such, divested of a few professional words, is the deliberate opinion of one of the best, the most learned and experienced missionaries."

Professor Rhys Davids seems to level a shaft at the typical Christian when he says that the Buddhist saint does not mar the purity of his self-denial by lusting after a positive happiness in a world to come; nor, it might be added, does the essential Christian who realizes the kingdom of heaven within.

If we take the word "God" in a restricted anthropomorphic sense, and the word "soul" to mean an entity that survives the body, it will appear strange to many, as Professor Rhys David says, that a religion which ignores the existence of such a God, and denies the existence of such a soul, should be the very religion which has found most acceptance among men. The same authority remarks that of any immaterial existence Buddhism knows nothing. This is true if "immaterial" or "spiritual" is taken to mean something altogether divorced from matter.

The universe, according to Buddhism, is not merely an arrangement of matter into forms and substances, but it consists also of the qualities of matter, and the relationship of the different particles and qualities to each other. The philosophy of Buddhism, in this connection, is Monism, which is described by its exponents as "a unitary world-conception, but not a one-substance theory. It does not imply that the world consists either of matter alone or of spirit alone, or that all its phenomena are motions only; but that our concepts of spiritual, material, mechanical, and other processes are abstractions, representing special features of reality; reality itself being one inseparable and indivisible entirety."

The phenomenal is a mode of the noumenal, as heat is a mode of motion. "Ex-istence" is a mode of "istence." There is no "beyond," no "behind the veil"; it is all one. If we take, as a provisional analogy, the flower of a tree to be the noumenal, and the root the phenomenal, they are both—as belonging to the tree—the same, and yet not the same. The soul might be likened to the blossom at the apex, at a point farthest away from the earth. The more perfect this soul-blossom becomes, the nearer it approaches the possibility of entering upon the unconditioned as immortal beauty—

and becoming thereby identical with truth.

Many people assign to music a power, exceeding that of all other arts, of sublimating the emotions of the human heart. Altering somewhat the form of the definition of Poetry as given by Theodore Watts, in his article on the subject in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica, one might say that absolute music is the non-concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical sounds. The state of the mind under the influence of music has been compared to a "sea of emotion—uncurdled by thoughts." This mental condition may also be super-induced, I think, by means of sculpture, painting, and poetry. In fact, I would maintain that the success of an artist, whether he be musician, poet, or painter, must always be measurable by his power of suggesting the unconditioned, or of bringing the human mind as near as possible to a thoughtless state of emotion, and, finally, to that of non-emotion.

In the gospel according to Buddha it is written:

The true artist can cause this immortal bliss to be felt, in all its Nirvanic beauty, by those naturally susceptible to such influences, as well as by those who, by a course of training, have rendered themselves capable of receiving them.

There is no line of demarcation between the noumenal and phenomenal. The one fades into the other, as all forms and outlines would disappear into the surrounding atoms or cosmic dust under a sufficiently powerful magnifying glass. "Appearance (the world of phenomena) is the real, as confusedly and partially understood.... The real is the apparent completely understood, and seen in the light of the whole.... Appearance is the appearance of reality.... If we know 'only phenomena,' we must thereby know something of that of which they are phenomena."[Y]

According to Buddhistic teaching, there are two worlds, so to speak—the one ruled by the law of causality, the other over which the law of causality has no power. A Buddhist would say that "the man who applies to the strictly unconditioned predicates such as being and non-being, which are used properly enough of the finite, the conditioned, resembles one who attempts to count the sands of the Ganges or the drops of the ocean."

With much the same sort of reasoning Jesus referred to the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven when addressing those who had eyes and did not see, and ears and did not hear.

In view of the apparent fact that the human body has reached its utmost limits of development, as a physical organism, there seems to be a thinkable probability that it will eventually, by a devolutionary process and by the atrophy of its present clumsy and imperfect organs, return, step by step, during the gradual cooling of this planet, to the condition of the psychic life of a simple cellule, and ultimately to the unconditioned; back, as Huxley puts it, to the indefinable latency from which we arose; or, as Carlyle expresses it, "pass stormfully across the astonished earth from God and to God."

Starting from the simple cellule, we see, in a way, how "Tanha," or the desire to extend the scope of activities, has persistently striven in this direction until the ultimate possibilities of the development of physical organism have been reached in man.

This highly-differentiated organism has become more and more sensitive to pain, more and more dissatisfied with its limitations; and man, recognizing these limitations, desires to abandon them altogether. Consequently, he seeks refuge in the hope of a future life, where limitations will no longer curb and embarrass him, and where he will cease to be subject to pain, passion, and sorrow.

Jesus and Gotama have indicated how by the suppression of this "Tanha," how by detachment from the things of the world, we can approach that simple cellular life-stage which is on the road to Heaven, Nirvana, and the Unconditioned. It is easy to realize how much pleasanter it would have been for us all if the simple cellule from which we spring had not been so persistently ambitious in the direction of activities. Its relatively prescribed functions suggest a most desirable condition of peace compared to that "unrest which men miscall delight."

Human life is but a drop in the ocean of organic existences on this planet—about 1,500 millions only among countless myriads of beings. It cannot, then, be accounted strange in a world containing so great a variety of organisms, with their varying tastes and needs, that man should find much that is distasteful and unsuitable to him which is pleasant and acceptable to other beings. The vulture feasts on carrion loathsome to man. Man partakes of food at which a rhinoceros would shudder.

Morality, as a law and corollary of organized life, being confined to humanity, it follows that immorality, as subversive of this law, would be of necessity abhorrent to those who appreciate a law without which social life would become intolerable, and not worth living. But, when we come to consider why it should be that the exquisite process of the decomposition of flesh should be less pleasing to the senses than the formation and fading of a sunset, we are forced to the conclusion that the world was not made for man, but man for the world.

The "part" working indiscriminately with and for the "whole" is an ethical law observable throughout the universe. All individuals are, unconsciously for the most part, carrying into effect the will of God by the will of God. We speak about individual effort to attain this perfection or avoid that evil, because we cannot divest ourselves of the feeling of free-will. To speak and act under a sense of free-will is forced upon us by the delusion of separateness.

It is often the case that God is only recognized in the beautiful aspects of nature. St. Paul says: "There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God that worketh all in all." We have to see God, not only in the sweet waters, but also in the deadly swamp; in the healthy child as well as in the foetid diseases of the sick. "That art thou," as the Buddhist truly says. The delicious and the disgusting are equally necessary as factors in the scheme of the universe; there is in both the same cosmic law fulfilling itself. "Dragons and all deeps: fire and hail fulfilling his word." A difference only exists in the appreciation of them.

This Monistic view of nature in no respect stands in the way of our regarding God as the sublimated reality of an ideal existence. Dr. Paul Carus, in his booklet on The Idea of God, says: "If the idea of God is an empty dream which we must expel from our minds, why not expel all ideas and all ideals? They are just as much and just as little real.... From this point of view a denial of the existence of God would, with consistency, lead us also to a denial of an integral, or a logarithm, or a differential. An integral is just as little a concrete object as is God. And the idea of God is just as important in the real life of human activity, human thought and emotion, as the idea of honesty is in the mercantile world, that of courage among warriors, and that of faith in science."

Buddha has taught that there are worlds more perfect and developed, and others less so, than this earth; and that the inhabitants of each world correspond in development with itself.[Z] Mr. Lafcadio Hearn says: "The Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively and subjectively.... The true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of feelings which are themselves unstable, and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong, perhaps impregnable."

Indian philosophers have attempted, with a fair measure of success, to overcome the perplexity presented by the idea of diversity in unity. They say that, "as an individual can conjure up visions of various phenomena in his waking state without destroying his sense of unity as an individual, so there may be a multiform creation in the One Absolute without any suppression of its unitary nature. To the Unconscious Absolute phenomena stand in the relation of dreams to the individual who is conscious of dreams on awaking. But the Unconscious Absolute does not awake; therefore 'It' remains unconscious of phenomena. The variety of the world is like the variety of a dream."

In a commentary on the Essence of the Upanishads the fictitiousness of emanations from unity is thus illustrated:—

"A belated wayfarer mistakes a piece of rope lying on the road for a snake; the delusion disappears, but the rope remains the rope. So with the apparitional world: the delusion passes, and unity remains.[AA]

"All the figments of the world-fiction may be made to disappear in such a way that pure thought, or the self, shall alone remain, in the same manner as the fictitious serpent seen in a piece of rope may be made to disappear, and the rope that underlies it may be made to remain. The rope was only the rope all the time it falsely seemed to be a snake. The fictitious world may be made to disappear as the fictitious snake is made to disappear, and this is its sublation."[AB]

Professor Seth, referring in his book, entitled The Position of Man in the Kosmos, to Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, remarks: "Reality 'must own' and somehow include appearance." In another part of his book he writes: "We are ourselves immersed in the process of the universe. We can only live our own life, and see through our own eyes. If we could do more, that would mean that we ourselves had vanished from the universe; the place which had known us would know us no more; and there would be, as it were, a gap created in the tissue of the world."

Under "Mysticism," in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica, we read: "Our consciousness of self is the condition under which we possess a world to know and to enjoy; but it likewise isolates us from all the world beside. Reason is the revealer of nature and God; but, by its acts, reason seems the thing reasoned about. Hence mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire—a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject and object are one."

The Great Self, or Immanent Power—expressions barely communicable to the understanding by the rather restrictive sounding and abrupt terminology of the word "God"—perhaps nearer in thought to the Will in Nature of Schopenhauer—with which the Brahmins of India sought communion, has been to them from time immemorial the Alpha and Omega of their being. When religion steps in it is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. They cannot in truth be called superstitious; they are, to coin a word, substitious. They sink, plummet-wise, into the fathomless; the line is severed, and they are lost in the depths and caverns of nescience. The concrete, with them, has always ranked lower than the abstract.

VamadÉo Shastri, writing in the Fortnightly Review of November, 1898, on the theological situation in India, says:—

In Europe, as I understand, your churches have long ago closed the era of unlimited metaphysical speculation, retaining only certain mysterious dogmata that are authoritatively prescribed as facts—that are not philosophical discoveries, but are declarations of revealed truth.

You have drawn up your creeds; you have settled finally all essential beliefs in future rewards and punishments, in man's redemption from sin and resurrection, and, above all, in a Divine Personality. You have numbered and ended the list of your sacred books; you look for no fresh revelation; you have regulated by ordinances the rites and ceremonies which unite the worshippers and divide the Churches....

But I want you to understand that we are still wandering in the metaphysic wilderness, and that Christianity, returning at last after an interval of so many centuries, finds us still engaged on the same problems as those which occupied the schools of Antioch and Alexandria and the secret professors of the Jewish Kabbala.

We have never yet set limits, either by philosophic criticism or by ecclesiastic ordinance, to the range of free inquiry or to the thinking faculty. We cannot submit to the restrictions placed by faith upon inquiry into mysteries; we are driven by our mental constitution to overleap the bounds of sentient experience, and to construct, like your ancient heretics, some intelligible theory of the unconditioned.

We are incapable of apprehending a Personality, except in the sense of something that masks or represents an incomprehensible notion; and dogmatic systems are to us no more than the formal envelopes of spiritual truth.

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Two cardinal ideas run through our deeper religious thought. One is the Maya, or cosmic illusion, which cuts the knot of any difficulty touching the relation between Spirit and Matter, and produces Unity by exhibiting the visible universe as a shadow projected upon the white radiance of eternity; the other is the notion of the soul's deliverance by long travail from existence in any stage or shape.

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In short, we have a religion, but no theology.

"By Plotinus 'The One' is explicitly exalted above the '????' and the 'ideas'; it transcends existence altogether, and is not cognizable by reason. Remaining itself in repose, it rays out, as it were, from its fulness an image of itself, which is called '????,' and which constitutes the system of ideas, or the intelligible world. The soul is in turn the image or product of the '????' and the soul, by its motion, begets corporeal matter. The soul thus faces two ways—towards the '????,' from which it springs, and towards the material life, which is its own product" (vide EncyclopÆdia Britannica).

A consideration of the theosophy of the "Sohar," or Book of Splendour, does not afford a key to the solution of this problem. We meet there with the same difficulty, the inconceivable transition point, where the "inactive" mingles with the "active." Ensoph is the Absolute, the great "I am," the endless, the boundless, the incomprehensible.

Mr. Bradley, in his book on Appearance and Reality, asks whether we really have a positive idea of an absolute defined as "one comprehensive sentience"; and he answers that, while we cannot fully realize its existence, its main features are drawn from our own experience, and we have also a suggestion there of the unity of a whole embracing distinctions within itself. "Identity only exists through differences, unity through multiplicity. Such is the constant thesis of the Hegelian philosophy."[AC]

The apparent connection between the Buddhist and Christian conceptions of a God is very ably stated by Dr. Paul Carus, and with the following extracts from his writings I may fitly close the subject of this chapter:—

"Buddhism is commonly said to deny the existence of a God. This is true, or not true, according to the definition of God.

"While Buddhists do not believe that God is an individual being like ourselves, they recognize that the Christian God idea contains an important truth, which, however, is differently expressed in Buddhism. Buddhism teaches that BÔdhi, or SambÔdhi, or Amitabha—i.e., that which gives enlightenment, or, in other words, those verities the recognition of which is Nirvana (constituting Buddhahood)—is omnipresent and eternal."

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"Christianity possesses in the idea, and, indeed, in the very word 'God,' representing the authority of moral conduct in a most forcible manner, a symbol of invaluable importance; it is an advantage which has contributed not a little to make Christianity so powerful and popular, so impressive and effective, as it has proved to be. In this little word 'God' much has been condensed, and it contains an unfathomable depth of religious comfort."

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