HEAVEN AND NIRVANA.

Innumerable figures of speech have been brought into requisition to convey to the imagination the import of the terms "Heaven" and "Nirvana." None of these, taken either separately or collectively, can be held to include all that is indicated by the above expressions. To speak of reaching Heaven, or Nirvana, is somewhat misleading; no measurement of space is applicable to them; no phenomenal expression in itself will pass muster.

A later and more material aspect of heaven, known as the Western Paradise, and only referred to, I think, in the Mahayana, has been provided, it would seem, for the satisfaction of those who require a temporary halting-place for thought before moving on to more abstract conceptions. This heaven is illustrated with all those inimitable colours and touches which oriental inventiveness uses with such alluring effect. It is naÏvely located ten millions of miles to the west.

There, in a light that never was on land or sea, where lotus flowers of every imaginable hue vie with each other to cluster at his holy feet, sits enthroned the Buddha of Infinite Light, the Compassionate, the Perfect One.

The sweet radiance of his pitying smile pervades the heavens for thousands of leagues. The beautiful expressions of his countenance cannot be numbered, for they are as countless as the sands of Gunga's sacred stream; nor can his compassion be measured—it is illimitable as a shoreless ocean. The magical grace of his form is compared to the "moon on high when she marches full-orbed" through the unclouded expanse of the Empyrean. If ever so "gentle a zephyr blows amid the trees," the atmosphere vibrates with all delicate and enticing melodies. The voices of the Devas are heard chanting his praises. An aerial choir, the birds of Paradise, answer back with antiphons of rapturous song as they soar above in the gilded air which fills the pavilions of the Blest. Such, and much more, is the "Pure Land," the land of Amita, the Buddha of Infinite Light.

The introduction into the picture of pavements of gold, crystal streams, precious stones, jewels, and many of the paraphernalia which the pageantry of this nether world demands for its embellishment brings to remembrance the splendours enshrined in that final revelation of things to be, which was delivered to man in the person of St. John the Divine.

Nirvana has been called "The Imperishable," "The Infinite," "The Eternal," "The Everlasting," "The Transcendent," "The Serene," "The Formless," "The Goal," "The Other Shore," "Rest," "The True," or "The Truth." It has been compared to an "island which no flood can overwhelm," to a "City of Peace," "The Jewelled Realm of Happiness," "An Escape from the Evil One."[AL] For the Christian Heaven, in like manner, a great variety of metaphors abounds.

But the mere gazing at, and admiration of, these pretty pictures will not conduce to a comprehension of them—will not help us to discover what formulated in the mind of the artist the design of the picture he painted. For this needful purpose it may not prove unprofitable to have recourse, in the first instance, to the metaphysics of the grand old Oriental mystic, St. Paul. By his assistance we may find that these conceptions, Heaven and Nirvana, on which so much wealth of imagery has been lavished, and about which controversy has well-nigh exhausted itself, will resolve themselves into something less indefinite, and more thinkable, of one nature and of one significance.

In his Epistle to the Corinthians he tells us "God hath chosen the things that are not to bring to nought the things that are." Now, the "things that are not" must assuredly be taken to mean that which is, figuratively speaking, beyond the threshold—something, in this respect, more than the subliminal[AM] reveals; in fact, the ultra-liminal, and, consequently, the immutable. They are the quality Truth, residing in, but inseparable, as long as senses last, from, the "things that are"—namely, in materiality as we perceive it; materiality being here understood as "potential feeling, from which develop ideas, or the soul of man."

Ultimately perfected ideas, or soul, become this quality, Truth; they become that which is within and outside all things—in short, what Jesus calls "the kingdom of God within," as well as the Heaven around us.

The expression "bring to nought" has its equivalents in the terms "annihilation" and "extinction," so often used in connection with Nirvana, for the desperate purpose of depreciating the Buddhist conception of Heaven. The "things that are" are material objects as we perceive them, which are mutable, and never the same one moment together—never really are, but are for ever undergoing a process of becoming ("God calleth those things which be not as though they were," Rom. iv. 17). Material objects are mutable, and Heaven and Nirvana are immutability. Plotinus says: "The return to God, or The One (or Truth), is the consummation of all things, and the goal indicated by Christian teaching." This oneness, however, does not imply extinction. "He who has entered upon Nirvana is not annihilated; on the contrary, he has attained the deathless."

The identical idea is prevalent both in New Testament teaching and in Buddhistic doctrine, that the realization of that state of blessedness which is called "Heaven" in the one case, and "Nirvana" in the other, could be brought about during the lifetime of the saint. "But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the kingdom of God" (Luke ix. 27).

"The kingdom of heaven is within you" is also a sufficiently explicit statement on the part of the Christian Scripture to substantiate the possibility of such an experience.

In an article published in the Monist of January, 1898, and bearing on this subject, there occurs the following passage, accompanied with extracts from the works of several Christian mystics:—

"The Buddhist idea, that salvation consists mainly in dropping our own self, in becoming nothing, in self-annihilation for the sake of becoming Buddha—viz., divinely incarnate—can be found in many Christian writers. The highest religious aspirations are not the result of an anxiety for the salvation of one's own soul, but a yearning for a union with God."

Scotus Erigena writes: "In God all things will be put to rest and remain One, Indivisible, and Immutable."...

"God does not perceive what is Himself."

According to St. Augustine: "If the soul is to comprehend God, it must forget itself, for if the soul sees and comprehends itself it neither sees nor comprehends God."

"If the soul loses itself through God and forsakes all things, it finds itself again through God."...

"Whenever the soul comes to uniting itself with God it becomes annihilated." ...

"All perfection and all bliss consists in this, that man enters into the ground that is groundless."...

"How shall I love God? Thou shalt love Him as He is—a not God, a not spirit, a not person, a not image; but rather as He is—a true, pure, clear One, separated from all two-hood; and in this One we shall eternally disappear from nothing into nothing."[AN]...

Erckhart says: "How shall that man be who shall behold God? He shall be dead. Our Lord says: 'No man shall see me and live.'"

According to Buddhistic teaching, "He who has conquered ignorance and got rid of desire enjoys the supreme reward already in this life. His outer man may still be detained in the world of suffering, but he knows that it is not he himself whom the coming of the Sankharas[AO] affects."

Enlightenment and Nirvana are synonymous. "Buddha is said to have entered upon Nirvana when he died. Yet at the same time we are told that Buddha had attained Nirvana already during his life."[AP]

"If thou knowest the destruction of the Sankharas, thou knowest the Uncreated" (Dhammapada); or, as Professor Oldenberg's translator renders it, "Let others pursue the uncreated by their erroneous paths which will never carry them beyond the realm of the created. As for thee, let the attainment of the Uncreated consist in this, that thou reachest the cessation of the created."

Gotama, in a conversation between himself and an unbeliever, said: "Illustrious disciple, Nirvana may be compared to the nothingness defined as the absence of something different to itself. We may justly define Nirvana as that sort of non-existence which consists in the absence of something essentially different."[AQ]

There are to be found several passages in the New Testament which seem to confirm the interpretation given to St. Paul's saying about the "things that are not." Heaven is spoken of as an inheritance that fadeth not away—that is, the "things that are" fade away, but the things that are not do not fade away. The things that are not seen (that are not) are eternal, and the things that are seen (that seemingly are) are temporal.

This it hath not entered the heart of man to fully understand. We only see through a glass darkly; through the web of illusion. "But if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with patience wait for it."

Jesus answering his interrogators, exclaims: "What house will ye build me, or what is the place of my rest?" This was a rebuff to those who endeavoured to localize the illocatable. "The Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands." "My kingdom is not of this world." Jesus spoke to the people in parable because it was not given to them to understand the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.

Gotama said: "Whatsoever has not been revealed by me let that remain unrevealed, and what has been revealed let it be revealed."

With reference to the saying of Jesus, "Multa habeo vobis dicere, sed nunc non potestis portare illa," St. Augustine remarks: "Manifestum est non esse culpandum, aliquando verum tacere."

Dr. Paul Carus, in a chapter headed "HinÂyÂna, MahÂyÂna, MahÂsÂtu" (p. 230, Buddhism and its Christian Critics), deals in a most masterly and effective manner with the value of the symbolic in contradistinction to the essential phases of Buddhism and Christianity. In judging the MahÂyÂna system (of Buddhism) and its fantastical offshoots, he says: "We must consider the mental state of those nations for whom it was adapted, and it may be that a purer religion would have failed utterly where cruder allegories of what appears to us as childish superstitions exercised a beneficent influence. The MahÂyÂna has changed the savage hordes of Central Asia, from whom proceeded the most barbarous hordes, dreaded by all their neighbours, into a most kind-hearted people, with a sacred passion for universal benevolence and charity."

With reference to the Christian Church, he remarks: "What does it matter that, during the development of the Church, the letter of symbolically-expressed truth has crystallized into fixed dogmas?... He who believes in a myth that contains, in the garb of a parable, a religious truth, and accordingly regulates his moral conduct, is better off than he who is void of any faith. The truth hidden in the myth teaches him and serves him as a guide; it comforts him in affliction, strengthens him in temptation, and shows him in an allegorical reflection the bliss that rests upon righteousness."

The words "rest," "peace," and "sleep" are in the New Testament more often associated with the conditions of a future life than such expressions as "joy" or "happiness." The word "joy" is only to be found once in direct connection with the word "heaven" in the New Testament—i.e., when there was joy in heaven over the repentance of a sinner.

The omission may have been intentional, so that the world might understand that the joy of heaven would be something absolutely different from what we conceive of joy; that there will be a kind of joy, in which joy, as it is known here, is absent.

"There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God."

"He that hath entered into his rest, he also has ceased from his own works as God did from his."

"Let us labour therefore to enter that rest."

"Ye shall find rest unto your souls."

Such texts seem to draw heaven and Nirvana very close together.

It is undoubtedly implied in some portions of the Christian Scriptures that the souls of the departed are asleep, and will not be disturbed till the coming of the Lord and the final judgment.

"Does not the testimony of the Bible lead us to this conclusion; from the cry of the tired spirit of Samuel, awakened from its sleep by the Witch of Endor, 'Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?' to the saying of the spirit in the Revelation, 'Yea, they rest from their labours.' In the case of Lazarus we have the words of Jesus to this effect: 'Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep'" (from Light).

Many are in love with the satisfying beauty of this sleep which has lasted since death began to be, and desire that it might never be disturbed. This is that yearning for the rest of Nirvana, for the peace that passeth understanding. The true mission of religious symbolism, of music, of poetry, and the plastic arts is, not to excite the physical emotions of man, not to crystallize appearances, but to translate his soul to this condition of delicious swooning, to turn his gaze inwards to what Brahmanic philosophy calls the fontal essence of things.

From a poetical point of view, it is perhaps melancholy to reflect that the seers of India are being rudely awakened from their reveries, to be at last, as seems probable, completely absorbed into the relatively sordid environment of Occidental progress—in fact, to dream no more. The West has murdered dreams.

Apart from the physical influences of climate and country, the strange yearning of the Indian for an ultimate heaven of unconsciousness may be accounted for by tracing it to a vague remembrance in the human organism of the happy condition from which it primarily emerged, before even animal existence had entered upon the fairly peaceful life-history of an amoeba.

The process of transition from the condition of "are" to that of "are not," from the phenomenal to the noumenal, has been conceived by Buddhists and Christians alike to be gradual. As a parallel to the "house of many mansions," so often taken to mean by Christians a progressive ascent through a number of heavens to a heaven of heavens, I give below, in abbreviated form, the "spheres of formlessness" as described by Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, in his book entitled Gleanings from Buddha Fields.

"These," he says, "are four. In the first state all sense of individuality is lost, and there survives only the idea of infinite space or emptiness. In the second state this idea of space vanishes, and its place is filled by the idea of infinite reason. But this idea of reason is anthropomorphic, it is an illusion, and it fades out in the third state, which is called the 'state-of-nothing-to-take-hold-of.' Here is only the idea of infinite nothingness. But even this condition has been reached by the aid of the action of the personal mind. This action ceases; then the fourth state is reached, the state of 'neither-namelessness-nor-notnamelessness.' Something of personal mentality continues to float vaguely here—the very uttermost expiring vibration of Karma—the last vanishing haze of being. It melts, and the immeasurable revelation comes."

Professor Oldenberg says: "It is not enough to say that the final goal to which the Buddhist strives to pass as an escape from the sorrow of the world is Nirvana. It is also necessary to any delineation of Buddhism to note, as a fact assured beyond all doubt, that internal cheerfulness, infinitely surpassing all mere resignation with which the Buddhist pursues his end....

"Does the path, then, lead into a new existence? Does it lead into the nothing? The Buddhist creed rests in delicate equipoise between the two. The longing of the heart that craves the eternal has not nothing, and yet the thought has not a something, which it might firmly grasp. Further off the idea of the endless, the eternal could not withdraw itself from belief than it has done here, where, like a gentle flutter on the point of merging in the nothing, it threatens to evade the gaze."

Nirvana, according to Mr. James Freeman Clarke, means to the Buddhist the absolute eternal world beyond time and space; that which is nothing to us now, but will be everything hereafter.

Students of Buddhism are often confronted with the question why sorrow and pain should have held such prominent places in the mind of Gotama. Explanations have been afforded that this was due, in a large measure, to a pathetic nature, born of climate and environment. The mind of the inhabitants of Hindustan is still an unfathomable mystery; the great heart of India beats slowly, and those waves of sprightly emotion which are distinctive peculiarities of the natives of Europe are but barely discernible ripples on the still surface of the Indian character.

To the poetic people of the Ganges the immense plains of India, their broad and voiceless rivers, the magic beauty of an oasis, the distant silence of the Himalayas, the brooding calm of the atmosphere, all appear to labour in unison to the same end—to fashion the restless heart of mortals after their own emotionless image, to expand it into that fulness of peace which is theirs, and to guide the children of men into the haven where they would be.

This mode of thought, or no thought; this complete abandonment of self, culminating in the ascetic, to the desire of union with the Infinite, can be differentiated from the meditative pose of the Christian by the absence in it of anything approaching to emotion or affection. These are weaknesses to be set aside. There can be no calm where sensations enter—not even a breath of divine love must stir the ocean of their pictured rest. Gotama fully recognized that true joy was only to be found when the notion of self-hood was in abeyance, as it most certainly is found invariably in those cases in which we lose, as it were, the sense of objective being in an absorbing subject, or in the presence of a fascinating personality.

There is an indescribable pleasure realizable in engrossing occupations of mind and body which distract attention from ourselves as selves. Hence the apotheosis of love as the ultimate possible bliss, whether it be manifested in the adoration of the human or in the ecstasy of the saint. Charles Beaudelaire declares the whole aim of life is to dispel ennui—the ennui of sitting still by walking, of lying down by change to an erect posture, and so on. Virtue, vice, love, etc., are all efforts to attain a state of oblivion of our individuality, to s'enivrer with distractions of some sort or another. Sorrow is the realization of ourselves as separate entities. The Buddhists declare that, when we rid ourselves of the idea of this separateness, then, and then only, will true joy be found. The same truth is expressed in the New Testament: "He that loseth his life shall gain it."

The drooping head upon the cross, the livid corpse of the Saviour—such pictures are strikingly emblematic of the sacrifice of self-hood, which is ever the cause of pain. Self-hood crucified—that is the Great Deliverance, that is Heaven, that is Nirvana! We must do more than take up the cross and follow; we must hang upon it, be nailed to it, if we would be saved.

It has been urged that the foundations of Buddhism rest upon the assumption that life is not worth living; everything leads to pain and sorrow; the joys of life are ignored. Hence, if it were proved that the enjoyments of life out-weighed the sorrows, would it not be clearly shown that Buddhism is de trop? For it is clear that life, in that case, would be worth living. This view of life is not only supported by a general consensus of opinion, but seems to be additionally strengthened by the universal desire to live. That this desire would not exist if the pessimistic idea of Buddhism regarding existence were well founded is evident.

In opposition to this view, my conception of Buddhism, as represented in its literature, is that its foundations rest upon the assumption that there is a life more worth living, in which all sorrow is eradicated; that only ignorance leads to pain and sorrow; that knowledge leads to their extinction. I am not aware that the joys of life are wholly ignored by Buddhists.

If it is granted that happiness predominates over unhappiness, and that life must consequently be worth living, this need not exclude the desire for a life more worth living, in which there is no unhappiness. If Buddhism is the wretched, pessimistic system it is declared by some to be, why should it not be allowed to hypothecate a heaven, when even the joyous, optimistic Christian, who finds life so worth living, speaks of being "delivered from the misery of this sinful world," and hopes for a life worth living?

Quite three-quarters of the population of this planet, as represented by its religious beliefs, which is supposed to find life worth living, looks through the spectacles of faith towards a life more worth living, after the dissolution of the body. In short, there are two distinct lives recognized by Buddhists—the living life and the non-living life; and it goes without saying that the latter is by far the more desirable of the two.

Dr. Paul Carus says: "The good tidings of Buddha's religion are not so much the recognition of the existence of pain and care as the conquest of evil and the escape from suffering. The following verses from the Dhammapada have no pessimistic ring:—

"'Let us live happily, then, not hating those who hate us!

"'Among men who hate us, let us dwell free from hatred!

"'Let us live happily, then, free from ailments among the ailing!

"'Among men who are ailing, let us dwell free from ailments!

"'Let us live happily, then, free from greed among the greedy!

"'Among men who are greedy, let us dwell free from greed!'"

There are many passages to be found in the New Testament, in our Christian Liturgy, and especially in the Hymnology of the Churches, which emphasize "suffering" as the normal and inevitable condition of humanity, almost leading one to suppose that it is the predominant factor in human life.

In the Burial Service we thank God that our brother has been delivered from the miseries of a sinful world, and Job is brought into requisition to show that "man that is born of woman is full of sorrows."

In a beautiful hymn we have the following verse:—

For an assembly of young men and maidens in the first rapturous dawn of maturing youth to sing—

though delightfully pessimistic, does not seem quite up to the standard of absolute truth.

These sorrows, these labours, these tears, this weary waiting, represent the experiences in store for the initiate, and the conditions under which the Christian must progress who would reach the goal of his dearest aspirations.

"Death is self-surrender; all loss is a kind of death; the only-begotten Son is the summing up of what is dearest, most one's own—i.e., God can only be at one with his work, can only make it to be truly his work by eternally dying—sacrificing what is dearest to him. God does not, therefore, cease to be; he does not annihilate himself; he lives eternally in the very process of sacrificing his dearest work. Hence God is said to be love; for love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.... Such would be the atonement of the world-god eternally living in his own death, eternally losing, and eternally returning to, himself" (Nettleship).

It cannot be denied that "suffering" was the burden of Gotama's song, the refrain of his passionless, yet beautiful, utterances.

Jesus has been described "as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

Jesus wept.

The whole creation weeps.

"What think ye, my disciples (the Perfect One said), whether is more, the water which is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept because that was your portion which ye abhorred, and that which ye loved was not your portion? And while ye experienced this through long ages more tears have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered on this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept because that was your portion which ye abhorred, and that which ye loved was not your portion, than all the water which is in the four great oceans" (Oldenberg's Buddhism).

St. Paul conjures up a vision of the immense figure of creation, prostrate, groaning beneath the silent heavens. "The true Buddhist certainly sees in this world a state of continuous sorrow; but this sorrow only awakes in him a feeling of compassion for those who are yet in the world. For himself he feels no sorrow or compassion.... He seeks Nirvana with the same joyous sense of victory in prospect with which the Christian looks forward to his goal, everlasting life" (Oldenberg).

The doctrine of an irrevocable doom for the unbeliever and obdurate sinner is not easy to follow, because it would seem to imply "a failure of the redemptive work of the Saviour unless all for whom he died ultimately partake of salvation." If many are called and but few are chosen; if the gate is narrow, and only a microscopic minority enter thereby, the supreme sacrifice of the only-begotten Son of God is liable to lose significance in the eyes of an exigeant public.

Jesus "treated popular religious terms such as Hell and Heaven as symbols." "He employed the familiar images of Heaven and Hell to impress on men's consciousness the supreme bliss of righteousness and the awful misery of sin."

"When our Lord came, he found the doctrines of last things presented in forms already fixed, and the terms Gehenna, Paradise, etc., in familiar, even proverbial, use" (Eschatology, EncyclopÆdia Britannica).

Every being, according to Buddhistic teaching, attains Nirvana in the end; so may it not be in "the times of the restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began"?

If symbolism were only taken for what it represents, every Buddhist could join with the Christian in many of the exquisite invocations of the Psalms. There is no rest to be found in the impermanent. To find the peace which passeth understanding, we must ultimately have recourse to the unconditioned, the permanent, Nirvana, God. The prayer of the Christian as well as the aspiration of the pure Buddhist is to be, whether living or dead, one with the Uncreate.

Professor Oldenberg says that "the devotion of abstraction is to Buddhism what prayer is to other religions." There is here a distinction without a difference. Abstraction is nothing more nor less than true, perfect, sublimated prayer. Real, unadulterated prayer is only possible when the mind is totally relieved of distractions.

Jesus went apart to pray; so the Buddhist monk seeks the silence of the forest or the seclusion of the cave to commune with the unconditioned, with "Our Father which art in Heaven," with the Uncreate of the Athanasian Creed. He who abstracts himself from the "plurality of the phenomenal world" anticipates the cessation of the impermanent.

"Come, then! Into solitude will I go, into the forest which Buddha praises; therein it is good for the solitary monk to dwell who seeks perfection. In the sÎta forest rich in blossoms, in the cool mountain cave, will I wash my body and walk alone."

The counting of inhalations and exhalations of the breath, and other practices of a like nature, are used as so many short cuts to this state of abstraction or prayer. For this purpose they are as valuable as ceremonial magic professes to be for the ready acquisition of power over unknown laws and qualities of nature.[AR]

Christianity and Buddhism cannot be differentiated in this matter of abstraction. Gibbon writes: "The fakirs of India and the monks of the Oriental Church were alike persuaded that, in total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity." The opinion and practice of the monasteries of Mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an Abbot who flourished in the eleventh century. "When thou art alone in thy cell," says the ascetic teacher, "shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner; raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thy eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel, and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first all will be dark and comfortless; but, if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light."

Here, in these practices attributed to Christian saints, we have an exact parallel to those in use by Hindu ascetics even of the present day. It must be clearly understood, however, that the Buddhist attaches no merit to such practices, unless they conduce to the banishment of ignorance. Asceticism, as a thing in itself, is useless.

Heaven and Nirvana are unpainted pictures, undescribed actualizations; they are realities, not materialities. There is a never-ending, unsatisfied, restless craving, conscious or unconscious, throughout the Kosmos to enter upon reality. The suns and their satellites whirl about aimlessly in search of it. The whole universe is in sore trouble because, through ignorance, it is not. "The vulture's eye hath not seen it; the lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea saith, It is not with me." And yet it is there!

The use of such exaggerated terms as "immense," "infinite," "illimitable," etc., is to be accounted for by referring the habit to unconscious efforts by the conditioned to express the unconditioned. The sea, mountains, the heavens, owe their fascination to a suggestion of the unconditioned possessed by them.

In moments of attempted aspiration we are prone to look upwards into space—a symbol of the boundless. On the other hand, when the mind is engaged in working out details and calculations, there is the habit of looking downwards. Not only men, but beasts of the field, look upwards for help in their dying moments; upwards into space, where the conditioned seemingly vanishes into the unconditioned.

I have often witnessed the pleading expression of dying antelopes and other wild animals, their eyes being almost invariably directed to the sky above in their last moments of life.

I was on one occasion more than usually struck with this beautiful expression—appealing, as it were, to the skies for mercy—in the case of a wounded bear when in its death throes amid the snowy solitudes of the Himalayas.

Let us draw the curtains apart, and behold for a moment the scene of the enacted tragedy. Out of the violet mists spread by the viewless hands of a yet unrisen sun, black crags uplifted their glacier breasts to receive the first ravishing kiss of dawn; and the forests, obedient to the silence imposed by the kingly peaks, stood austere and unstirred by the affectionate airs of heaven. The staining blood, the furry mass, the clutching claws of the wild monster in his struggle with life and death, presented to the imagination some weird sacrifice consummated upon an altar, built of immaculate snow.

It was then that this remarkable pleading expression of the eyes arrested the attention of my Himalayan huntsman, who, turning round to me, exclaimed: "He is seeing God." The Psalmist says: "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help."

Human beings, as well as all animal nature, seem to make their final appeal for help or pity to something above or beyond this conditioned world. The enhancement of the beauties of landscape and architecture by the effects of mist and twilight is due to the obliteration of detail by these atmospheric conditions. Detail is fatiguing to the eye and brain. These organs unconsciously demand the repose which the absence of detail confers. Hence the charm of impressionism in Art.

In the countenances of the blind, who possess one sensation the less to distract and weary them, there is not infrequently to be noticed a peculiar scintillation of peace which seems to speak to one of the time when all sensations will cease to be, and to herald the approach of that eternal beatitude which is so highly uplifted above the joys of this transitory world.

There is also a strong Nirvanic suggestion in the appearance of some of the eminent ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic faith, in those instances where the flesh shows traces of the consuming fire of asceticism. Benevolence, compassion, love, genius, joy—all these are presented, but with a minimum of the earthy adhering to them. In this aspect they create an impression very different to that communicated to us by the comfortable placidity of those who have only experienced happiness of a less exalted description.[AS]

In "stillness," another attribute of the unconditioned, there abides an enchantment that cannot be surpassed by other conditions. Yet even the rapture engendered by the sight of a furious and incontinent sea can be explained by the fact that the pleasure derived therefrom is solely due and in proportion to the magnitude of the display, and magnitude suggests the "illimitable."

The ambition to scale the highest summits, in whatever position or capacity, the idea of resurrection, the fascination of the word "eternal," the hope of everlasting rest—all these tend in the same direction, all point to the Empyrean, where detail seems to fade into a vacuum, into Nirvana, into Heaven, into God.