Chapter II

"O Bhagavat, the idea of a self is no idea; and the idea of a being, or a living person, or a person, is no idea. And why? Because the blessed Buddhas are freed from all ideas."--_The Diamond-Cutter._

And now let us try to understand what it is that dies, and what it is that is reborn,--what it is that commits faults and what it is that suffers penalties,--what passes from states of woe to states of bliss,--what enters into Nirvana after the destruction of self-consciousness,--what survives "extinction" and has power to return out of Nirvana,--what experiences the Four Infinite Feelings after all finite feeling has been annihilated.

It is not the sentient and conscious Self that enters Nirvana. The Ego is only a temporary aggregate of countless illusions, a phantom-shell, a bubble sure to break. It is a creation of Karma,--or rather, as a Buddhist friend insists, it _is_ Karma. To comprehend the statement fully, the reader should know that, in this Oriental philosophy, acts and thoughts are forces integrating themselves into material and mental phenomena,--into what we call objective and subjective appearances. The very earth we tread upon,--the mountains and forests, the rivers and seas, the world and its moon, the visible universe in short,--_is the integration of acts and thoughts,_ is Karma, or, at least, Being conditioned by Karma.[1]

[Footnote 1: "The aggregate actions of all sentient beings give birth to the varieties of mountains, rivers, countries, etc. ... Their eyes, nostrils, ears, tongues, bodies,--as well as their gardens, woods, farms, residences, servants, and maids,--men imagine to be their own possessions; but they are, in truth, only results produced by innumerable actions."

--KURODA, _Outlines of the Mahâyana._

"Grass, trees, earth,--all these shall become Buddha."

--CHŪ-IN-KYŌ."

"Even swords and things of metal are manifestations of spirit: within them exist all virtues (or '_power_') in their fullest development and perfection."--HIZŌ-HŌ-YAKU.

"When called sentient or non-sentient, matter is Law-Body (or '_spiritual body_')."--CHISHŌ-HISHŌ.

"The Apparent Doctrine treats of the four great elements _[earth, fire, water, air]_ as non-sentient. But in the Hidden Doctrine these are said to be the Sammya-Shin (_Samya-Kaya_), or Body-Accordant of the Nyōrai (Tathâgata)."--SOKU-SHIN-JŌ-BUTSU-GI.

"When every phase of our mind shall be in accord with the mind of Buddha, ... then there will not be even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood."--ENGAKU-SHŌ.]

The Karma-Ego we call Self is mind and is body;--both perpetually decay; both are perpetually renewed. From the unknown beginning, this double--phenomenon, objective and subjective, has been alternately dissolved and integrated: each integration is a birth; each dissolution a death. There is no other birth or death but the birth and death of Karma in some form or condition. But at each rebirth the reintegration is never the reintegration of the identical phenomenon, but of another to which it gives rise,--as growth begets growth, as motion produces motion. So that the phantom-self changes not only as to form and condition, but as to actual personality with every reëmbodiment. There is one Reality; but there is no permanent individual, no constant personality: there is only phantom-self, and phantom succeeds to phantom, as undulation to undulation, over the ghostly Sea of Birth and Death. And even as the storming of a sea is a motion of undulation, not of translation,--even as it is the form of the wave only, not the wave itself, that travels,--so in the passing of lives there is only the rising and the vanishing of forms,--forms mental, forms material. The fathomless Reality does not pass. "All forms," it is written in the _Kongō-hannya-haramitsu-Kyō,_[2] "are unreal: he who rises above all forms is the Buddha." But what can remain to rise above all forms after the total disintegration of body and the final dissolution of mind?

[Footnote 2: Vagra-pragnâ-pâramita-Sutra.]

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 forever its chrysalis of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and Time. Wherefore it is written in the _Kegon-Kyō_ (Avatamsaka-Sutra): "Child of Buddha, there is not even one living being that has not the wisdom of the Tathâgata. It is only because of their vain thoughts and affections that all beings are not conscious of this.... I will teach them the holy Way;--I will make them forsake their foolish thoughts, and cause them to see that the vast and deep intelligence which dwells within them is not different from the wisdom of the very Buddha."

*

Here we may pause to consider the correspondence between these fundamental Buddhist theories and the concepts of Western science. It will be evident that 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 or subjectively. For the negation of Karma as Karma would involve the negation of the entire Buddhist system. 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 aggregates of feelings which are themselves unstable and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong,--perhaps impregnable. Of substance in itself we certainly know nothing: we are conscious of the universe as a vast play of forces only; and, even while we discern the general relative meaning of laws expressed in the action of those forces, all that which is Non-Ego is revealed to us merely through the vibrations of a nervous structure never exactly the same in any two human beings. Yet through such varying and imperfect perception we are sufficiently assured of the impermanency of all forms,--of all aggregates objective or subjective.

The test of reality is persistence; and the Buddhist, finding in the visible universe only a perpetual flux of phenomena, declares the material aggregate unreal because non-persistent,--unreal, at least, as a bubble, a cloud, or a mirage. Again, relation is the universal form of thought; but since relation is impermanent, how can thought be persistent?... Judged from these points of view, Buddhist doctrine is not Anti-Realism, but a veritable Transfigured Realism, finding just expression in the exact words of Herbert Spencer:--"Every feeling and thought being but transitory;--an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being also but transitory;--nay, the objects amid which life is passed, though less transitory, being severally in the course of losing their individualities, whether quickly or slowly,--_we learn that the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality hidden under all these changing shapes._"

Likewise, the teaching of Buddhism, that what we call Self is an impermanent aggregate,--a sensuous illusion,--will prove, if patiently analyzed, scarcely possible for any serious thinker to deny. Mind, as known to the scientific psychologist, is composed of feelings and the relations between feelings; and feelings are composed of units of simple sensation which are physiologically coincident with minute nervous shocks. All the sense-organs are fundamentally alike, being evolutional modifications of the same morphological elements;--and all the senses are modifications of touch. Or, to use the simplest possible language, the organs of sense--sight, smell, taste, even hearing--have been alike developed from the skin! Even the human brain itself, by the modern testimony of histology and embryology, "is, at its first beginning, merely an infolding of the epidermic layer;" and thought, physiologically and evolutionally, is thus a modification of touch. Certain vibrations, acting through the visual apparatus, cause within the brain those motions which are followed by the sensations of light and color;--other vibrations, acting upon the auditory mechanism, give rise to the sensation of sound;--other vibrations, setting up changes in specialized tissue, produce sensations of taste, smell, touch. All our knowledge is derived and developed, directly or indirectly, from physical sensation,--from touch. Of course this is no ultimate explanation, because nobody can tell us _what feels the touch._ "Everything physical," well said Schopenhauer, "is at the same time meta-physical." But science fully justifies the Buddhist position that what we call Self is a bundle of sensations, emotions, sentiments, ideas, memories, all relating to the _physical_ experiences of the race and the individual, and that our wish for immortality is a wish for the eternity of this merely sensuous and selfish consciousness. And science even supports the Buddhist denial of the permanence of the sensuous Ego. "Psychology," says Wundt, "proves that not only our sense-perceptions, but the memorial images that renew them, depend for their origin upon the functionings of the organs of sense and movement.... A continuance of this sensuous consciousness must appear to her irreconcilable with the facts of her experience. And surely we may well doubt whether such continuance is an ethical requisite: more, whether the fulfillment of the wish for it, if possible, were not an intolerable destiny."