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 Kyō_ Sō (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 _Daizō-hō-sū_ will also be found interesting "By experience the Tathâgata possesses all forms,--forms for multitude numberless as the dust-grains of the universe.... The Tathâgata 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."]
[Footnote 10: Half of this Buddhist thought is really embodied in Tennyson's line,--"Boundless inward, in the atom; boundless outward, in the Whole."]
... "All beings that have life shall lay Aside their complex form,--that aggregation Of mental and material qualities That gives them, or in heaven or on earth, Their fleeting individuality." _The Book of the Great Decease_.
In every teleological system there are conceptions which cannot bear the test of modern psychological analysis, and in the foregoing unfilled outline of a great religious hypothesis there will doubtless be recognized some "ghosts of beliefs haunting those mazes of verbal propositions in which metaphysicians habitually lose themselves." But truths will be perceived also,--grand recognitions of the law of ethical evolution, of the price of progress, and of our relation to the changeless Reality abiding beyond all change.
The Buddhist estimate of the enormity of that opposition to moral progress which humanity must overcome is fully sustained by our scientific knowledge of the past and perception of the future. Mental and moral advance has thus far been effected only through constant struggle against inheritances older than reason or moral feeling,--against the instincts and the appetites of primitive brute life. And the Buddhist teaching, that the average man can hope to leave his worse nature behind him only after the lapse of millions of future lives, is much more of a truth than of a theory. Only through millions of births have we been able to reach even this our present imperfect state; and the dark bequests of our darkest past are still strong enough betimes to prevail over reason and ethical feeling. Every future forward pace upon the moral path will have to be taken against the massed effort of millions of ghostly wills. For those past selves which priest and poet have told us to use as steps to higher things are not dead, nor even likely to die for a thousand generations to come: they are too much alive;--they have still power to clutch the climbing feet,--sometimes even to fling back the climber into the primeval slime.