"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."