uls conducts. But
the communion to which it leads is so intimate that the human soul, the
individual, ceases to be. Obviously, therefore, if it ceases to be,
the communion also must cease; there is no real communion subsisting
between two spirits, the human and the divine, for two spirits do not
exist, but only one. If this way of stating the case be looked upon
with suspicion as possibly not doing justice to the teaching of
Buddhism, or as pressing unduly far the union between the human and the
divine which is the ultimate goal of the transmigration of souls, the
reply is that in truth the case against Buddhism is stronger than
appears from this mode of stating it. To say that from the Buddhist
point of view the human soul, the individual, eventually ceases to be,
is indeed an incorrect way of putting the matter. It implies that the
human soul, the individual, now is; and hereafter ceases to be. But so
far from {64} admitting that the individual now is, the Buddhist
doctrine is that the existence of the soul, now, is mere illusion,
_maya_. It is therefore logical enough, and at any rate
self-consistent, to say that hereafter, when the series of
transmigrations is complete, the individual will not indeed cease to
be, for he never was, but the illusion that he existed will be
dissipated. Logically again, it follows from this that if the
existence of the individual soul is an illusion from the beginning,
then there can strictly speaking be no transmigration of souls, for
there is no soul to transmigrate. But with perfect self-consistency
Buddhism accepts this position: what is transmitted from one being to
the next in the chain of existences is not the individuality or the
soul, but the character. Professor Rhys Davids says (_Hibbert
Lectures_, pp. 91, 92): "I have no hesitation in maintaining that
Gotama did not teach the transmigration of souls. What he did teach
would be better summarized, if we wish to retain the word
transmigration, as the transmigration of character. But it would be
more accurate to drop the word transmigration altogether when speaking
of Buddhism, and to call its doctrine the doctrine of karma. Gotama
held that after the death of any being, {65} whether human or not,
there survived nothing at all but that being's 'karma,' the result,
that is, of its mental and bodily actions." "He discarded the theory
of the presence, within each human body, of a soul which could have a
separate and e