re were a pool of water, clear, translucent and serene and a
man standing on the bank and with eyes to see should perceive the
mussels and the shells, the gravel and pebbles and the shoals of fish as
they move about or lie within it."

Similar accounts occur in many other passages with variations in the
number of stages described. We must not therefore insist on the details
as essential. But in all cases the process is marked by mental activity.
The meditations of Indian recluses are often described as
self-hypnotism, and I shall say something on this point elsewhere, but
it is clear that in giving the above account the Buddha did not
contemplate any mental condition in which the mind ceases to be active
or master of itself. When, at the beginning, the monk sits down to
meditate it is "with intelligence alert and intent": in the last stage
he has the sense of freedom, of duty done, and of knowledge immediate
and unbounded, which sees the whole world spread below like a clear pool
in which every fish and pebble is visible.

6

With this stage he attains Nirvana[488], the best known word and the
most difficult to explain in all the vocabulary of Buddhism.

It is perhaps used more by western students than by oriental believers
and it belongs to the same department of religious language as the word
saint. For most Christians there is something presumptuous in trying to
be a saint or in defining the precise form of bliss enjoyed by saints in
heaven and it is the same with nirvana. Yet no one denies that sanctity
and nirvana are religious ideals. In a passage already quoted[489],
Gotama described how in attaining Buddhahood he sought and arrived at
the incomparable security of nirvana in which there is no birth, age,
sickness, death, pain or defilement. This, confirmed by many other
statements, shows that nirvana is a state attainable in this existence
and compatible with a life of intellectual and physical exertion such as
he himself led. The original meaning is the state of peace and happiness
in which the fires of lust, hatred and stupidity are extinguished and
the participle _nibbuto_ apparently derived from the same root had
passed into popular language in the sense of happy[490]. Two forms of
nirvana are distinguished. The first is upadi-sesa-nibbanam[491] or
nirvana in which the skandhas remain, although passion is destroyed.
This state is also called arhatship, the condition of an arhat, meaning
originally a wor