ly have passed his lips. But we cannot call things unreal
unless we have a conception of something that is real. Where, then,
did Buddha find a reality in comparison with which this world might be
called unreal? What remedy did he propose as an emancipation from the
sufferings of this life? Difficult as it seems to us to conceive it,
Buddha admits of no real cause of this unreal world. He denies the
existence not only of a Creator, but of any Absolute Being. According
to the metaphysical tenets, if not of Buddha himself, at least of his
sect, there is no reality anywhere, neither in the past nor in the
future. True wisdom consists in perceiving the nothingness of all
things, and in a desire to become nothing, to be blown out, to enter
into Nirva_n_a. Emancipation is obtained by total extinction, not by
absorption in Brahman, or by a recovery of the soul's true estate. If
to be is misery, not to be must be felicity, and this felicity is the
highest reward which Buddha promised to his disciples. In reading the
Aphorisms of Kapila, it is difficult not to see in his remarks on
those who maintain that all is void, covert attacks on Buddha and his
followers. In one place (I. 43) Kapila argues that if people believed
in the reality of thought only, and denied the reality of external
objects, they would soon be driven to admit that nothing at all
exists, because we perceive our thoughts in the same manner as we
perceive external objects. This naturally leads him to an examination
of that extreme doctrine, according to which all that we perceive is
void, and all is supposed to perish, because it is the nature of
things that they should perish. Kapila remarks in reference to this
view (I. 45), that it is a mere assertion of persons who are 'not
enlightened,' in Sanskrit a-buddha, a sarcastic expression in which it
is very difficult not to see an allusion to Buddha, or to those who
claimed for him the title of the Enlightened. Kapila then proceeds to
give the best answer that could be given to those who taught that
complete annihilation must be the highest aim of man, as the only
means of a complete cessation of suffering. 'It is not so,' he says,
'for if people wish to be free from suffering, it is they themselves
who wish to be free, just as in this life it is they themselves who
wish to enjoy happiness. There must be a permanent soul in order to
satisfy the yearnings of the human heart, and if you deny that soul,
you have no rig