thing can be more satisfactory than that
nearly the whole edition of a work which would have remained
unpublished without their liberal assistance, has been sold in little
more than a month.

_April, 1857._

XI.

THE MEANING OF NIRVANA.

_To the Editor of_ THE TIMES.

Sir,--Mr. Francis Barham, of Bath, has protested in a letter, printed
in 'The Times' of the 24th of April, against my interpretations of
Nirva_n_a, or the summum bonum of the Buddhists. He maintains that the
Nirva_n_a in which the Buddhists believe, and which they represent as
the highest goal of their religion and philosophy, means union and
communion with God, or absorption of the individual soul by the divine
essence, and not, as I tried to show in my articles on the 'Buddhist
Pilgrims,' utter annihilation.

I must not take up much more of your space with so abstruse a subject
as Buddhist metaphysics; but at the same time I cannot allow Mr.
Barham's protest to pass unnoticed. The authorities which he brings
forward against my account of Buddhism, and particularly against my
interpretation of Nirva_n_a, seem formidable enough. There is Neander,
the great church historian, Creuzer, the famous scholar, and Hue, the
well-known traveller and missionary,--all interpreting, as Mr. Barham
says, the Nirva_n_a of the Buddhists in the sense of an apotheosis of
the human soul, as it was taught in the Vedanta philosophy of the
Brahmans, the Sufiism of the Persians, and the Christian mysticism of
Eckhart and Tauler, and not in the sense of absolute annihilation.

Now, with regard to Neander and Creuzer, I must observe that their
works were written before the canonical books of the Buddhists,
composed in Sanskrit, had been discovered, or at least before they had
been sent to Europe, and been analysed by European scholars. Besides,
neither Neander nor Creuzer was an Oriental scholar, and their
knowledge of the subject could only be second-hand. It was in 1824
that Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, then resident at the Court of Nepal,
gave the first intimation of the existence of a large religious
literature written in Sanskrit, and preserved by the Buddhists of
Nepal as the canonical books of their faith. It was in 1830 and 1835
that the same eminent scholar and naturalist presented the first set
of these books to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. In 1837 he made
a similar gift to the Societe Asiatique of Paris, and some of the most
important works wer