re? Because it is illusion
which makes creatures what they are. It is as if a clever juggler, or
his pupil, made an immense number of people to appear on the high
road, and after having made them to appear, made them to disappear
again. Would there be anybody who had killed, or murdered, or
annihilated, or caused them to vanish? No. And it is the same with
Buddha. He conducts an immense, innumerable, infinite number of
creatures to complete Nirva_n_a, and yet there are neither creatures
which are conducted, nor creatures that conduct. If a Bodhisattva, on
hearing this explanation of the Law, is not frightened, then it may be
said that he has put on the great armour.[89]

[Footnote 88: Burnouf, 'Introduction,' p. 462.]

[Footnote 89: Ibid. p. 478.]

Soon after, we read: 'The name of Buddha is nothing but a word. The
name of Bodhisattva is nothing but a word. The name of Perfect Wisdom
(Pra_gn_a-paramita) is nothing but a word. The name is indefinite, as
if one says "I," for "I" is something indefinite, because it has no
limits.'

Burnouf gives the gist of the whole Pra_gn_a-paramita in the following
words: 'The highest Wisdom, or what is to be known, has no more real
existence than he who has to know, or the Bodhisattva; no more than he
who does know, or the Buddha.' But Burnouf remarks that nothing of
this kind is to be found in the Sutras, and that Gautama _S_akya-muni,
the son of _S_uddhodana, would never have become the founder of a
popular religion if he had started with similar absurdities. In the
Sutras the reality of the objective world is denied; the reality of
form is denied; the reality of the individual, or the 'I,' is equally
denied. But the existence of a subject, of something like the Purusha,
the thinking substance of the Sankhya philosophy, is spared. Something
at least exists with respect to which everything else may be said not
to exist. The germs of the ideas, developed in the Pra_gn_a-paramita,
may indeed be discovered here and there in the Sutras.[90] But they
had not yet ripened into that poisonous plant which soon became an
indispensable narcotic in the schools of the later Buddhists. Buddha
himself, however, though, perhaps, not a Nihilist, was certainly an
Atheist. He does not deny distinctly either the existence of gods, or
that of God; but he ignores the former, and he is ignorant of the
latter. Therefore, if Nirva_n_a in his mind was not yet complete
annihilation, still less could it hav