sdom, which is the highway to Nirwana, the

33 Major Cunningham, Bbilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments of
Central India, p. 168.

city of peace. On that road you are the guide of all beings. Begin
your work and pursue it with fidelity." From that time until the
day of his death he preached "the three laws of mortality, misery,
and mutability." Every morning he looked through the world to see
who should be caught that day in the net of truth, and took his
measures accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths by
which alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring,
invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, as
thick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty miles
around the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze on
him who had broken the circle of transmigration.34

The system of Gotama distinguishes seven grades of being: six
subject to repeated death and birth; one the condition of the
rahats and the Buddhaship exempt therefrom. "Who wins this has
reached the shore of the stormy ocean of vicissitudes, and is in
safety forever." Baur says, "The aim of Buddhism is that all may
obtain unity with the original empty Space, so as to unpeople the
worlds."35 This end it seeks by purification from all modes of
cleaving to existing objects, and by contemplative discrimination,
but never by the fanatical and austere methods of Brahmanism.
Edward Upham, in his History of Buddhism, declares this earth to
be the only ford to Nirwana. Others also make the same
representation:

"For all that live and breathe have once been men, And in
succession will be such again."

But the Buddhist authors do not always adhere to this statement.
We sometimes read of men's entering the paths to Nirwana in some
of the heavens, likewise of their entering the final fruition
through a decease in a dewa loka. Still, it is the common view
that emancipation from all existence can be secured only by a
human being on earth. The last birth must be in that form. The
emblem of Buddha, engraved on most of his monuments, is a wheel,
denoting that he has finished and escaped from the circle of
existences. Henceforth he is named Tathagata, he who has gone.

Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say of
Nirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of their
philosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion.

"The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, and