That the soul feels not during profound trance, is not for want
of sensibility, but for want of sensible objects." Wilson,
Hodgson, and Vans Kennedy three able thinkers, as well as
scholars, in this field agree that Nirwana is not annihilation as
we understand that word. Mr. Hodgson believes that the Buddhists
expect to be "conscious in Nirwana of the eternal bliss of rest,
as they are in this world of the ceaseless pain of activity."
Forbes also argues against the nihilistic explanation of the
Buddhist doctrine of futurity, and says he is compelled to
conclude that Nirwana denotes imperishable being in a blissful
quietude.39 Many additional authorities in favor of this view
might be adduced, enough to balance, at least, the names on the
other side. Koeppen, in his very fresh, vigorous, and lucid work,
just published, entitled "The Religion of Buddha, and its Origin,"
says, "Nirwana is the blessed Nothing. Buddhism is the Gospel of
Annihilation." But he forgets that the motto on the title page of
his volume is the following sentence quoted from Sakya Muni
himself: "To those who know the concatenation of causes and
effects, there is neither being nor nothing." To them Nirwana is.
Considering it, then, as an open question, unsettled by any
authoritative assertion, we will weigh the probabilities of the
case.

No definition of Nirwana is more frequent than the one given by
the Kalpa Sutra,40 namely, "cessation from action and freedom from
desire." But this, like many of the other representations, such,
for instance, as the exclusion of succession, very plainly is not
a denial of all being, but only of our present modes of
experience. The dying Gotama is said to have "passed through the
several states, one after another, until he arrived at the state
where there is no pain. He then continued to enter the other
higher states, and from the highest entered Nirwana." Can literal
annihilation, the naked emptiness of nonentity, be better than

37 Burnouf, Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien,
Appendice No. I., Du mot Nirvana.

38 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 353.

39 Eleven Years in Ceylon, vol. ii. chap. ix.

40 Tanslation by Dr. Stevenson, p. 23.

the highest state of being? It can be so only when we view Nothing
on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating
deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as
affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the