be
laboriously sought by personal effort. To secure it is a positive
triumph quite distinct from the fated dissolution of the khandas
in death. Now, if there be in man no personal entity, what is it
that with so much joy attains Nirwana? The genuine Buddhist
notion, as seems most probable, is that the conscious essence of
the rahat, when the exterior elements of existence fall from
around him, passes by a transcendent climax and discrete leap
beyond the outermost limits of appreciable being, and becomes that
INFINITE which knows no changes and is susceptible of no
definitions. In the Ka gyur collection of Tibetan sacred books,
comprising a hundred volumes, and now belonging to the Cabinet of
Manuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, there are two volumes
exclusively occupied by a treatise on Nirwana. It is a significant
fact that the title of these volumes is "Nirwana, or Deliverance
from Pain." If Nirwana be simply annihilation, why is it not so
stated? Why should recourse be had to a phrase partially
descriptive of one feature, instead of comprehensively announcing
or implying the whole case?

Still further: it deserves notice that, according to the unanimous
affirmation of Buddhist authors, if any Buddhist were offered the
alternative of an existence as king of a dewa loka, keeping his
personality for a hundred million years in the uninterrupted
enjoyment of perfect happiness, or of translation into Nirwana, he
would spurn the former as defilement, and would with unutterable
avidity choose the latter. We must therefore suppose that by
Nirwana he understands, not naked destruction, but some mysterious
good, too vast for logical comprehension, too obscure to
Occidental thought to find expression in Occidental language.

42 Hardy, Manual, p. 427.

At the moment when Gotama entered upon the Buddhaship, like
a vessel overflowing with honey, his mind overflowed with the
nectar of oral instruction, and he uttered these stanzas:

"Through many different births I have run, vainly seeking The
architect of the desire resembling house. Painful are repeated
births. O house builder! I have seen thee. Again a house thou
canst not build for me. I have broken thy rafters and ridge pole;
I have arrived at the extinction of evil desire; My mind is gone
to Nirwana."

Hardy, who stoutly maintains that the genuine doctrine of Buddha's
philosophy is that there is no transmigrating individuality in
man, but that the karma creat