ch rahat is
identified with the total Nirwana. The rivers of emancipated men
neither disembogue into the ocean of spirit nor evaporate into the
abyss of nonentity, but are blended with infinitude as an
ontological integer. Nirwana is unexposed and illimitable space.
Buddhism is perfect disinterestedness, absolute self surrender. It
is the gospel of everlasting emancipation for all. It cannot be
that a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepest
desire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is not
negation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil.

Some light may be thrown on the subject by contemplating the
successive states through which the dying Gotama passed. Max
Muller describes them, after the Buddhist documents, thus: "He
enters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedom
from sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, and
has no desire except that of Nirvana. But he still feels pleasure;
he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use of
these powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, when
nothing remains but a desire after Nirvana, and a general feeling
of satisfaction arising from his intellectual perfection. That
satisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage.
Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self consciousness, and
a certain amount of physical pleasure. In the fourth stage these
last remnants are destroyed; memory fades away, all pleasure and
pain are gone, and the doors of Nirvana now open before him. We
must soar still higher, and, though we may feel giddy

and disgusted,46 we must sit out the tragedy till the curtain
falls. After the four stages of meditation are passed, the Buddha
(and every being is to become a Buddha) enters first into the
infinity of space, then into the infinity of intelligence, and
thence he passes into the third region, the realm of nothing. But
even here there is no rest. There is still something left, the
idea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must be
destroyed; and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region,
where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and where
there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not
nothing."47 Analyze away all particulars until you reach an
uncolored boundlessness of pure immateriality, free from every
predicament; and that is Nirwana. This is one possible way of
conceiving the fate of the soul; and the speculative mind