The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE DOCTRINES OF BUDDHISM Having sat for seven long years under the Bédhi tree Gotama opened his eyes and perceiving the world of Sam- sara* exclaimed: “Quod erat demonstrandum!” True, he had attained to the spotless eye of Truth and had become Buddha the Enlightened One; he had entered the Nothing- ness of Nibbdna,j and had become one with the Uncreated and the Indestructible. And now he stood once again on the shore line of existence and watched the waves of life roll landwards, curve, break and hiss up the beach only to surge back into the ocean from which they came. He did not deny the existence of the Divine, (how could he when he had become one with it?) but so filled was he with the light of Amitabha,+ that he fully saw that by Silence alone could the world be saved, and that by the denial of the Unknowable of the uninitiate, the Kether, the Atman, the First Cause, the God of the unenlightened, could he ever hope to draw man- kind to that great illimitable LVX, from which he had * The world of unrest and transiency, of birth and death. + The Great Attainment of Buddhism. Our terminology now degenerates into the disgusting vulgarity of the Pali dialect. } The Mahay4na Buddhists’ Boundless Light. Compared;with the canonical Nibbana it bears a very similar relation to it as the Ain Soph Aur, the Illimit- able Light, does to the Ain, the negatively Existent One. In the Brihadaranyka Upanishad 4. 4. 66. Brahman is termed “jyotisham jyotis” which means “the light of lights”—a similar conception. 125