The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX is non-existent. Each man is, as it were, a thought in an universal brain, each thought jarring against the next and prolonging the dream. As each individual thought dies it enters Nibbana and ceases to be, and eventually when all thoughts die the dream passes and Nibbana wakes.* This bad dream seems to be caused by a separateness of Subject and Object which means Sorrow; when sleep vanishes this separateness vanishes with it, things assume their correct proportion and may be equated to a state of bliss or Non- Sorrow. Thus we find that Nirvana and Nibbana are the same + in * Compare “ Mandtikya Upanishad,” 1, 16. In the infinite illusion of the universe The soul sleeps; when it awakes Then there wakes in it the Eternal, Free from time and sleep and dreams. t+ Most Buddhists will raise a terrific howl when they read this; but, in spite of their statement that the Hindu Nirvana, the absorption into Brahman, corresponds not with their Nibbana, but with their fourth Ardpa-Vimokha, we nevertheless maintain, that in essence Nirvana and Nibbana are the same, or in detail, if logic is necessary in so illogical an argument, it certainly sided rather with Nirvana than Nibbana. Nibbana is Final says the Buddhist, when once an individual enters it there is no getting out again, in fact a kind of Spiritual Bastille, for it is Niccain, changeless; but Brahman is certainly not this, for all things in the Universe originated from him. This is as it should be, though we see little difference between proceeding from to proceeding to, when it comes to a matter of First and Last Causes. The only reason why the Buddhist does not fall into the snare, is, not because he has explained away Brahman, but because he refuses to discuss him at all. Further the Buddhist argues that should the Hindu even attain by the exaltation of his selfhood to Ardpa Brahma-loka, though for a period incalculable he would endure there, yet in the end Karma would once again exert its sway over him, “and he would die as an Ardpabrahmaloka- Deva, his Sankharas giving rise to a being according to the nature of his unex- hausted Karma.” In “Buddhism,” vol. i, No. 2, p. 323, we read: “To put it another way; you say that the Universe came from Brahman, and that at one 134