17
The Hindu method is really mystical in the truest
sense; for, as I have shown, the Atman is not infinite
and eternal: one day it must sink down with the other
forces. But by creating in thought
an infinite Impersonal
Personality, by defining it as such, all religions except
the Buddhist, and as I believe, the Qabalistic, have
sought to annihilate their own personality. The Buddhist
aims directly at extinction; the Hindu denies and
abolishes his own finity by the creation of an absolute,
As this cannot be done in reality, the process is
illusory, yet itis useful in the early stages—as far at any
rate, as the fourth stage of Dhyana, where the Buddha
places it, though the Yogis claim to attain to Nirvikalpa-
Samadhi, and that Moksha is identical with Nirvana; the
former claim I see no reason to deny them the latter
statement I must decline at present to accept.
The task of the Buddhist recluse is roughly as
follows; He must plunge every particle of his being into
one idea: right views, aspirations, word, deed, life, will-
power, meditation, rapture, such are the stages of his
liberation, which resolves itself into a struggle against the
law of causality. He cannot prevent past causes taking
effect, but he can prevent present causes from haying
any future results. The exoteric Christian and Hindu
rather rely on another person to do this for them, and
are further blinded by the thirst for life and individual
existence, the most formidable obstacle of all, in fact a
negation of the very object of all religion. Schopenhauer
shows that life is assured to the will-to-live, and unless
Christ (or Krishna, as the case may be) destroys these folk