"wretched of mind." The actuality of the world, the material reality of existence, the samsâra is absolutely void of permanency. All is transient and nothing endures. Therefore he who sets his heart on anything of the world or its various realizations of form, is sure to suffer; while he who has understood the emptiness of all material existence seeks refuge in Nirvâna, the domain of eternal verities which, in comparison to bodily realizations, constitute the Void, the Nothing, the existence-less. The eternal verities are immanent in all reality and condition its evolution; they are the aim and purpose of life; they are, to use Goethe's words," the unattainable of which all actual things are but symbols." They are the nothingness of which we read in the Majjhima Nikaya (Sutta 26), that he who dwells in it is "out of the reach of Mâra," the Evil One.

"He has blinded Mâra, made useless the eye of Mâra, gone out of sight of the Wicked One." (Ib., p. 348.)

An ancient Pâli verse (preserved in the Udâna, IV., 4) characterizes this condition as follows:

"The man whose mind, like to a rock,
Unmoved stands, and shaketh not;
Which no delights can e'er inflame,
Or provocations rouse to wrath—

O, whence can trouble come to him,

Who thus hath nobly trained his mind ? "1

The belief in self, a separate soul-entity or âtman, is the most serious obstacle to the attainment of the

* Buddhism in Translations, p. 315.

eternal and deathless, because the thought of self infuses all creatures with fear of dissolution as well as a desire for this particular and special copy of its own eternal being. The Visudhi-Magga (the Book on the Path of Purity) dwells on the subject in Chapter XXI., where we read:

"To one who considers them [the constituents of being] in the light of their transitoriness, the constituents of being seem perishable. To one who considers them in the light of their misery, they seem frightful. To one who considers them in the light of their want of an Ego, they seem empty.

"He who considers them [the constituents of being] in the light of their transitoriness abounds in faith and obtains the unconditioned deliverance; he who considers them in the light of their misery, abounds in tranquillity and obtains the desireless deliverance; he who considers them in the light of their want of an Ego, abounds in knowledge and obtains the empty deliverance." (Ib., p. 379.)

This is said to explain the stanza :

"Behold how empty is the world,

Mogharâja! In thoughtfulness
Let one remove belief in self

And pass beyond the realm of death.

The king of death can never find

The man who thus the world beholds."*

MODERN PSYCHOLOGY.

The world has been greatly astonished in these latter years by the results reached by modern psychologists, Herbart, Fechner, Weber, Wundt, Ribot, etc., who have arrived at the conclusion that there is no soul-being, a theory which received the paradoxical name of "a psychology without a soul." The * Ib. p. 376.

name is misleading, for the truth is that modern psychology discards the metaphysical conception of the soul only, not the soul itself. The unity of the soul has ceased to be a monad, an atomistic unity, and is recognized as a unification. The personality of a man is a peculiar idiosyncrasy of psychic forms, a system of sensations, impulses, and motor ideas, but it is not a monad, not a distinct entity, not a separate unit. In a word, there is no soul-entity, or soul-substance, or soul-substratum, that is possessed of sensations, impulses, and motor ideas; but all the sensations, impulses, and motor ideas of a man are themselves part and parcel of his soul. Mr. Hegeler expresses it by saying: "I have not ideas, but I am ideas."

son.

The modern theory of the soul is not quite new, for it was clearly outlined by Kant, who counted the notion of a distinct ego-soul as a contradiction, or, as he termed it, one of the paralogism of pure reaHe did not exactly deny the separate existence of an ego, by which he understands apperception as a unit, viz., self-consciousness, but he proved the inconsistency of the assumption and retained the notion only on practical grounds, because he argued that the ego-conception is an idea without which ethics would fall to the ground. Theoretically he rejected the existence of an ego-soul, but for the sake of morality he retained it as a postulate of practical reason.

The ego-soul is nothing but the ancient and famed thing-in-itself in the province of psychology. Met

aphysicians of the old school believe that philosophy consists in the search for the thing-in-itself, while the new positivist abandons the idea that there is a separate entity behind or within the parts of things. There is no watch-in-itself; but a peculiar combination of wheels and other mechanical contrivances, together with a dial and the movable hands on the dial, is called a watch. This is as little denial of the existence of watches as the new psychology is a psychology without a soul. Yet the enemies of the new positivism will still insist that the denial of things-in-themselves implies a philosophical nihilism.

But the new psychology is still older than Kant. As the doctrine of a separate soul prevailed in India among the Brahmans, so the denial of the existence of a separate soul was pronounced more than two thousand years ago by that school of thought which under the leadership of the great Shakyamuni grew up in opposition to Brahmanism and became known by the name of Buddhism. Not only are the similarities that obtain between modern psychology and Buddhism striking, but we meet also with the same misconceptions and objections. The denial of the existence of a soul-entity is supposed to be a denial of the soul and also of its immortality or its reincarnation.

PROFESSOR OLDENBERG'S VIEW.

Among the expounders of Buddhism Professor Oldenberg of Kiel ranks high. There are others that are his equal, but there is perhaps none who is

his superior in scholarship. But with all his philological knowledge, the learned Professor is sadly deficient in philosophical comprehension. He appears absolutely unable to grasp the significance of the Buddhistic soul-conception, and since his book on Buddha has become a great authority, in Germany almost the sole authority, from which our reading public take their opinions on Buddhism ready-made, his misconceptions have become instilled into the minds of European and American thinkers, and it will be worth while to point out the deficiencies of his propositions.

H. Dharmapâla, the secretary of the Mâha-Bâdhi Society and editor of the Mâha-Bhâdi Journal, the official delegate of Ceylonese Buddhism to the Chicago Parliament of Religions, wrote sorrowfully to me two years ago:

"Professor Oldenberg, the erudite scholar, has not grasped the spirit of the Dharma. He has translated carefully the Pâli words, and that is all. A philologist may dissect the root of a Pâli word, but it does not make him know the spirit of Buddhism."

I have greatly profited by Professor Oldenberg's researches, which, considered as philological lucubrations, are very valuable, but I have, after all, felt constrained to adopt Mr. Dharmapâla's opinion. I have done so, however, not without hesitation, and not without having previously tried to reach a satisfactory explanation of his position. I shall here briefly call attention to his presentation of the Bud