Buddhism offered extinction.  Turning from the masses to the philosophical ascetic—­when he cuts himself off from family life with all its variety of pleasure and interest, not to speak of the self-torture he also sometimes inflicts, he too has some corresponding demand, some adequate motive to satisfy.  His is the resolute quest for salvation of the higher, older type.  But we are dealing with modern, new-educated India, and now we ask ourselves:  What does the modern, new-educated Indian mean by salvation?  Why does the thought of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ fail to reach his heart?

[Sidenote:  Three ways of salvation in Hinduism:  more strictly, three stages.]

[Sidenote:  1.  Saving knowledge]

[Sidenote:  Or now Beatific Vision.]

The acute Indian mind, with its disposition to analyse and its tenderness towards all manifestations of religion, has noted three different paths of salvation, or more strictly three stages in the path.  The last only really leads to salvation, the other two paths are tolerant recognition of the well-meaning religious efforts of those who have not attained to understanding of the true and final path of salvation.  For convenience sake we may roughly designate the three ways as Saving Works, and Saving Faith, and Saving Knowledge, placing the elementary stage first.  One of the Tantras or ritual scriptures of Modern Hinduism, the Mahanirv[=a]na Tantra, thus explains the three stages in the path and their respective merits:  “The knowledge that Brahma alone is true is the best expedient; meditation is the middling [= the means?]; and (2) the chanting of glories and the recitation of names is the worst; and (3) the worship of idols is the worst of the worst.[128] Of the pantheist’s “saving knowledge,” perhaps enough has been said.  But again, it is the piercing of the veil of Maya or Delusion which hides from the soul that God is the One and the All.  It is the transformation of the consciousness of “I” into that of the “One only, without a second.”  It is the ability to say “Aham Brahman,” i.e. I am Brahma.  In the Life of Dr. Wilson, the Scottish Missionary at Bombay, we read that in 1833, Dr. Wilson went with a visitor to see a celebrated jogi who was lying in the sun in the street, the nails of whose hands were grown into his cheek, and on whose head there was the nest of a bird.  The visitor questioned the jogi, “How can one obtain the knowledge of God?” and the reply of the jogi was, “Do not ask me questions; you may look at me, for I am God.”  “Aham Brahman,” very probably was his reply.  That is pantheistic salvation, mukti, or deliverance from further human existences and their desires and delusions.  At last the spirit is free, and the galling chains of the lusting and limited body are broken.  But as pantheism is declining, such cases are growing fewer, and for the educated Hindus, now largely monotheists, the saving knowledge is rather a beatific vision of the Divine, only vouchsafed to minds intensely concentrated upon the quest and thought of God, and cut off from mundane distractions.  This is the union with God which is salvation to many of the modern monotheistic Hindus.