These are Buddha’s own words as he spoke with a Brahman priest,[29] who was converted thereby and replied at once with the Buddhist’s confession of faith:  “I take refuge in Buddha, in the doctrine, in the church.”

A significant conversation!  In many ways these words should be corrective of much that is hazarded today in regard to Buddhism.  There is here no elaborate system of metaphysics.  Wisdom consists in the truth as it is in Buddha; and before truth stand, as antecedently essential, faith and kindness; for so may one render the passive non-injury of the Brahman as taught by the Buddhist.  To have faith and good works, to renounce the pomps and vanities of life, to show kindness to every living thing, to seek for salvation, to understand, and so finally to leave no second self behind to suffer again, this is Buddha’s doctrine.

We have avoided thus far to define Nirv[=a]na.  It has three distinct meanings, eternal blissful repose (such was the Nirv[=a]na of the Jains and in part of Buddhism), extinction and absolute annihilation (such was the Nirv[=a]na of some Buddhists), and the Nirv[=a]na of Buddha himself.  Nirv[=a]na meant to Buddha the extinction of lust, anger, and ignorance.  He adopted the term, he did not invent it.  He was often questioned, but persistently refused to say whether he believed that Nirv[=a]na implied extinction of being or not.  We believe that in this refusal to speak on so vital a point lies the evidence that he himself regarded the ‘extinction’ or ‘blowing out’ (this is what the word means literally) as resulting in annihilation.  Had he believed otherwise we think he would not have hesitated to say so, for it would have strengthened his influence among them to whom annihilation was not a pleasing thought.

But one has no right to ‘go behind the returns’ as these are given by Buddha.  The later church says distinctly that Buddha himself did not teach whether he himself, his ego, was to live after death or not; or whether a permanent ego exists.  It is useless, therefore, to inquire whether Buddha’s Nirv[=a]na be a completion, as Mueller defines it, or annihilation.  To one Buddhistic party it was the one; to the other, the other; to Buddha himself it was what may be inferred from his refusal to make any declaration in regard to it.

The second point of interest is not more easily disposed of.  What to the Buddhist is the spirit, the soul of man?  It certainly is not an eternal spirit, such as was the spirit of Brahmanic philosophy, or that of the Jain.  But, on the other hand, it is clear that something survived after death till one was reborn for the last time, and then entered Nirv[=a]na.  The part that animates the material complex is to the Buddhist an individuality which depends on the nature of its former complex, home, and is destined to project itself upon futurity till the house which it has built ceases to exist, a home rebuilt no more to be its tabernacle.  When a man dies the component