The only emancipation from self-love is in the perception of an infinite love.  Buddhism, ignoring this infinite love, incapable of communion with God, aiming at morality without religion, at humanity without piety, becomes at last a prey to the sadness of a selfish isolation.  We do not say that this is always the case, for in all systems the heart often redeems the errors of the head.  But this is the logical drift of the system and its usual outcome.

Sec. 9.  Relation of Buddhism to Christianity.

In closing this chapter, let us ask what relation this great system sustains to Christianity.

The fundamental doctrine and central idea of Buddhism is personal salvation, or the salvation of the soul by personal acts of faith and obedience.  This we maintain, notwithstanding the opinion that some schools of Buddhists teach that the soul itself is not a constant element or a special substance, but the mere result of past merit or demerit.  For if there be no soul, there can be no transmigration.  Now it is certain that the doctrine of transmigration is the very basis of Buddhism, the corner-stone of the system.  Thus M. Saint-Hilaire says:  “The chief and most immovable fact of Buddhist metaphysics is the doctrine of transmigration.”  Without a soul to migrate, there can be no migration.  Moreover, the whole ethics of the system would fall with its metaphysics, on this theory; for why urge men to right conduct, in order to attain happiness, or Nirvana, hereafter, if they are not to exist hereafter.  No, the soul’s immortality is a radical doctrine in Buddhism, and this doctrine is one of its points of contact with Christianity.

Another point of contact is its doctrine of reward and punishment,—­a doctrine incompatible with the supposition that the soul does not pass on from world to world.  But this is the essence of all its ethics, the immutable, inevitable, unalterable consequences of good and evil.  In this also it agrees with Christianity, which teaches that “whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap”; that he who turns his pound into five will he set over five cities, he who turns it into ten, over ten cities.

A third point of contact with Christianity, however singular it may at first appear to say so, is the doctrine of Nirvana.  Nirvana, to the Buddhist, means the absolute, eternal world, beyond time and space; that which is nothing to us now, but will be everything hereafter.  Incapable of cognizing both time and eternity, it makes them absolute negations of each other.

The peculiarity of Plato, according to Mr. Emerson and other Platonists was, that he was able to grasp and hold intellectually both conceptions,—­of God and man, the infinite and finite, the eternal and the temporal.  The merit of Christianity is, in like manner, that it is able to take up and keep, not primarily as dogma, but as life, both these antagonistic ideas.  Christianity recognizes God as the infinite