Though the Buddha seems to condemn by anticipation the form of the Vedanta known as the Advaita, this philosophy illustrates the difficulty of making any statement about the saint after his death.  For it teaches that the saint knows that there is but one reality, namely Brahman, and that all individual existences are illusion:  he is aware that he is Brahman and that he is not differentiated from the world around him.  And when he dies, what happens?  Metaphors about drops and rivers are not really to the point.  It would be more correct to say that nothing at all has happened.  His physical life, an illusion which did not exist for himself, has ceased to exist for others.

Perhaps he will be nearest to the Buddha’s train of thought who attempts to consider, by reflection rather than by discussion in words, what is meant by annihilation.  By thinking of the mystery of existence and realizing how difficult it is to explain how and why anything exists, we are apt to slip into thinking that it would be quite natural and intelligible if nothing existed or if existing things became nothing.  Yet as a matter of fact our minds have no experience of this nothing of which we talk and it is inconceivable.  When we try to think of nothingness we really think of space from which we try to remove all content, yet could we create an absolute vacuum within a vessel, the interior of the vessel would not be annihilated.  The man who has attained nirvana cannot be adequately defined or grasped even in this life:  what binds him to being is cut[524] but it is inappropriate and inadequate to say that he has become nothing[525].

CHAPTER XI

MONKS AND LAYMEN

1

The great practical achievement of the Buddha was to found a religious order which has lasted to the present day.  It is known as the Sangha and its members are called Bhikkhus[526].  It is chiefly to this institution that the permanence of his religion is due.

Corporations or confraternities formed for the purpose of leading a particular form of life are among the most widespread manifestations, if not of primitive worship, at any rate of that stage in which it passes into something which can be called personal religion and at least three causes contribute to their formation.  First, early institutions were narrower and more personal than those of to-day.  In politics as well as religion such relatively broad designations as Englishman or Frenchman, Buddhist or Christian, imply a slowly widening horizon gained by centuries of cooperation and thought.  In the time of the Buddha such national and religious names did not exist.  People belonged to a clan or served some local prince.  Similarly in religious matters they followed some teacher or worshipped some god, and in either case if they were in earnest they tended to become members of a society.  Societies such as the Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods