So also the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana, or the attainment of a sinless state of existence, has grown out of the idea of final union of the individual soul with the Universal Soul, which is also inculcated in the Upanishads.  Yet, as we shall see, the Buddhists were, in the eyes of the Brahmans, atheists, because in the ken of these new levellers gods and men were put on the same plane.  Brahmanism has never forgiven Buddhism for ignoring the gods, and the Hindoos finally drove out the followers of Gautama from India.  It eventuated that after a millenium or so of Buddhism in India, the old gods, Brahma, Indra, etc., which at first had been shut out from the ken of the people, by Gautama, found their places again in the popular faith of the Buddhists, who believed that the gods as well as men, were all progressing toward the blessed Nirvana—­that sinless life and holy calm, which is the Buddhist’s heaven and salvation.

It is certainly very curious, and in a sense amusing, to find flourishing in far-off Japan the old gods of India, that one would suppose to have been utterly dead and left behind in oblivion.  As acknowledged devas or kings and bodhisattvas or soon-to-be Buddhas, not a few once defunct Hindu gods, utterly unknown to early Buddhism, have forced their way into the company of the elect.  Though most of them have not gained the popularity of the indigenous deities of Nippon, they yet attract many worshippers.  They remind one that amid the coming of the sons of Elohim before Jehovah, “the satan” came also.[10]

From another point of view Buddhism was a new religion; for it swept away and out of the field of its vision the whole of the World or Universal Soul theory.  “It proclaimed a salvation which each man could gain for himself and by himself, in this world during this life, without the least reference to God, or to gods, either great or small.”  “It placed the first importance on knowledge; but it was no longer a knowledge of God, it was a clear perception of the real nature as they supposed it to be of men and things.”  In a word, Gautama never reached the idea of a personal self-existent God, though toward that truth he groped.  He was satisfied too soon.[11] His followers were even more easily satisfied with abstractions.  When Gautama saw the power over the human heart of inward culture and of love to others, he obtained peace, he rested on certainty, he became the Buddha, that is, the enlightened.  Perhaps he was not the first Buddhist.  It may be that the historical Gautama, if so he is worthy to be called, merely made the sect or the new religion famous.  Hardly a religion in the full sense of the word, Buddhism did not assume the role of theology, but sought only to know men and things.  In one sense Buddhism is atheism, or rather, atheistic humanism.  In one sense, also, the solution of the mystery of God, of life, and of the universe, which Gautama and his followers attained, was one of skepticism rather than of faith.  Buddhism is, relatively, a very modern religion; it is one of the new faiths.  Is it paradoxical to say that the Buddhists are “religious atheists?”