which are in bondage and God who rules the world are illusions like the world itself.  But the Advaita has at least a verbal superiority over the Madhyamika philosophy, for in its terminology Brahman is the real and the existent contrasted with the world of illusion.  The result of giving to what the Advaita calls the real and existent the name of sunyata or void is disconcerting.  To say that everything without distinction is non-existent is much the same as saying that everything is existent.  It only means that a wrong sense is habitually given to the word exist, as if it meant to be self-contained and without relation to other objects.  Unless we can make a verbal contrast and assert that there is something which does exist, it seems futile to insist on the unreality of the world.  Yet this mode of thought is not confined to text-books on logic.  It invades the scriptures, and appears (for instance) in the Diamond Cutter[106] which is still one of the most venerated books of devotion in China and Japan.  In this work the Buddha explains that a Bodhisattva must resolve to deliver all living beings and yet must understand that after he has thus delivered innumerable beings, no one has been delivered.  And why?  Because no one is to be called a Bodhisattva for whom there exists the idea of a being, or person.  Similarly a saint does not think that he is a saint, for if he did so think, he would believe in a self, and a person.  There occur continually in this work phrases cast in the following form:  “what was preached as a store of merit, that was preached as no store of merit[107] by the Tathagata and therefore it is called a store of merit.  If there existed a store of merit, the Tathagata would not have preached a store of merit.”  That is to say, if I understand this dark language rightly, accumulated merit is part of the world of illusion which we live in and by speaking of it as he did the Buddha implied that it, like everything else in the world, is really non-existent.  Did it belong to the sphere of absolute truth, he would not have spoken of it as if it were one of the things commonly but erroneously supposed to exist.  Finally we are told of the highest knowledge “Even the smallest thing is not known or perceived there; therefore it is called the highest perfect knowledge.”  That is to say perfect knowledge transcends all distinctions; it recognises the illusory nature of all individuality and the truth of sameness, the never-changing one behind the ever-changing many.  In this sense it is said to perceive nothing and know nothing.

One might expect that a philosophy thus prone to use the language of extreme nihilism would slip into a destructive, or at least negative system.  But Mahayanism was pulled equally strongly in the opposite direction by the popular and mythological elements which it contained and was on the whole inclined to theism and even polytheism quite as much as to atheism and acosmism.  A modern Japanese writer[108] says that Dharma-kaya “may be considered to be equivalent to the Christian conception of the Godhead.”  This is excessive as a historical statement of the view current in India during the early centuries of our era, but it does seem true that Dharma-kaya was made the equivalent of the Hindu conception of Param Brahma and also that it is very nearly equivalent to the Chinese Tao.[109]