We cannot pass over, however, this weighty problem without saying a word.  We shall try in this chapter to present Enlightenment before the reader in a roundabout way, just as the painter gives the fragmentary sketches of a beautiful city, being unable to give even a bird’s-eye view of it.  Enlightenment, first of all, implies an insight into the nature of Self.  It is an emancipation of mind from illusion concerning Self.  All kinds of sin take root deep in the misconception of Self, and putting forth the branches of lust, anger, and folly, throw dark shadows on life.  To extirpate this misconception Buddhism[FN#179] strongly denies the existence of the individual soul as conceived by common sense-that is, that unchanging spiritual entity provided with sight, hearing, touch, smell, feeling, thought, imagination, aspiration, etc., which survives the body.  It teaches us that there is no such thing as soul, and that the notion of soul is a gross illusion.  It treats of body as a temporal material form of life doomed to be destroyed by death and reduced to its elements again.  It maintains that mind is also a temporal spiritual form of life, behind which there is no immutable soul.

[FN#179] Both Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism teach the doctrine of Anatman, or Non-self.  It is the denial of soul as conceived by common sense, and of Atman as conceived by Indian heterodox thinkers.  Some Mahayanists believe in the existence of real Self instead of individual self, as we see in Mahaparinirvana-sutra, whose author says:  “There is real self in non-self.”  It is worthy of note that the Hinayanists set forth Purity, Pleasure, Atman, and Eternity, as the four great misconceptions about life, while the same author regards them as the four great attributes of Nirvana itself.

An illusory mind tends either to regard body as Self and to yearn after its material interests, or to believe mind dependent on soul as Ego.  Those who are given to sensual pleasures, consciously or unconsciously, bold body to be the Self, and remain the life-long slave to the objects of sense.  Those who regard mind as dependent on soul as the Self, on the other hand, undervalue body as a mere tool with which the soul works, and are inclined to denounce life as if unworthy of living.  We must not undervalue body, nor must we overestimate mind.  There is no mind isolated from body, nor is there any body separated from mind.  Every activity of mind produces chemical and physiological changes in the nerve-centres, in the organs, and eventually in the whole body; while every activity of body is sure to bring out the corresponding change in the mental function, and eventually in the whole personality.  We have the inward experience of sorrow when we have simultaneously the outward appearance of tears and of pallor; when we have the outward appearance of the fiery eyes and short breath, we have simultaneously the inward feeling of anger.  Thus body is mind observed outwardly in its relation