the Equinox - The Hermetic Library

THE DOCTRINES OF BUDDHISM
Having sat for seven long years under the Bôdhi tree
Gotama opened his eyes and perceiving the world of Samsâra*
exclaimed: “Quod erat demonstrandum!” True, he
had attained to the spotless eye of Truth and had become
Buddha the Enlightened One; he had entered the Nothingness
of Nibbâna,† and had become one with the Uncreated
and the Indestructible. And now he stood once again on the
shore line of existence and watched the waves of life roll
landwards, curve, break and hiss up the beach only to surge
back into the ocean from which they came. He did not deny
the existence of the Divine, (how could he when he had
become one with it?) but so filled was he with the light of
Amitâbha,‡ that he fully saw that by Silence alone could the
world be saved, and that by the denial of the Unknowable of
the uninitiate, the Kether, the Âtman, the First Cause, the
God of the unenlightened, could he ever hope to draw mankind
to that great illimitable LVX, from which he had
* The world of unrest and transiency, of birth and death.
† The Great Attainment of Buddhism. Our terminology now degenerates
into the disgusting vulgarity of the Pali dialect.
‡ The Mahâyâna Buddhists’ Boundless Light. Compaired with the canonical
Nibbâna it bears a very similar relation to it as the Ain Soph Aur, the Illimitable
Light, does to the Ain, the negatively Existent One. In the Brihadâranyka
Upanishad 4. 4. 66. Brahman is termed “jyotishâm jyotis” which means “the
light of lights”—a similar conception.
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