the Equinox - The Hermetic Library

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THE EQUINOX
its place wrote Nibbâna, which according to Nâgasena is
cessation,* a passing away in which nothing remains, an
end.† Soon, however, under Mahâyâna-Buddhism, was the
Âtman to be revived in all its old glory under the name of
Amitâbha, or that Source of all Light, which so enlightens a
man who is aspiring to the Bodhi that he becomes a Buddha.
“Amitâbha,” so Paul Carus informs us, “is the final norm of
wisdom and of morality‡ (sic), the standard of truth and of
righteousness, the ultimate raison d’être of the Cosmic Order.”
This of course is “bosh.” Amitâbha, as the Âtman, is “the
light which shines there beyond the heaven behind all things,
behind each in the highest worlds, the highest of all.Ӥ
Once logically having crushed out the idea of an individual
soul, a personal God and then an impersonal God had to be
set aside and with them the idea of a First Cause or Beginning;
concerning which question Buddha refused to give an answer.
For, he well saw, that the idea of a Supreme God was the
greatest of the dog-faced demons that seduced man from the
path. “There is no God, and I refuse to discuss what is not!”
cries Buddha, “but there is Sorrow and I intend to destroy
it.” If I can only get people to start on the upward journey
they will very soon cease to care if there is a God or if there
is a No-God; but if I give them the slightest cause to expect
any reward outside cessation of Sorrow, it would set them all
* “The Questions of King Milinda,” iii, 4, 6. † Ibid., iii, 5, 10.
‡ It is curious how, inversely according to the amount of morality preached
is morality practised in America; in fact there are almost as many moral writers
there as there are immoral readers. Paul Carus is as completely ignorant of
Buddhism as he is about the art of nursing babies—he has written on both these
subjects and many more, all flatulently.
§ Chândogya, 3, 13, 7.