--“Well,” said the friend to whom I read this revery, “there is some
Buddhism in your fancies--though you seem to have purposely avoided
several important points of doctrine. For instance, you must know that
Nirvana is never to be reached by wishing, but by _not_ wishing. What
you call the ‘wish-to-become’ can only help us, like a lantern, along
the darker portions of the Way. As for wanting the Moon--I think that
you must have seen many old Japanese pictures of apes clutching at the
reflection of the Moon in water. The subject is a Buddhist parable: the
water is the phantom-flux of sensations and ideas; the Moon--not its
distorted image--is the sole Truth. And your Western philosopher was
really teaching a Buddhist parable when he proclaimed man but a higher
kind of ape. For in this world of illusion, man is truly still the ape,
trying to seize on water the shadow of the Moon.”
--“Ape indeed,” I made answer,--“but an ape of gods,--even that divine
Ape of the Ramayana who may clutch the Sun!”