(It is found in the second _Book of Commentaries_ and is addressed to the
Arhats.)
Said the All‐Merciful: Blessed are ye, O Bhikshus, happy are ye who have
understood the mystery of Being and _Non‐Being_ explained in Bas‐pa
[Dharma, Doctrine], and have given preference to the latter, for ye are
verily my Arhats.... The elephant, who sees his form mirrored in the lake,
looks at it, and then goes away, taking it for the real body of another
elephant, is wiser than the man who beholds his face in the stream, and,
looking at it, says, “Here am I.... I am I”: for the “I,” his Self, is not
in the world of the twelve Nidânas and mutability, but in that of Non‐
Being, the only world beyond the snares of Mâyâ.... That alone, which has
neither cause nor author, which is self‐existing, eternal, far beyond the
reach of mutability, is the true “I” [Ego], the Self of the Universe. The
Universe of Nam‐Kha says: “I am the world of Sien‐Chan”;(690) the four
illusions laugh and reply, “Verily so.” But the truly wise man knows that
neither man, nor the Universe that he passes through like a flitting
shadow, is any more a real Universe than the dewdrop that reflects a spark
of the morning sun is that sun.... There are three things, Bhikshus, that
are everlastingly the same, upon which no vicissitude, no modification can
ever act: these are the Law, Nirvâna, and Space,(691) and those three are
One, since the first two are within the last, and that last one a Mâyâ, so
long as man keeps within the whirlpool of sensuous existences. One need
not have his mortal body die to avoid the clutches of concupiscence and
other passions. The Arhat who observes the seven hidden precepts of Bas‐pa
may become Dang‐ma and Lha.(692) He may hear the “holy voice” of ...
[Kwan‐yin],(693) and find himself within the quiet precincts of his
Sangharama(694) transferred into Amitâbha Buddha.(695) Becoming one with
Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,(696) he may pass through all the six worlds of
Being (Rûpaloka) and get into the first three worlds of Arûpa.(697)... He
who listens to my secret law, preached to my select Arhats, will arrive
with its help at the knowledge of Self, and thence at perfection.
It is due to entirely erroneous conceptions of Eastern thought and to
ignorance of the existence of an Esoteric key to the outward Buddhist
phrases that Burnouf and other great scholars have inferred from such
propositions—held also by the Vedântins—as “my body is not body” and
“myself is no self of mine,” that Eastern psychology was all based upon
non‐permanency. Cousin, for instance, lecturing upon the subject, brings
the two following propositions to prove, on Burnouf’s authority, that,
unlike Brâhmanism, Buddhism rejects the perpetuity of the thinking
principle. These are:
1. Thought or Spirit(698)—for the faculty is not distinguished
from the subject—appears only with sensation and does not survive
it.
2. The Spirit cannot itself lay hold of itself, and in directing
attention to itself it draws from it only the conviction of its
powerlessness to see itself otherwise than as successive and
transitory.
This all refers to Spirit embodied, not to the freed Spiritual Self on
whom Mâyâ has no more hold. Spirit is no body; therefore have the
Orientalists made of it “nobody” and nothing. Hence they proclaim
Buddhists to be Nihilists, and Vedântins to be the followers of a creed in
which the “Impersonal [God] turns out on examination to be a myth”; their
goal is described as
The complete extinction of all spiritual, mental, and bodily
powers by absorption into the Impersonal.(699)