What Nirvana is the learned do
not agree. But, since the best original authorities tell us there is
neither desire nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
reappearance for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
said of this acme of Buddhistic philosophy--"the rest is silence."
[Note 9] Thus there is no very great practical disagreement between
Gautama and his predecessors with respect to the end of action; but it
is otherwise as regards the means to that end. With just insight into
human nature, Gautama declared extreme ascetic practices to be useless
and indeed harmful. The appetites and the passions are not to be
abolished by mere mortification of the body; they must, in addition,
be attacked on their own ground and conquered by steady cultivation of
the mental habits which oppose them; by universal benevolence; by the
return of good for evil; by humility; by abstinence from evil thought;
in short, by total renunciation of that self-assertion which is the
essence of the cosmic process.
Doubtless, it is to these ethical qualities that Buddhism owes its
marvellous success.[Note 10] A system which knows no God in the
western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in
immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; [69] which refuses any
efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but
their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew
nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought
the aid of the secular arm; yet spread over a considerable moiety of
the Old World with marvellous rapidity, and is still, with whatever
base admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large
fraction of mankind.
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