SIB MONIEB MONIEB- WILLIAMS. 



If the Buddha was not a materialist, in the sense of believing 

 in the eternal existence of material atoms, neither could he 

 in any sense be called a " spiritualist," or " spiritist." 



With him Creation did not proceed from an Omnipotent 

 Spirit evolving phenomena out of itself by the exercise of 

 almighty will, nor from an eternal self-existing, self-evolving 

 germ of any kind. As to the existence of any spiritual 

 substance in the Universe which was not matter and was 

 imperceptible by the senses, it could not be proved. 



Nor did he believe in the eternal existence of an invisible, 

 intangible, human self or Ego, commonly called Soul, as dis- 

 tinct from a material body. In this he differed widely from 

 the Yoga. The only eternity of early Buddhism was in an 

 eternity of "becoming," not of "being," an eternity of 

 universes, all succeeding each other, and all lapsing into 

 nothingness. 



In short, the Buddha's enlightenment consisted, first, in 

 the discovery of the origin and remedy of suffering, and, next, 

 in the knowledge of the existence of an eternal Force a 

 force generated by what in Sanskrit is called Karman, " Act." 

 Who, or what, started the first act the Buddha never pre- 

 tended to be able to explain. He confessed himself in regard 

 to this point a downright Agnostic. 



All he affirmed was that every man was created by the 

 force of his own acts in former bodies, combined with a force 

 generated by intense attachment to existence (upadana). 

 The Buddha himself was so created, and had been created 

 and re-created through countless bodily forms ; but he had 

 no spirit or soul existing separately between the intervals of 

 each creation. By his protracted meditation he attained to no 

 higher knowledge than this, and although he himself rose to 

 loftier heights of knowledge than any other man of his day, 

 he never aspired to other than the extraordinary faculties 

 which were within the reach of any human being capable of 

 rising to the same sublime abstraction of mind. 



He was even careful to lay down a precept that the acquisi- 

 tion of transcendent human faculties was restricted to the 

 perfected saints called Arhats ; and so important did he con- 

 sider it to guard such faculties from being claimed by mere 

 impostors, that one of the four prohibitions communicated to 

 all monks on first admission to his monastic Order was that 

 they were not to pretend to such powers. 



Nor is there any proof that even Arhats in Gautama's time 

 were allowed to claim the power of working physical miracles. 



By degrees, no doubt, powers of this kind were ascribed to 

 them as well as to the Buddha. Even in the Yinaya, one of 



