20 SIR MONIER MONIER-WILLIAMS. 
Ifthe 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 I’orce—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). 
he 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 Vinaya, one of 
