MA HAVANA BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 



259 



Suzuki thinks that quality too may be found in it somehow. 

 Prayer cannot profitably be addressed to it, for it is devoid of 

 personality and consciousness. It manifests itself in all that 

 exists, for existent things are its outward garb, so to speak. 

 But it is untouched by our troubles, and renders no help to men 

 in attaining knowledge of itself, in overcoming temptation., in 

 securing happiness hereafter. Great men, such as the historical 

 Siddhartha Buddha, are manifestations, or incarnations, of it ; 

 but so are all other men and all animals, plants, minerals, in 

 fact all things that exist. We may in a sense style this 

 Ban theism, or we may call it Atheism, or Monism, or we may 

 apply to the Mahayana system a variety of other names, all 

 more or less appropriate ; but the one thing that we cannot do, 

 if in any degree we understand the system, is to assert that it 

 is in any sense a form of Christianity. 



Mahayanism is genuinely Buddhistic in this, that it utterly 

 denies the existence of Personality, not only in the Dharmakaya, 

 but also in man. " What* distinguishes Buddhism most 

 characteristically and emphatically from all other religions is 

 the doctrine of non-Atinan, or non-ego, exactly opposite to the 

 postulate of a soul-substance which is cherished by most of 

 religious enthusiasts. In this sense Buddhism is undoubtedly 

 a religion without the soul." "Buddhists do not deny the 

 existence of the so-called empirical ego in contradistinction to 

 the noumenal ego, which latter can be considered to correspond 

 to the Buddhist atman. Vasubandhu, in his treatise on 

 Yogacara's idealistic philosophy, declares that the existence of 

 atman and dharma is only hypothetical, provisional, apparent, 

 and not in any sense real and ultimate. To express this in 

 modern terms : the soul and the world, or subject and object, 

 have only relative existence, and no absolute reality can be 

 ascribed to them. Psychologically speaking, every one of us 

 has an ego or soul which means the unity of consciousness. . . . 

 Buddhism most emphatically insists on . . . the non-existence of 

 a concrete, individual, irreducible soul-substance, whose immor- 

 tality is so much coveted by most unenlightened people. 

 Individuation is only relative and not absolute. ... To think 

 that there is a mysterious something behind the empirical ego, 

 and that this something comes out triumphantly after the 

 fashion of the immortal phoenix from the funeral pyre of 

 corporeality, is notf Buddhistic." Here again Mahayanism is 

 absolutely opposed to Christianity. 



* Outlines, p. 32. 



t Outlines, pp. 163, 164. 



s 2 



