In the gospel according to Buddha it is written:
"There lurks in transient form immortal bliss."
The true artist can cause this immortal bliss to be felt, in all its Nirvanic beauty, by those naturally susceptible to such influences, as well as by those who, by a course of training, have rendered themselves capable of receiving them.
There is no line of demarcation between the noumenal and phenomenal. The one fades into the other, as all forms and outlines would disappear into the surrounding atoms or cosmic dust under a sufficiently powerful magnifying glass. "Appearance (the world of phenomena) is the real, as confusedly and partially understood.... The real is the apparent completely understood, and seen in the light of the whole.... Appearance is the appearance of reality.... If we know 'only phenomena,' we must thereby know something of that of which they are phenomena."[Y]
According to Buddhistic teaching, there are two worlds, so to speak—the one ruled by the law of causality, the other over which the law of causality has no power. A Buddhist would say that "the man who applies to the strictly unconditioned predicates such as being and non-being, which are used properly enough of the finite, the conditioned, resembles one who attempts to count the sands of the Ganges or the drops of the ocean."
With much the same sort of reasoning Jesus referred to the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven when addressing those who had eyes and did not see, and ears and did not hear.
In view of the apparent fact that the human body has reached its utmost limits of development, as a physical organism, there seems to be a thinkable probability that it will eventually, by a devolutionary process and by the atrophy of its present clumsy and imperfect organs, return, step by step, during the gradual cooling of this planet, to the condition of the psychic life of a simple cellule, and ultimately to the unconditioned; back, as Huxley puts it, to the indefinable latency from which we arose; or, as Carlyle expresses it, "pass stormfully across the astonished earth from God and to God."
Starting from the simple cellule, we see, in a way, how "Tanha," or the desire to extend the scope of activities, has persistently striven in this direction until the ultimate possibilities of the development of physical organism have been reached in man.
This highly-differentiated organism has become more and more sensitive to pain, more and more dissatisfied with its limitations; and man, recognizing these limitations, desires to abandon them altogether. Consequently, he seeks refuge in the hope of a future life, where limitations will no longer curb and embarrass him, and where he will cease to be subject to pain, passion, and sorrow.