The whole creation weeps.
"What think ye, my disciples (the Perfect One said), whether is more, the water which is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept because that was your portion which ye abhorred, and that which ye loved was not your portion? And while ye experienced this through long ages more tears have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered on this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept because that was your portion which ye abhorred, and that which ye loved was not your portion, than all the water which is in the four great oceans" (Oldenberg's Buddhism).
St. Paul conjures up a vision of the immense figure of creation, prostrate, groaning beneath the silent heavens. "The true Buddhist certainly sees in this world a state of continuous sorrow; but this sorrow only awakes in him a feeling of compassion for those who are yet in the world. For himself he feels no sorrow or compassion.... He seeks Nirvana with the same joyous sense of victory in prospect with which the Christian looks forward to his goal, everlasting life" (Oldenberg).
The doctrine of an irrevocable doom for the unbeliever and obdurate sinner is not easy to follow, because it would seem to imply "a failure of the redemptive work of the Saviour unless all for whom he died ultimately partake of salvation." If many are called and but few are chosen; if the gate is narrow, and only a microscopic minority enter thereby, the supreme sacrifice of the only-begotten Son of God is liable to lose significance in the eyes of an exigeant public.
Jesus "treated popular religious terms such as Hell and Heaven as symbols." "He employed the familiar images of Heaven and Hell to impress on men's consciousness the supreme bliss of righteousness and the awful misery of sin."
"When our Lord came, he found the doctrines of last things presented in forms already fixed, and the terms Gehenna, Paradise, etc., in familiar, even proverbial, use" (Eschatology, Encyclopædia Britannica).
Every being, according to Buddhistic teaching, attains Nirvana in the end; so may it not be in "the times of the restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began"?
If symbolism were only taken for what it represents, every Buddhist could join with the Christian in many of the exquisite invocations of the Psalms. There is no rest to be found in the impermanent. To find the peace which passeth understanding, we must ultimately have recourse to the unconditioned, the permanent, Nirvana, God. The prayer of the Christian as well as the aspiration of the pure Buddhist is to be, whether living or dead, one with the Uncreate.
Professor Oldenberg says that "the devotion of abstraction is to Buddhism what prayer is to other religions." There is here a distinction without a difference. Abstraction is nothing more nor less than true, perfect, sublimated prayer. Real, unadulterated prayer is only possible when the mind is totally relieved of distractions.
Jesus went apart to pray; so the Buddhist monk seeks the silence of the forest or the seclusion of the cave to commune with the unconditioned, with "Our Father which art in Heaven," with the Uncreate of the Athanasian Creed. He who abstracts himself from the "plurality of the phenomenal world" anticipates the cessation of the impermanent.