"Come, then! Into solitude will I go, into the forest which Buddha praises; therein it is good for the solitary monk to dwell who seeks perfection. In the sîta forest rich in blossoms, in the cool mountain cave, will I wash my body and walk alone."
The counting of inhalations and exhalations of the breath, and other practices of a like nature, are used as so many short cuts to this state of abstraction or prayer. For this purpose they are as valuable as ceremonial magic professes to be for the ready acquisition of power over unknown laws and qualities of nature.[AR]
Christianity and Buddhism cannot be differentiated in this matter of abstraction. Gibbon writes: "The fakirs of India and the monks of the Oriental Church were alike persuaded that, in total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity." The opinion and practice of the monasteries of Mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an Abbot who flourished in the eleventh century. "When thou art alone in thy cell," says the ascetic teacher, "shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner; raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thy eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel, and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first all will be dark and comfortless; but, if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light."
Here, in these practices attributed to Christian saints, we have an exact parallel to those in use by Hindu ascetics even of the present day. It must be clearly understood, however, that the Buddhist attaches no merit to such practices, unless they conduce to the banishment of ignorance. Asceticism, as a thing in itself, is useless.
Heaven and Nirvana are unpainted pictures, undescribed actualizations; they are realities, not materialities. There is a never-ending, unsatisfied, restless craving, conscious or unconscious, throughout the Kosmos to enter upon reality. The suns and their satellites whirl about aimlessly in search of it. The whole universe is in sore trouble because, through ignorance, it is not. "The vulture's eye hath not seen it; the lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea saith, It is not with me." And yet it is there!
The use of such exaggerated terms as "immense," "infinite," "illimitable," etc., is to be accounted for by referring the habit to unconscious efforts by the conditioned to express the unconditioned. The sea, mountains, the heavens, owe their fascination to a suggestion of the unconditioned possessed by them.
In moments of attempted aspiration we are prone to look upwards into space—a symbol of the boundless. On the other hand, when the mind is engaged in working out details and calculations, there is the habit of looking downwards. Not only men, but beasts of the field, look upwards for help in their dying moments; upwards into space, where the conditioned seemingly vanishes into the unconditioned.
I have often witnessed the pleading expression of dying antelopes and other wild animals, their eyes being almost invariably directed to the sky above in their last moments of life.
I was on one occasion more than usually struck with this beautiful expression—appealing, as it were, to the skies for mercy—in the case of a wounded bear when in its death throes amid the snowy solitudes of the Himalayas.
Let us draw the curtains apart, and behold for a moment the scene of the enacted tragedy. Out of the violet mists spread by the viewless hands of a yet unrisen sun, black crags uplifted their glacier breasts to receive the first ravishing kiss of dawn; and the forests, obedient to the silence imposed by the kingly peaks, stood austere and unstirred by the affectionate airs of heaven. The staining blood, the furry mass, the clutching claws of the wild monster in his struggle with life and death, presented to the imagination some weird sacrifice consummated upon an altar, built of immaculate snow.