[7] They are: (1) form or materiality (rûpa), (2) sensation (vedanâ), (3) conception (samjnâ), (4) action or deeds (samkâra), and (5) consciousness (vijnâna). These terms are explained elsewhere. ([return])
[8] The Dhammapada, v. 165. Tr. by A. J. Edmunds. ([return])
[9] The Dhammapada, v. 127. ([return])
[10] This last passage should not be understood in the sense of a total abnegation of existence. It means simply the transcendentality of the highest principle. ([return])
[11] The Kathopaniṣad, IV. 10. ([return])
[12] Guyau, a French sociologist, refers to the Buddhist conception of Nirvâna in his Non-Religion of the Future. I take his interpretation as typical of those non-Buddhist critics who are very little acquainted with the subject but pretend to know much. (English translation, pp. 472-474.)
“Granted the wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable... The conception is that of Nirvâna. To sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognise that to be rid of them is a deliverance; to practise a sort of complete psychial circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the mystic would say, of God); to create an inner vacuum, and to feel dizzy in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plenitude supreme, pleroma, these have always constituted temptations to mankind. Mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over... Nirvâna leads, in fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the logical absurdity that the vanquished are the victors over the trials and miseries of life.”
Then, the author recites the case of one of his acquaintances, who made a practical experiment of Nirvâna, rejecting variety in his diet, giving up meat, wine, every kind of ragout, every form of condiment, and reducing to its lowest possible terms the desire that is most fundamental in every living being—the desire of food, and substituting a certain number of cups of pure milk. “Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he thought to find a recompense in the pleasure of abstract meditation and of esthetic contemplation. He entered to a state which was not that of dreamland, but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details.” ([return])
[13] For detailed explanation of this term see [Chapter XI]. ([return])
[14] The Udâna, Ch. VIII, p. 118. Translation by General Strong. ([return])