This is the reason why St. Denys did not hesitate to call it Nihil.
“Nihil” therefore stands—even with some Christian theologians and thinkers, especially with the earlier ones who lived but a few removes from the profound Philosophy of the initiated Pagans—as a synonym for the impersonal, divine Principle, the Infinite All, which is no Being or thing—the En or Ain Soph, the Parabrahman of the Vedânta. Now St. Denys was a pupil of St. Paul—an Initiate—and this fact makes everything clear.
The “Nihil” is in esse the Absolute Deity itself, the hidden Power or Omnipresence degraded by Monotheism into an anthropomorphic Being, with all the passions of a mortal on a grand scale. Union with That is not annihilation in the sense understood in Europe.[714] In the East annihilation in Nirvâna refers but to matter: that of the visible as well as the invisible body, for the astral body, the personal double, is still matter, however sublimated. Buddha taught that the primitive Substance is eternal and unchangeable. Its vehicle is the pure, luminous ether, the boundless, infinite Space,
Not a void resulting from the absence of forms, but on the contrary, the foundation [pg 403]of all forms.... [This] denotes it to be the creation of Mâyâ, all the works of which are as nothing before the uncreated Form [Spirit], in whose profound and sacred depths all motion must cease for ever.[715]
Motion here refers only to illusive objects, to their change as opposed to perpetuity, rest—perpetual motion being the Eternal Law, the ceaseless Breath of the Absolute.
The mastery of Buddhistic dogmas can be attained only according to the Platonic method: from universals to particulars. The key to it lies in the refined and mystical tenets of spiritual influx and divine life.
Saith Buddha:
Whosoever is unacquainted with my Law,[716] and dies in that state must return to earth until he becomes a perfect Samano [ascetic]. To achieve this object he must destroy within himself the trinity of Mâyâ.[717] He must extinguish his passions, unite and identify himself with the Law [the teaching of the Secret Doctrine], and comprehend the philosophy of annihilation.[718]
No, it is not in the dead-letter of Buddhistical literature that scholars may ever hope to find the true solution of its metaphysical subtleties. Alone in all antiquity the Pythagoreans understood them perfectly, and it is on the (to the average Orientalist and the Materialist) incomprehensible abstractions of Buddhism that Pythagoras grounded the principal tenets of his Philosophy.
Annihilation means with the Buddhistical Philosophy only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or semblance of form it may be, for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish, i.e., change that shape; therefore, as something temporal, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Mâyâ; for as eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to realize that we have seen it, it is gone and passed for ever; hence even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person during his lifetime, and this is [pg 404] metempsychosis. When the spiritual Entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvâna. He exists in Spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for Spirit alone is no Mâyâ, but the only Reality in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.