Your personality?—your peculiarity? That is to say, your ideas, sentiments, recollections?—your very particular hopes and fears and loves and hates? Why, in each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection. And in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour updrawn from the Sea of Birth and Death there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures ... The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss.
There is no loss—because there is not any Self that can be lost. Whatsoever was, that you have been;—whatsoever is, that you are;—whatsoever will be, that you must become. Personality!—individuality!—the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it,—sun, moon, and stars,—earth, sky, and sea,—and Mind and Man, and Space and Time. All of them are shadows. The shadows come and go;—the Shadow-Maker shapes forever.
[Gaki]
—"Venerable Nagasena, are there such things as demons in the world?"
—"Yes, O King."
—"Do they ever leave that condition of existence?"
—"Yes, they do."
—"But, if so, why is it that the remains of those demons are never found?"...
—"Their remains are found, O King.... The remains of bad demons can be found in the form of worms and beetles and ants and snakes and scorpions and centipedes."...
—The Questions of King Milinda.