The priest seemed interested, but said nothing. With the interpreter's help, I continued:—
"There are three great questions by which the minds of many men in the Western countries are perpetually tormented. These questions we call 'the Whence, the Whither, and the Why,' meaning, Whence Life? Whither does it go? Why does it exist and suffer? Our highest Western Science declares them riddles impossible to solve, yet confesses at the same time that the heart of man can find no peace till they are solved. All religions have attempted explanations; and all their explanations are different. I have searched Buddhist books for answers to these questions, and I found answers which seemed to me better than any others. Still, they did not satisfy me, being incomplete. From your own lips I hope to obtain some answers to the first and the third questions at least. I do not ask for proof or for arguments of any kind: I ask only to know doctrine. Was the beginning of all things in universal Mind?"
To this question I really expected no definite answer, having, in the Sutra called Sabbâsava, read about "those things which ought not to be considered," and about the Six Absurd Notions, and the words of the rebuke to such as debate within themselves: "This is a being: whence did it come? whither will it go?" But the answer came, measured and musical, like a chant:—
"All things considered as individual have come into being, through forms innumerable of development and reproduction, out of the universal Mind. Potentially within that mind they had existed from eternity. But between that we call Mind and that we call Substance there is no difference of essence. What we name Substance is only the sum of our own sensations and perceptions; and these themselves are but phenomena of Mind. Of Substance-in-itself we have not any knowledge. We know nothing beyond the phases of our mind, and these phases are wrought in it by outer influence or power, to which we give the name Substance. But Substance and Mind in themselves are only two phases of one infinite Entity."
"There are Western teachers also," I said, "who teach a like doctrine; and the most profound researches of our modern science seem to demonstrate that what we term Matter has no absolute existence. But concerning that infinite Entity of which you speak, is there any Buddhist teaching as to when and how It first produced those two forms which in name we still distinguish as Mind and Substance?"
"Buddhism," the old priest answered, "does not teach, as other religions do, that things have been produced by creation. The one and only Reality is the universal Mind, called in Japanese Shinnyo,[1]—the Reality-in-its-very-self, infinite and eternal. Now this infinite Mind within Itself beheld Its own sentiency. And, even as one who in hallucination assumes apparitions to be actualities, so the universal Entity took for external existences that which It beheld only within Itself. We call this illusion Mu-myo,[2] signifying 'without radiance,' or 'void of illumination.'"
"The word has been translated by some Western scholars," I observed, "as Ignorance.'"
"So I have been told. But the idea conveyed by the word we use is not the idea expressed by the term 'ignorance.' It is rather the idea of enlightenment misdirected, or of illusion."
"And what has been taught," I asked, concerning the time of that illusion?"
"The time of the primal illusion is said to be Mu-shi, 'beyond beginning,' in the incalculable past. From Shinnyo emanated the first distinction of the Self and the Not-Self, whence have arisen all individual existences, whether of Spirit or of Substance, and all those passions and desires, likewise, which influence the conditions of being through countless births. Thus the universe is the emanation of the infinite Entity; yet it cannot be said that we are the creations of that Entity. The original Self of each of us is the universal Mind; and within each of us the universal Self exists, together with the effects of the primal illusion. And this state of the original Self enwrapped in the results of illusion, we call Nyōrai-zō,[3] or the Womb of the Buddha. The end for which we should all strive is simply our return to the infinite Original Self, which is the essence of Buddha."