"Very likely I have inherited the feeling from my mother, who was very timid of other people, and given to mysticism."
"Is it not rather your reading? The unhappy Schopenhauer?"
Wilhelm smiled a little.
"I am above all things an admirer of Schopenhauer, although his explanation of the mysteries of the world through the will is a joke. What he has written about the main teachings of Buddhism has influenced me very much."
"I see where you have got to—'Maja Nirvana'"
Wilhelm nodded.
"That is all a fraud," Schrotter broke out, so that Bhani, who never saw him violent, looked up frightened. "I know Indians who have talked endlessly to learned pandits on these questions, and have explained the real ideas of Maja Nirvana to me. It is incomprehensible that people can misuse words on this subject as they do in Europe. Nirvana is not what European Buddhists appear to believe—an absolute negation—a cessation of consciousness and desire; but, on the contrary, it is the highest consciousness, the expansion of individual being into universal existence. Here is the Indian seer's conception: the most limited individuality cares only for his own 'ego.' But in the same measure that he transcends his limitation, the circle of his interest is widened; more actualities and existing phenomena are admitted, and come into sympathy with himself. All things mingle with and extend his own 'ego;' and that can be so widened as to embrace the interests of the whole world, until man can be in as much sympathy with a grain of sand, or the most distant star, and take as much share in the ant, and in the dwellers on Saturn, as in his own stomach and toes. In this way the whole universe becomes a constituent part of his 'ego;' thus his desires cease individually to exist, and are assimilated with the entire phenomenal world, and he longs for nothing beyond this. The 'ego' ceases because nothing is left outside the individual 'ego;' but this Nirvana, this highest step in the perfection of humanity, is, as you can see, not the negation of everything, but the absorption of everything; not something immovable, but rather the wonderful, ceaseless movement of the world's life. Men will not attain to Nirvana through quiet and indifference, but through strenuous labor, not by withdrawing into their 'ego,' but by going outside it. The true Nirvana of the pandits is the exact opposite of your Schopenhauer's Nirvana."
"But how can this conception of the seer's Nirvana coincide with their inactivity and renunciation of the world?"
"People misunderstand the fakir's belief. The Indian wise men think that the work of perfection is performed by the spirit alone, and that the activity of the body disturbs it; therefore the body must rest while the soul accomplishes its full measure of work, while it widens the circle of its interest, and absorbs into itself the phenomenal world. The clumsy understanding of the crowd thereupon comes to the conclusion that to become holy and attain to Nirvana, one must not stir a finger, not even to support oneself."
Wilhelm thought over this new point of view, but Schrotter went on: