Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away. (Hellas.)
Or like lotuses, for ever unfolding and then decaying, each decay containing the germ of a new plant; or like an interminable succession of wheels for ever coming into view, for ever rolling onwards, disappearing and reappearing; for ever passing from being to non-being, and again from non-being to being. It was this ceaseless rotation that led to the wheel being adopted as the favourite symbol in Buddhism ([p. 122]).
Christianity recognizes in a very different way this ‘law of circularity’ in the physical world, as the Rev. Hugh Macmillan has ably pointed out.
As to the question from whom? or whence? or how? came the original force or impetus that started the first movement, the Buddha hazarded no opinion. He held this to be an inexplicable mystery—an insoluble riddle. He confessed himself to be a thorough Agnostic. He saw nothing but countless cycles of causes and effects, and never undertook to explain the first cause which set the first wheel in motion. It was not, then, without a deep significance that Gautama placed Ignorance first in his chain of Causation ([p. 102]. Note, however, the explanation given at [p. 99]).
After all, these Buddhistic speculations amount to little else than Brāhmanism stripped of some of its transcendental mysticism. We know, for example, that the true Vedānta philosophy makes the Universe proceed out of an eternal Illusion, or Ignorance associated with the impersonal Spirit Brahman, into which it is again absorbed.
Can it be affirmed, then, a Buddhist might say, that either this pure impersonal Spirit (or Ignorance) is virtually very different from pure nothingness?
What says the author of Ṛig-veda X. 120?—
In the beginning there was neither naught nor aught,
Then there was neither sky nor atmosphere above.