If this way of stating the case be looked upon with suspicion as possibly not doing justice to the teaching of Buddhism, or as pressing unduly far the union between the human and the divine which is the ultimate goal of the transmigration of souls, the reply is that in truth the case against Buddhism is stronger than appears from this mode of stating it. To say that from the Buddhist point of view the human soul, the individual, eventually ceases to be, is indeed an incorrect way of putting the matter. It implies that the human soul, the individual, now is; and hereafter ceases to be. But so far from {64} admitting that the individual now is, the Buddhist doctrine is that the existence of the soul, now, is mere illusion, _mâyâ_. It is therefore logical enough, and at any rate self-consistent, to say that hereafter, when the series of transmigrations is complete, the individual will not indeed cease to be, for he never was, but the illusion that he existed will be dissipated. Logically again, it follows from this that if the existence of the individual soul is an illusion from the beginning, then there can strictly speaking be no transmigration of souls, for there is no soul to transmigrate. But with perfect self-consistency Buddhism accepts this position: what is transmitted from one being to the next in the chain of existences is not the individuality or the soul, but the character. Professor Rhys Davids says (_Hibbert Lectures_, pp. 91, 92): "I have no hesitation in maintaining that Gotama did not teach the transmigration of souls. What he did teach would be better summarized, if we wish to retain the word transmigration, as the transmigration of character. But it would be more accurate to drop the word transmigration altogether when speaking of Buddhism, and to call its doctrine the doctrine of karma. Gotama held that after the death of any being, {65} whether human or not, there survived nothing at all but that being's 'karma,' the result, that is, of its mental and bodily actions." "He discarded the theory of the presence, within each human body, of a soul which could have a separate and eternal existence. He therefore established a new identity between the individuals in the chain of existence, which he, like his forerunners, acknowledged, by the new assertion that that which made two beings to be the same being was--not soul, but--karma" (_ib._, pp. 93, 94). Thus once more it appears that there can be no eventual communion between the human soul, at the end of its chain of existence, and the divine, for the reason, not that the human soul ultimately ceases to be, but that it never is or was, and therefore neither transmigrates from one body to another, nor is eventually absorbed in the _âtmân_.