We read in the Lalita-vistara (chap. i) that at the supreme moment of his intellectual illumination brilliant flames of light issued from the crown of his head, through the interstices of his cropped hair. These rays are sometimes represented in his images, emerging from his skull in a form resembling the five fingers of an extended hand (see the frontispiece). Mark, however, that Gautama’s meditation never led him to the highest result of the true Yoga of Indian philosophy—union with the Supreme Spirit. On the contrary, his self-enlightenment led to entire disbelief in the separate existence of any eternal, infinite Spirit at all—any Spirit, in fact, with which a spirit existing in his own body could blend, or into which it could be absorbed. If the Buddha was not a materialist, in the sense of believing in the eternal existence of material atoms, neither could he in any sense be called a ‘spiritualist,’ or believer in the eternal existence of abstract spirit. With him Creation did not proceed from an Omnipotent Spirit or Mind evolving phenomena out of itself by the exercise of will, nor from an eternal self-existing, self-evolving germ of any kind. As to the existence in the Universe of any spiritual substance which was not matter and was imperceptible by the senses, it could not be proved. Nor did he believe in the eternal existence of an invisible Self or Ego, called Soul, distinct from a material body. The only eternity of true Buddhism was an eternity of ‘becoming,’ not of ‘being’—an eternity of existences, all succeeding each other, and all lapsing into nothingness. If there were any personal gods they were all inferior to the perfect man, and all liable to change and dissolution. In brief, the Buddha’s enlightenment consisted, first, in the discovery of the origin and remedy of suffering, and, next, in the knowledge of the existence of an eternal Force—a force generated by what in Sanskṛit is called Karman, ‘Act.’ The accumulated force of the acts of one Universe produced another. Every man, therefore, was created by the force of his own acts in former bodies, combined with a force generated by intense attachment to existence (upādāna). Who or what started the first act, the Buddha never pretended to be able to explain. He confessed himself in regard to this point a downright Agnostic. The Buddha himself had been created by his own acts, and had been created and re-created through countless bodily forms; but he had no spirit or soul existing separately between the intervals of each creation. By his protracted meditation he attained to no higher knowledge than this, and although he himself rose to loftier heights of knowledge than any other man of his day, he never aspired to other faculties than were within the reach of any human being capable of rising to the same sublime abstraction of mind.