“The art of demonstration was only evolved as far as the first rudiments.” I maintain that every single word in this sentence is false or incorrect. The art of demonstration in the philosophical systems that surged all about the Buddha, was developed to a height it never can reach among us for the simple reason that our speech and our brains have lost the necessary flexibility. One has only to read those great Suttas that I might call the transcendental Suttas, such as the Brahmajāla Sutta of the _Dīgha Nikāya_, in order to see that as well speech as brain with us have become so stiff in mechanical views as to be no longer capable of following up and thinking out all these possibilities, all these species and sub-species of idealistic and materialistic views. But it is just for this reason that the Buddha is called the “Master-guide.” Like the guide in the catacombs, where at every step the unacquainted are threatened with irretrievable errors, calmly and surely he takes his way through this wild tangle of method, through this rigid logic of the absurd. Serene and clear he recognizes, perceives, “It is altogether conditioned; it is all of the mind’s own devising.” Again we have the delicate irony that comes of commanding insight, when in another discourse he says, “There are wise men who call day night, and night day.” How could one hit off more aptly certain tendencies of modern science--that astounding faculty it displays for interpreting actuality in accordance with preconceived ideas? All those imposing definitions that for our minds and for the human mind in all ages, have possessed such an intoxicating quality, are only possible where one fabricates artificial cores around which dialectical processes can crystallize, and crystallize out all the more splendidly the more carefully one protects them from the rude shocks of actuality. The loftiness and subtlety of our conceptual constructions is nothing but the water-mark that indicates the height of our ignorance. There is certainly much that is confusing for our thought, brought up as that has been under the sway of Aristotelian logic, to see concepts merge and blend upon whose clear differentiation the logical possibility of the entire system seems to rest--such concepts, for example, as _kamma_ and _sankhāra_, _kamma_ and _viññāṇa_, _kamma_ and _taṇhā_, and so forth. It may easily happen that the seeker for truth may suffer shipwreck on such apparent contradictions. But in such case it is with him as with one who is stranded on the lighthouse itself--blinded by its very light! To be able to follow the Buddha here, one must have understood him. What Jesus said of himself in terms of emotion, that, but in terms of understanding, the Buddha also can say, “Blessed is he that is not offended in me.”