It is the indispensable task of every earnest thinker who would really follow the Buddha, experience him in himself, to make clear to himself, and ever and again make clear, that our whole mental life, our concept-world is based upon artificial premisses, in which, in the strictest sense of the words, not life must serve truth but truth life. As the spider itself flings forth its web over the abyss, so from out ourselves we fling forth in the form of concepts an inextricable network of airy roots. As the ape from bough to bough, so springs the human mind from concept to concept, and has itself borne aloft by the entire network, where any single thread would rend beneath him, each individual bough snap under him and precipitate him into the bottomless gulfs of an endless infinitude. All that circulates in daily life in the way of mental values are pure concept-values, bills of exchange upon actuality. But in the hurry and bustle of traffic no one has time or inclination to go and get these bills turned into actual currency. Just as they stand they are passed along “like a basket from hand to hand.” Hence the terrible predominance of ideals, the tyranny they exercise over our minds, and so over genuine education and culture. Whoso has experienced in himself the collapse of ideals, the taking up of the bills of current concept-values at the counter of actuality,--he well understands why the Buddha calls his intuition an “awakening.” It is the awakening out of the dream-world of concepts. A Buddha, in short, is a man who dares to _live_ this his insight that there are no concepts and accordingly nothing conceived, but only a “conceiving.” Hence his attitude towards many questions, and above all to that question as to how one ought to picture to oneself a Buddha, or one who after this life is re-born no more. The scheme of the questions runs thus: 1. Where is he re-born? 2. Is he not re-born? 3. Is he re-born as well as not re-born? 4. Is he neither re-born nor yet not re-born? To all these sophistical questions the stereotyped answer of the Buddha is, “That does not apply”--an answer, naturally, which gives plenty of scope for the profoundest conjectures and hypotheses, but which only means that the question is wrongly put and therefore renders impossible any answer at all. A being that with this as his last existence, is proceeding towards extinction, that will never again be re-born _is no longer existent_, even in the form of concept; hence the whole question is meaningless.