Through this its truthfulness, his teaching has conquered half a world; not by fire and sword but even as truth conquers, by demonstration, by teaching. And so it now stands, old by two thousand years, before the portals of western culture, and claims entrance not into the cloudy domain of a vague mysticism or a crude pantheism, but into the realm of clear, clean thinking, as fulfilment of that which never can be attained by the means at the disposal of science. Comprehension, a world-conception, this goal of all mental life, made impossible by science in its false apprehension of the task--this the Buddha resolves in the limitation that reveals the genius. Whoso, if only from afar, has scented the import of the Buddha and his teaching, must feel that here he has to do with something wholly unique. One can place on one side not only all the religions of the world but also all the philosophical and scientific systems, and upon the other Buddhism will take its place alone. Yet not as their antithesis. Buddhism is the teaching of actuality, and actuality has no antitheses, because itself the union of antitheses. The Buddha laid hold of actuality there where alone it can be laid hold of--in one’s own _I_. Here he found the secret law, the sacred riddle that the chorus outside there mockingly sings us, like to some oracle of Delphi at one and the same time revealing and concealing. All religions founded upon revelation are of a decidedly revolutionary nature. Buddhism is a pure evolution, a process of mental development in which thought, so to speak, passes a culminating point and works on with reversed signs. This reversal of all life-values has set in with a new point of view, from which the _struggle for no more existence_, so unintelligible for us, follows as a logical necessity. Henceforth truth is no more the servitor of life, but life of truth. As a candle manifests itself through itself, by consuming itself in burning, so does the _I_ manifest itself through itself in expending itself in thinking. In this teaching he is not great who loves most, but he who thinks most. The full scope of this can only be understood later; for the moment it may serve the reader as preparation for what is to follow. Let him know then, at the very outset, that here he enters the realm of a man who seeks not life but truth--a man for whom life has no value in itself but only as an instrument of truth. Him I call a sorry seeker for truth who in his investigation of the riddle of life, sets life itself as sacrosanct in a place of security, making that which is to be measured into the measure itself.