what was positive now negative. Buddhist scholars ought not to forget this revaluation of ideas that comes along with Enlightenment. Since Buddhism asserts Enlightenment to be the ultimate fact of Buddhist life, there is in it nothing negativistic, nothing pessimistic. IV As philosophy tends to emphasise unduly the importance of abstract ideas and logical inferences and forgets to keep itself constantly in touch with the actual world of experience, the Buddha, as I have repeatedly stated, flatly refused to subscribe to theorisation (_takka_ or _vitakka_) at the expense of practical discipline. Enlightenment was the fruit of such discipline, and the dispelling of Ignorance could not be effected by any other means. If the Buddha could be said to have had any system of thought governing the whole trend of his teaching, it was what we may call radical empiricism. By this I mean that he took life and the world as they were and did not try to read them according to his own interpretation. Theorists may say this is impossible, for we put our subjectivity into every act of perception and what we call an objective world is really a reconstruction of our innate ideas. Epistemologically this may be so, but spiritually a state of perfect freedom is obtained only when all our egoistic thoughts are not read into life and the world is accepted as it is as a mirror reflects a flower as flower and the moon as moon. When therefore I say Buddhism is radical empiricism, this is not to be understood epistemologically but spiritually. This is really the meaning of “yathābhūtam” or “yathātatham”—the term quite frequently used in the Buddhist canon and in fact forming a most important refrain of Buddhist thought. In the _Sāmañña-phala Sutta_, in the Dīgha-Nikāya, we are told in an ascending scale what the ultimate fruits of Buddhist life are, and the scale terminates in the “yathābhūtam” acceptance of the world: