our logical way of thinking upon reality in its concreteness. When we transfer this separation from thought into reality, we encounter many difficulties not only intellectual but moral and spiritual, from which we suffer unspeakable anguish later. This was felt by the Buddha, and he called this mixing up Ignorance (_avidyā_). The Mahayana doctrine of Śūnyatā was a natural conclusion. But I need not make any remark here to the effect that the Śūnyatā theory is not nihilism or acosmism, but that it has its positive background which sustains it and gives life to it. It was in the natural order of thought now for Buddhists to endeavour to find a philosophical explanation of Enlightenment and Nirvana in the theory of non-Atman or Śūnyatā, and this to the best of their intellectual power and in the light of their spiritual experience. They finally found out that Enlightenment was not a thing exclusively belonging to the Buddha, but that each one of us could attain it if he got rid of ignorance by abandoning the dualistic conception of life and of the world; they further concluded that Nirvana was not vanishing into a state of absolute non-existence which was an impossibility as long as we had to reckon with the actual facts of life, and that Nirvana in its ultimate signification was an affirmation—an affirmation beyond opposites of all kinds. This metaphysical understanding of the fundamental problem of Buddhism marks the features of the Mahayana philosophy. As to its practical side where the theory of Śūnyatā and the doctrine of Enlightenment are harmoniously united and realised in life, or where the Buddhists aim to enter into the inner consciousness of the Buddha as was revealed to him under the Bodhi tree, we will refer to it in the following section. * * * * *