These ideas on the transmigrations and the trinity of man, were held by many of the early Christian Fathers. It is the jumble made by the translators of the _New Testament_ and ancient philosophical treatises between soul and spirit, that has occasioned the many misunderstandings. It is also one of the many reasons why Buddha, Plotinus, and so many other initiates are now accused of having longed for the total extinction of their souls--“absorption unto the Deity,” or “reunion with the universal soul,” meaning, according to modern ideas, annihilation. The animal soul must, of course, be disintegrated of its particles, before it is able to link its purer essence forever with the immortal spirit. But the translators of both the _Acts_ and the _Epistles_, who laid the foundation of the _Kingdom of Heaven_, and the modern commentators on the Buddhist _Sutra of the Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness_, have muddled the sense of the great apostle of Christianity, as of the great reformer of India. The former have smothered the word φυχικος, so that no reader imagines it to have any relation with _soul_; and with this confusion of _soul_ and _spirit_ together, _Bible_ readers get only a perverted sense of anything on the subject; and the interpreters of the latter have failed to understand the meaning and object of the Buddhist four degrees of Dhyâna. In the writings of Paul, the entity of man is divided into a trine--flesh, psychical existence or _soul_, and the overshadowing and at the same time interior entity or SPIRIT. His phraseology is very definite, when he teaches the _anastasis_, or the continuation of life of those who have died. He maintains that there is a _psychical_ body which is sown in the corruptible, and a spiritual body that is raised in incorruptible substance. “The first man is of the earth earthy, the second man from heaven.” Even James (iii. 15) identifies the soul by saying that its “wisdom descendeth not from the above but is terrestrial, _psychical_, _demoniacal_” (see Greek text). Plato, speaking of the Soul (_psuché_), observes that “when she allies herself to the _nous_ (divine substance, a god, as psuché is a goddess), she does everything aright and felicitously; but the case is otherwise when she attaches herself to _Annoia_.” What Plato calls _nous_, Paul terms the _Spirit_; and Jesus makes the _heart_ what Paul says of the _flesh_. The natural condition of mankind was called in Greek αποστασια; the new condition αναστασις. In Adam came the former (death), in Christ the latter (resurrection), for it is he who first publicly taught mankind the “Noble Path” to Eternal life, as Gautama pointed the same Path to Nirvana. To accomplish both ends there was but one way, according to the teachings of both. “Poverty, chastity, contemplation or inner prayer; contempt for wealth and the illusive joys of this world.”