These rather lengthy quotations are necessary for our purpose. Better than anything else, they show the agreement between the oldest “Pagan” philosophies--not “assisted by the light of divine revelation,” to use the curious expression of Laboulaye in relation to Buddha--and the early Christianity of some Fathers. Both Pagan philosophy and Christianity, however, owe their elevated ideas on the soul and spirit of man and the unknown Deity to Buddhism and the Hindu Manu. No wonder that the Manicheans maintained that Jesus was a permutation of Gautama; that Buddha, Christ, and Mani were one and the same person,[592] for the teachings of the former two were identical. It was the doctrine of old India that Jesus held to when preaching the complete renunciation of the world and its vanities in order to reach the kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, where “men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but live like the angels.” It is the philosophy of Siddhârtha-Buddha again that Pythagoras expounded, when asserting that the _ego_ (νοῦς) was eternal with God, and that the soul only passed through various stages (Hindu _Rupa-locas_) to arrive at the divine excellence; meanwhile the _thumos_ returned to the earth, and even the _phren_ was eliminated. Thus the _metempsychosis_ was only a succession of disciplines through refuge-heavens (called by the Buddhists _Zion_),[593] to work off the exterior mind, to rid the _nous_ of the _phren_, or soul, the Buddhist “Winyanaskandaya,” _that principle that lives_ from _Karma_ and the Skandhas (groups). It is the latter, the metaphysical personations of the “deeds” of man, whether good or bad, which, after the death of his body, incarnate themselves, so to say, and form their many invisible but never-dying compounds into a new body, or rather into an ethereal being, the _double_ of what man was _morally_. It is the astral body of the kabalist and the “incarnated deeds” which form the new sentient self as his _Ahancara_ (the ego, self-consciousness), given to him by the sovereign Master (the breath of God) can never perish, for it is immortal _per se_ as a spirit; hence the sufferings of the newly-born _self_ till he rids himself of every earthly thought, desire, and passion. We now see that the “four mysteries” of the Buddhist doctrine have been as little understood and appreciated as the “wisdom” hinted at by Paul, and spoken “among them that are _perfect_” (initiated), the “mystery-wisdom” which “none of the _Archons_ of this world knew.”[594] The fourth degree of the Buddhist Dhyâna, the fruit of Samâdhi, which leads to the utmost perfection, to _Viconddham_, a term correctly rendered by Burnouf in the verb “_perfected_,”[595] is wholly misunderstood by others, as well as in himself. Defining the condition of Dhyâna, St. Hilaire argues thus: