But if we have to choose between the two, let us first have all-embracing love, the Buddhists would say; for it is love that awakens in us an intense desire to find the way of emancipating the masses from perpetual sufferings and eternal transmigration. The intellect will now endeavor to realise its highest possibilities; the Bodhi will exhibit its fullest strength. When it is found out that this life is an expression of the Dharmakâya which is one and eternal, that {363} individual existences have no selfhood (_âtman_ or _svabhâva_) as far as they are due to the particularisation of subjective ignorance, and, therefore, that we are true and real only when we are conceived as one in the absolute Dharmakâya, the Bodhisattva’s love which caused him to search after the highest truth will now unfold its fullest significance. This love, or faith in the Mahâyâna, as it is sometimes called, is felt rather vaguely at the first awakening of the religious consciousness, and agitates the mind of the aspirant, whose life has hitherto been engrossed in every form of egocentric thought and desire. He no more finds an unalloyed satisfaction, as the Çrâvakas or the Pratyekabuddhas do, in his individual emancipation from the curse of Samsâra. However sweet the taste of release from the bond of ignorance, it is lacking something that makes the freedom perfectly agreeable to the Bodhisattva who thinks more of others than of himself; to be sweet as well as acceptable, it must be highly savored with lovingkindness which embraces all his fellow-beings as his own children. The emancipation of the Çrâvaka or of the Pratyekabuddha is like a delicious food which is wanting in saline taste, for it is no more than a dry, formal philosophical emancipation. Love is that which stimulates a man to go beyond his own interests. It is the mother of all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The sacred motive that induces them to renounce a life of Nirvânic self-complacency, is nothing but their boundless love for all beings. They do {364} not wish to rest in their individual emancipation, they want to have all sentient creatures without a single exception emancipated and blest in paradisiacal happiness. Love, therefore, bestows on us two spiritual benefits: (1) It saves all beings from misery and (2) awakens in us the Buddha-intelligence. The following passages quoted at random from Devala’s _Mahâpuruṣa_ will help our readers to understand the true signification of Nirvâna and the value of love (_karuṇâ_) as estimated by the Mahâyânists.