“Granted the wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable... The conception is that of Nirvâna. To sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognise that to be rid of them is a deliverance; to practise a sort of complete psychial circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the mystic would say, of God); to create an inner vacuum, and to feel dizzy in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plenitude supreme, pleroma, these have always constituted temptations to mankind. Mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over... Nirvâna leads, in fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the logical absurdity that the vanquished are the victors over the trials and miseries of life.” Then, the author recites the case of one of his acquaintances, who made a practical experiment of Nirvâna, rejecting variety in his diet, giving up meat, wine, every kind of ragout, every form of condiment, and reducing to its lowest possible terms the desire that is most fundamental in every living being--the desire of food, and substituting a certain number of cups of pure milk. “Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he thought to find a recompense in the pleasure of abstract meditation and of esthetic contemplation. He entered to a state which was not that of dreamland, but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details.” [13] For detailed explanation of this term see Chapter XI. [14] _The Udâna_, Ch. VIII, p. 118. Translation by General Strong. [15] This is a peculiarly Indian religious practice, which consists in counting one’s exhaling and inhaling breaths. When a man is intensely bent on the practise, he gradually passes to a state of trance, forgetting everything that is going on around and within himself. The practise may have the merit of alleviating nervousness and giving to the mind the bliss of relaxation, but it oftentimes leads the mind to a self-hypnotic state. [16] Here Nirvâna is evidently understood to mean self-abnegation or world-flight or quietism, which is not in accord with the true Buddhist interpretation of the term. [17] The sentiment of the Golden Rule is not the monopoly of Christianity; it has been expressed by most of the leaders of thought, thus, for instance: “Requite hatred with virtue” (Lao-tze). “Hate is only appeased by love” (Buddha). “Do not do to others what ye would not have done to you by others” (Confucius). “One must neither return evil, nor do any evil to any one among men, not even if one has to suffer from them” (Plato, _Crito_, 49).