To confine ourselves to the psychological question, what Buddhism most emphatically insists on is the non-existence of a concrete, individual, irreducible soul-substance, whose immortality is so much coveted by most unenlightened people. Individuation is only relative and not absolute. Buddhism knows how far the principle could safely and consistently be carried out, and its followers will not forget where to stop and destroy the wall, almost adamantine to some religionists, of individualism. Absolute individualism, as the Buddhists understand it, incapacitates us to follow the natural flow of sympathy; to bathe in the eternal sunshine of divinity which not only surrounds but penetrates us; to escape the curse of individual immortality which is strangely so much sought after by some people; to trace this mundane life to its fountainhead of which it drinks so freely, yet quite unknowingly; to rise rejuvenated from the consuming fire of Kâla (Chronos). To think that there is a mysterious something behind the empirical ego and that this something comes out triumphantly after the fashion of the immortal phœnix from the funeral pyre of corporeality, is not Buddhistic. What I would remark here in connection with this {165} problem of the soul, is its relation to that of Âlayavijñâna, of which it is said that the Buddha was very reluctant to talk, on account of its being easily confounded with the notion of the ego. The Âlaya, as was explained, is a sort of universal soul from which our individual empirical souls are considered to have evolved. The Manas which is the first offspring of the Âlaya is endowed with the faculty of discrimination, and from the wrongful use of this faculty there arises in the Manas the conception of the Âlaya as the ego,--the real concrete soul-substratum. The Âlaya, however, is not a particular phenomenon, for it is a state of Suchness in its evolutionary disposition and has nothing in it yet to suggest its concrete individuality. When the Manas finds out its error and lifts the veil of Ignorance from the body of the Âlaya, it soon becomes convinced of the ultimate nature of the soul, so called. For the soul is not individual, but supra-individual. _Âtman and the “Old Man.”_