The Lord Buddha addressed Subhuti, saying: “What think you? Can the Lord Buddha be perceived by means of his thirty-two bodily distinctions?”[4] Subhuti replied, saying: “No! Honoured of the Worlds! the Lord Buddha cannot be perceived by means of his thirty-two bodily distinctions. And why? Because, what the Lord Buddha referred to as his ‘thirty-two bodily distinctions,’ are not in reality ‘bodily distinctions,’ they are merely defined as ‘bodily distinctions.’” The Lord Buddha addressed Subhuti, saying: “If a good disciple, whether man or woman, day by day sacrificed lives innumerable as the sands of the Ganges;[5] and if another disciple adhered with implicit faith to a stanza of this Scripture, and diligently explained it to others, the intrinsic merit of such a disciple would be relatively greater than the other.”[6] [1] A Chinese annotator observes, that as the “diamond” excels all other precious gems in brilliance and indestructibility, so also the “wisdom” of this Sutra transcends and shall outlive all other knowledge known to philosophy. [2] “Then what do you think, O Subhuti, is there anything that was preached by the Tathagata? Subhuti said: Not indeed, O Bhagavat, there is nothing that was preached by the Tathagata.”—_The Vagrakkhedika_. Max Müller. It appears to be one of the distinctive features of primitive Buddhism, that its founder made provision for the utmost development of the human intellect, within the spheres of religion and philosophy. According to the text of _The Diamond Sutra_, the Lord Buddha evidently disclaims any suggestion on his part to formulate a “precise system of Law or doctrine” corresponding to the idea of a _creed_. [3] “Matter is infinitely divisible.”—_The World as Idea and Will_. Schopenhauer. “After me repeat Your numeration.... By Pundarikas unto Padumas, Which last is how you count the utmost grains Of Hastagiri ground to finest dust.”—_The Light of Asia_. Sir Edwin Arnold. “If the Buddha was not a materialist, in the sense of believing in the eternal existence of material atoms, neither could he in any sense be called a ‘spiritualist,’ or believer in the external existence of abstract spirit. With him creation did not proceed from an omnipotent spirit or mind evolving phenomena out of itself by the exercise of will, nor from an eternal self-existing, self-evolving germ of any kind. As to the existence in the universe of any spiritual substance which was not matter and was imperceptible to the senses, it could not be proved.”—_Buddhism_. Sir Monier Williams. “Subhuti, all these countless particles of dust Tathagata declares are no real particles; it is but an empty name by which they are known. Tathagata declares that all these systems of worlds composing the great chiliocosm are no real worlds; they are but empty names.”—_Kin-Kong-King_. Beal.