Lest the fundamental idea of the Buddha's doctrines be misunderstood, the reader is warned to take the term "self" in the sense in which the Buddha uses it. The "self" of man translates the word _ātman_ which can be and has been understood, even in the Buddhist canon, in a sense to which the Buddha would never have made any objection. The Buddha denies the existence of a "self" as it was commonly understood in his time; he does not deny man's mentality, his spiritual constitution, the importance of his personality, in a word, his soul. But he does deny the mysterious ego-entity, the _ātman_, in the sense of a kind of soul-monad which by some schools was supposed to reside behind or within man's bodily and psychical activity as a distinct being, a kind of thing-in-itself, and a metaphysical agent assumed to be the soul. Buddhism is monistic. It claims that man's soul does not consist of two things, of an _ātman_ (self) and of a _manas_ (mind or thoughts), but that there is one reality, our thoughts, our mind or _manas_, and this _manas_ constitutes the soul. Man's thoughts, if anything, are his self, and there is no _ātman_, no additional and separate "self" besides. Accordingly, the translation of _ātman_ by "soul", which would imply that the Buddha denied the existence of the soul, is extremely misleading. Representative Buddhists, of different schools and of various countries, acknowledge the correctness of the view here taken, and we emphasize especially the assent of Southern Buddhists because they have preserved the tradition most faithfully and are very punctilious in the statement of doctrinal points. "_The Buddhist_, the Organ of the Southern Church of Buddhism," writes in a review of _The Gospel of Buddha_: "The eminent feature of the work is its grasp of the difficult subject and the clear enunciation of the doctrine of the most puzzling problem of _ātman_, as taught in Buddhism. So far as we have examined the question of _ātman_ ourselves from the works of the Southern canon, the view taken by Dr. Paul Cams is accurate, and we venture to think that it is not opposed to the doctrine of Northern Buddhism." This _ātman_-superstition, so common not only in India, but all over the world, corresponds to man's habitual egotism in practical life. Both are illusions growing out of the same root, which is the vanity of worldliness, inducing man to believe that the purpose of his life lies in his self. The Buddha proposes to cut off entirely all thought of self, so that it will no longer bear fruit. Thus Nirvāna is an ideal state, in which man's soul, after being cleansed from all selfishness, hatred and lust, has become a habitation of the truth, teaching him to distrust the allurements of pleasure and to confine all his energies to attending to the duties of life.