[33] There are five _Skandhas_ or attributes in the Buddhist teachings: “_Rupa_ (form or body), material qualities; _Vedana_, sensation; _Sanna_, abstract ideas; _Samkhara_, tendencies of mind; _Vinnana_, mental powers. Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of existence; and through them communicate with the world about us.” [34] By H. S. Olcott, President and Founder of the Theosophical Society. The accuracy of the teaching is sanctioned by the Rev. H. Sumangala, High Priest of the Sripada and Galle, and Principal of the _Widyodaya Parivena_ (College) at Colombo, as being in agreement with the Canon of the Southern Buddhist Church. [35] Or the _Spiritual_, in contradistinction to the personal _Self_. The student must not confuse this Spiritual Ego with the “HIGHER SELF” which is _Atma_, the God within us, and inseparable from the Universal Spirit. [36] Even in his _Buddhist Cathechism_, Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of Esoteric philosophy, found himself obliged to correct the mistakes of previous Orientalists who made no such distinction, and gives the reader his reason for it. Thus he says: “The successive appearances upon the earth, or ‘descents into generation,’ of the _tanhaically_ coherent parts (Skandhas) of a certain being are a succession of personalities. In each birth the PERSONALITY differs from that of a previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, the DEUS EX MACHINA, masks (or shall we say reflects?) itself now in the personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout the string of births. But though personalities ever shift, the one line of life along which they are strung, like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that _particular line_, never any other. It is therefore individual, an individual vital undulation, which began in Nirvana, or the subjective side of nature, as the light or heat undulation through æther began at its dynamic source; is careering through the objective side of nature under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of _Tanha_ (the unsatisfied desire for existence); and leads through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr. Rhys-Davids calls that which passes from personality to personality along the individual chain ‘character,’ or ‘doing.’ Since ‘character’ is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the sum of one’s mental qualities and moral propensities, would it not help to dispel what Mr. Rhys-Davids calls ‘the desperate expedient of a mystery’ (_Buddhism_, p. 101) if we regarded the life-undulation as individuality, and each of its series of natal manifestations as a separate personality? The perfect individual, Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture. And as countless generations (‘four _asankheyyas_ and a hundred thousand cycles,’ Fausboll and Rhys-Davids’ BUDDHIST BIRTH STORIES, p. 13) are required