THEO. It depends whether you mean exoteric, popular Buddhism, or its esoteric teachings. The former explains itself in the _Buddhist Catechism_ in this wise: “Soul it considers a word used by the ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is subject to change, then man is included, and every material part of him must change. That which is subject to change is not permanent, so there can be no immortal survival of a changeful thing.” This seems plain and definite. But when we come to the question that the new personality in each succeeding re-birth is the aggregate of “_Skandhas_,” or the attributes, of the _old_ personality, and ask whether this new aggregation of _Skandhas_ is a _new_ being likewise, in which nothing has remained of the last, we read that: “In one sense it is a new being, in another it is not. During this life the Skandhas are continually changing, while the man A. B. of forty is identical as regards personality with the youth A. B. of eighteen, yet by the continual waste and reparation of his body and change of mind and character, he is a different being. Nevertheless, the man in his old age justly reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and actions at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of the re-birth, being the _same individuality as before_ (but not the same personality), with but a changed form, or new aggregation of _Skandhas_, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and thoughts in the previous existence.” This is abstruse metaphysics, and plainly does not express _disbelief_ in Soul by any means. ENQ. Is not something like this spoken of in _Esoteric Buddhism_? THEO. It is, for this teaching belongs both to Esoteric _Budhism_ or Secret Wisdom, and to the exoteric Buddhism, or the religious philosophy of Gautama Buddha. ENQ. But we are distinctly told that most of the Buddhists do not believe in the Soul’s immortality? THEO. No more do we, if you mean by Soul the _personal Ego_, or life-Soul—_Nephesh_. But every learned Buddhist believes in the individual or _divine Ego_. Those who do not, err in their judgment. They are as mistaken on this point, as those Christians who mistake the theological interpolations of the later editors of the Gospels about damnation and hell-fire, for _verbatim_ utterances of Jesus. Neither Buddha nor “Christ” ever wrote anything themselves, but both spoke in allegories and used “dark sayings,” as all true Initiates did, and will do for a long time yet to come. Both Scriptures treat of all such metaphysical questions very cautiously, and both, Buddhist and Christian records, sin by that excess of exotericism; the dead letter meaning far overshooting the mark in both cases.