"Does the path, then, lead into a new existence? Does it lead into the nothing? The Buddhist creed rests in delicate equipoise between the two. The longing of the heart that craves the eternal has not nothing, and yet the thought has not a something, which it might firmly grasp. Further off the idea of the endless, the eternal could not withdraw itself from belief than it has done here, where, like a gentle flutter on the point of merging in the nothing, it threatens to evade the gaze." Nirvana, according to Mr. James Freeman Clarke, means to the Buddhist the absolute eternal world beyond time and space; that which is _nothing_ to us now, but will be _everything_ hereafter. Students of Buddhism are often confronted with the question why sorrow and pain should have held such prominent places in the mind of Gotama. Explanations have been afforded that this was due, in a large measure, to a pathetic nature, born of climate and environment. The _mind_ of the inhabitants of Hindustan is still an unfathomable mystery; the great heart of India beats slowly, and those waves of sprightly emotion which are distinctive peculiarities of the natives of Europe are but barely discernible ripples on the still surface of the Indian character. To the poetic people of the Ganges the immense plains of India, their broad and voiceless rivers, the magic beauty of an oasis, the distant silence of the Himalayas, the brooding calm of the atmosphere, all appear to labour in unison to the same end--to fashion the restless heart of mortals after their own emotionless image, to expand it into that fulness of peace which is theirs, and to guide the children of men into the haven where they would be. This mode of thought, or no thought; this complete abandonment of self, culminating in the ascetic, to the desire of union with the Infinite, can be differentiated from the meditative pose of the Christian by the absence in it of anything approaching to emotion or affection. These are weaknesses to be set aside. There can be no calm where sensations enter--not even a breath of divine love must stir the ocean of their pictured rest. Gotama fully recognized that true joy was only to be found when the notion of self-hood was in abeyance, as it most certainly is found invariably in those cases in which we lose, as it were, the sense of objective being in an absorbing subject, or in the presence of a fascinating personality.