Here, in these practices attributed to Christian saints, we have an exact parallel to those in use by Hindu ascetics even of the present day. It must be clearly understood, however, that the Buddhist attaches no merit to such practices, unless they conduce to the banishment of ignorance. Asceticism, as a thing in itself, is useless. Heaven and Nirvana are unpainted pictures, undescribed actualizations; they are realities, not materialities. There is a never-ending, unsatisfied, restless craving, conscious or unconscious, throughout the Kosmos to enter upon reality. The suns and their satellites whirl about aimlessly in search of it. The whole universe is in sore trouble because, through ignorance, it is not. "The vulture's eye hath not seen it; the lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea saith, It is not with me." And yet it is there! The use of such exaggerated terms as "immense," "infinite," "illimitable," etc., is to be accounted for by referring the habit to unconscious efforts by the conditioned to express the unconditioned. The sea, mountains, the heavens, owe their fascination to a suggestion of the unconditioned possessed by them. In moments of attempted aspiration we are prone to look upwards into space--a symbol of the boundless. On the other hand, when the mind is engaged in working out details and calculations, there is the habit of looking downwards. Not only men, but beasts of the field, look upwards for help in their dying moments; upwards into space, where the conditioned seemingly vanishes into the unconditioned. I have often witnessed the pleading expression of dying antelopes and other wild animals, their eyes being almost invariably directed to the sky above in their last moments of life. I was on one occasion more than usually struck with this beautiful expression--appealing, as it were, to the skies for mercy--in the case of a wounded bear when in its death throes amid the snowy solitudes of the Himalayas. Let us draw the curtains apart, and behold for a moment the scene of the enacted tragedy. Out of the violet mists spread by the viewless hands of a yet unrisen sun, black crags uplifted their glacier breasts to receive the first ravishing kiss of dawn; and the forests, obedient to the silence imposed by the kingly peaks, stood austere and unstirred by the affectionate airs of heaven. The staining blood, the furry mass, the clutching claws of the wild monster in his struggle with life and death, presented to the imagination some weird sacrifice consummated upon an altar, built of immaculate snow. It was then that this remarkable pleading expression of the eyes arrested the attention of my Himalayan huntsman, who, turning round to me, exclaimed: "He is seeing God." The Psalmist says: "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help."