And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.… The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (_atta_) and anything appertaining to the Ego (_attaniya_) cannot be comprehended with accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,--firm, constant, eternal, unchangeable,--thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,’--is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely redeemed souls.”