In his famous “Sermon at Benares,” Buddha gave in brief the outlines of his doctrines in the following words: “Hear, oh monks! the holy truth of the springs of sorrow! Sorrow is born of lust of life, that drags us from incarnation to incarnation, and of pleasure and desire, which seek their fulfilment hither and thither; the lust of pleasure, the lust of life, the lust of power. Hear, oh monks! the holy truth of the conquest of sorrow; it is the killing of this lust by the utter abandonment of desire, the giving up of all desire, the forgetting of all desire, the freeing of the body of all desire, until there is no place left for desire.”[195] In such a spirit of resignation, Buddha became himself a monk, and lived according to the strict rules of the pure life that he himself had laid down (“the belief pure, the will pure, the language pure, the deeds pure, the means of livelihood pure, the study pure, the attention pure, the meditation pure”). However, he did not find many kindred souls to follow the same precepts. Buddhism soon moved away from these original tenets, and became a religious doctrine of the ordinary kind. We are inclined to associate with Buddhism the doctrine of Nirvâna, as if the latter were the goal to which human life should be directed. Many philosophers, and the pessimists chief among them, naturally with Schopenhauer at their head, have adopted Nirvâna as the goal of mankind, as they see the world. However, the word Nirvâna has had many interpretations put upon it, the which is less surprising as Sanscrit scholars differ. I do not intend to join in the discussion, as I myself am not acquainted with Sanscrit, upon which the argument must be founded. However, I cannot pass it by without comment on the pretext that it has not yet been settled definitely by specialists, as it is the case that many thinkers regard Nirvâna as the goal of human existence. For long Nirvâna was represented as a sort of blank, in which there was no display of any mental operations. Max Müller,[196] the celebrated Oxford professor, opposed this interpretation on the ground that, according to him, in “all passages of Buddhistic origin in which Nirvâna occurs there is nothing to betoken annihilation. Most of these passages, if not all of them, would be quite unintelligible if we were to replace in them the word Nirvâna by the word annihilation.”