But though he knew full well and each day perceived more clearly that the climax of wisdom is perception of this universal Law from which nothing—no, not the very soul of man is exempt—still it evaded him. Freedom from deception he attained, diamond-clear lucidity, certainty that there is a first principle and final aim of the Universe, but the Way to touch hands with it he could not find. Thus, having caught but a glimpse of the Absolute like a star in driven clouds, he had gained the certainty of what is not, but not as yet the knowledge of what is, and there even the majesty of the Bodhisattva’s[2] intellect fell back baffled, and at last his mind became like a dimness in which thought itself lost its way and analysis stumbled, and the clear call became like the falling of a great water in which many sounds fuse into a confused roar in which nothing but mere noise is to be discerned, deafening the ears and confusing the senses. ----- [2] The Buddha-to-be. ----- And thus he sat for six long years, and at the end though he had discerned the perishable, the transient, the Eternal Way was far from his perception, and life rushed by him from an unknown beginning to a hopeless end, defending itself frantically for a few brief years, but in the end conquered, and the man broken in the frail edifice which is called his being. And now he was so wasted that life hung in him by a thread worn slender as a spider’s, and the fame of his terrible austerities had spread like the sound of a great bell hung in the canopy of the skies, and if he had gained what he sought all this would have counted as nothing in his eyes, but in the long six years he had not gained, and his mind tortured him because now it seemed that it broke itself and its power dispersed like a mighty wave broken on rocks and fleeing in foam and spray. And one day when he rose to his feet, still drowned in hopeless meditation, his limbs failed beneath him, and he fell and so lay exhausted, spent, believing “This is death, and I am conquered.” And it could not be otherwise for very terrible had been his austerities and later he told his disciple this. “I remember when a crab-apple was my only daily food. I remember when a single grain of rice was my only grain of food. And my body became extremely thin and lean. Like dried withered reeds my arms and legs, my hips like a camel’s hoof, like a plait of hair my spine. As project the rafters of a house’s roof, so raggedly stuck out my ribs. As in a deep-lying brook the watery mirror beneath appears so small as almost to disappear, so in the deep hollows of my eye-pits my eye-balls well nigh wholly disappeared. As a gourd becomes shrivelled and hollow in the hot sun so did the skin of my head become parched. And pressing my stomach my hands touched my spine, and feeling my spine my hand felt through to the stomach. And yet with all this mortification I came no nearer to the supernatural faculty of clearness of knowledge.”