Page:The Development of Mahayana Buddhism - The Monist 1914.pdf/8

572 non-existent; neither that which is one, nor that which is many; neither that which is at once one and many, nor that which is not at once one and many…. It is altogether beyond the conception of a finite mind, and the best way of defining it is to designate it suchness.”

Nâgârjuna, the founder of the Mâdhyamika school of Buddhism in India, who was as great as Ashvaghosha, declares in his Book of the Mean: “No birth, no death, no persistence, no changing, no oneness, no manyness, no coming, no going: this is the doctrine of the mean.” Again, “To think ‘it is’ is eternalism: to think ‘it is not’ is nihilism. To be or not to be, the wise cling to neither.”

All these statements have been construed as nihilistic, leading the mind nowhere but to absolute emptiness. But, as I have said before, such critics entirely ignore the fact that the human understanding, owing to its constitutional limitations, often finds it most expedient and indeed most logical to state a truth negatively, since a negation is really a higher form of affirmation, to be comprehended only through a process of intuition. The Mahâyâna thinkers have denied with their conservative fellow believers the existence of a concrete ego-soul; they have refused to accept the doctrine of a personal God; they are further reluctant to assert anything dogmatically; and the ultimate logical sequence of all these necessarily negative statements could not be anything else but the conception of suchness. Beyond this, one enters into mysticism; philosophy must bow her head modestly to religion at this gate of suchness; and religion must proceed by herself into an unknown wilderness, or to Eckhart's stille Düsterniss or Wüste, or to Boehme’s Abgrund; -- this is the realm of “Eternal Yea,” or, which is the same thing, the realm of “Eternal Nay.” The Mahâyâna philosophy at this point becomes mysticism. Intellectually, it has gone as far as it can. Vidya must now give way to dhyâna or