In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,--or, indeed, his silence,--are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. These mysteries are understood of the Buddha, but evolution, cultivated by the "true word," or doctrine, will allow man, whose mysteries are like the mysteries of the Buddhas, to become like unto them.
But since the path is open for all to Buddhahood,--since these animals that pass me, this landscape about me, can become divine,--why, alas! are not men more easily carried to that glorious end? It is because we are living in the present; and as that present must have had a past, since nothing is lost and nothing disappears, so it will have a future; and that future depends on the present and on the past. Changes and transformations are only a "play" of cause and effect, since spirit and matter are one in absolute nature, which in its essence can neither be born nor be dissolved. Actual life is absolutely determined by the influencing action of merit and demerit in past existence, as the future will be determined by present causes; so that it is possible for the soul to pass through the six conditions of the infernal being, the phantom, the beast, the demon, the human, and the celestial, and, through painful transmigration, to reach the supreme salvation of Nirvana. Then will end the universal metamorphoses, the trials, the expiations, the unceasing whirlwind of life. Illusion will cease, and reality last, in the complete calm of absolute truth.
Have I told you my story of the word Nirvana, as used by the reporter at Omaha, who managed to interview us? The association of a reporter with any of the four states of Nirvana may seem impossible to you--but this is the way it happened.
Owing to A----'s being the brother of the president of the road, we were naturally suspected of business designs when we acknowledged that we were going to Japan, and, in my shortsighted wisdom, I thought that I should put to rout our interviewer by "allowing" that the purpose of our going was to find Nirvana. I had misjudged the mind of the true reporter, and did not expect the retort, "Are you not rather late in the season?" Whether he knew or "builded better," he had certainly pointed out the probable result. I often recur to this episode when, as now, I enjoy, in dreaming action, that Nirvana which is called conditioned; that state of the terrestrial being who understands truth by the extinction of passions, but who is yet, indeed, very much tied to the body--if I may speak so lightly of what is a contemplation of, and an absorption in, eternal truth, a rest in supreme salvation.