§ 26. Secondly, in the case of _Buddhism_ we are said to meet with a religion that is essentially atheistic.
"Whether Buddhas arise, O priests, or whether Buddhas do not arise, it remains a fact and the fixed and necessary constitution of being, that all its constituents are transitory."[78:14]
The secret of life lies in the application of this truth:
"O builder! I've discovered thee! This fabric thou shalt ne'er rebuild! Thy rafters all are broken now, And pointed roof demolished lies! This mind has demolition reached, And seen the last of all desire!"[78:15]
The case of Buddha himself and of the exponents of his purely esoteric doctrine, belong to the reflective type which will presently be given special consideration. But with the ordinary believer, even where an extraneous but almost inevitable polytheism is least in evidence, the religious experience consists in substantially the same elements that appear in theistic religions. The individual is here living appropriately to the ultimate nature of things, with the ceaseless periods of time in full view. That which is brought home to him is the illusoriness and hollowness of things when taken in the spirit of active endeavor. The only profound and abiding good is nothingness. While nature and society conspire to mock him, Nirvana invites him to its peace. The religious course of his life consists in the use of such means as can win him this end. From the stand-point of the universe he has the sympathy only of that wisdom whose essence is self-destruction. And this truth is mediated by the imagination of divine sympathy, for the Blessed One remains as the perpetual incarnation of his own blessedness.
§ 27. Finally there remains the consideration of the bearing of this interpretation upon the more refined and disciplined religions. The religion of the critically enlightened man is less naive and credulous in its imagery. God tends to vanish into an ideal or a universal, into some object of theoretical definition. Here we are on that borderland where an assignment of individual cases can never be made with any certainty of correctness. We can generalize only by describing the conditions that such cases must fulfil if they are properly to be denominated religious. And there can be no question of the justice of deriving such a description from the reports of historical and institutional religions. An idealistic philosophy will, then, be a religion just in so far as it is rendered practically vivid by the imagination. Such imagination must create and sustain a social relationship. The question of the legitimacy of this imagination is another matter. It raises the issue concerning the judgment of truth implied in religion, and this is the topic of the next chapter. At any rate the religious experience _may be_ realized by virtue of the metaphorical or poetical representation of a situation as one of intercommunication between persons, where reflective definition at the same time denies it. The human worshipper may supply the personality of God from himself, viewing himself as from the divine stand-point. But whatever faculty supplies this indispensable social quality of religion, he who defines God as the ultimate goodness or the ultimate truth, has certainly not yet worshipped Him. He begins to be religious only when such an ideal determines the atmosphere of his daily living; when he regards the immanence of such an ideal in nature and history as the object of his will; and when he responds to its presence in the spirit of his conduct and his contemplation.