Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.142

c8.142

In the age of which the sacred writings of the Buddhists give us a picture, and, we may add with probability, in Buddha's own time, the belief in a sudden illumination of the soul, in the fact of an internal emancipation perfecting itself in one moment, was universally prevalent: people looked for the "deliverance from death," and told one another with beaming countenance that the deliverance from death had been found: people asked how long it was till one striving for salvation is able to attain his goal, and gave one another to understand, with and without figure or parable, that of course the day and hour, in which the fruit of immortality will be given to man, are not in his power, but still the Master promised to his follower that, if he trod the right path, "after a short time that for which noble youths leave their homes to lead a pilgrim life, the highest achievement of religious effort, would be vouchsafed to him, that he would yet in this life apprehend the truth itself, and see it face to face.” This visionary grasp of truth some pursued by mortification, others by abstraction of the mind, pushed to the utmost limit and accompanied by long-protracted retention of the body in fixed postures, all waiting the moment in which the attainment of their aim would be clearly realized by them with absolute certainty. When any one came to regard his natural state as impermanent and dark, that to which he aspired, and which he, therefore, expected finally to actually realize, could not but appear to him to be a condition of purer internal illumination and self-knowledge, and with this condition of pure internal illumination was combined the consciousness of his own power to look, by visionary intuition, through the whole concatenation of the universe.