act 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.

[Sidenote: Critical Religion.]

Sect. 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
rel