of slanderers with
redhot wires, pouring molten lead down the throats of liars, with
burning prongs tossing souls upon mountains planted with hooks of
iron reeking with the blood of those who have gone before,
screwing the damned between planks, pounding them in husking
mortars, grinding them in rice mills, while other fiends, in the
shape of dogs, lap up their oozing gore. But the hardest
sensibility must by this time cry, Hold!

With the turmoil and pain of entanglement in the vortex of births,
and all the repulsive exposures of finite life, the Hindus
contrast the idea of an infinite rest and bliss, an endless

7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 26.

8 Coleman, Mythology of the Hindus, p. 198.

exemption from evil and struggle, an immense receptivity of
reposing power and quietistic contemplation. In consequence of
their endlessly varied, constantly recurring, intensely earnest
speculations and musings over this contrast of finite restlessness
and pain with infinite peace and blessedness, a contrast which
constitutes the preaching of their priests, saturates their sacred
books, fills their thoughts, and broods over all their life, the
Orientals are pervaded with a profound horror of individual
existence, and with a profound desire for absorption into the
Infinite Being. A few quotations from their own authors will
illustrate this:

"A sentient being in the repetition of birth and death is like a
worm in the midst of a nest of ants, like a lizard in the hollow
of a bamboo that is burning at both ends."9 "Emancipation from all
existence is the fulness of felicity."10 "The being who is still
subject to birth may now sport in the beautiful gardens of heaven,
now be cut to pieces in hell; now be Maha Brahma, now a degraded
outcast; now sip nectar, now drink blood; now repose on a couch
with gods, now be dragged through a thicket of thorns; now reside
in a mansion of gold, now be exposed on a mountain of lava; now
sit on the throne of the gods, now be impaled amidst hungry dogs;
now be a king glittering with countless gems, now a mendicant
taking a skull from door to door to beg alms; now eat ambrosia as
the monarch of a dewa loka, now writhe and die as a bat in the
shrivelling flame."11 "The Supreme Soul and the human soul do not
differ, and pleasure or pain ascribable to the latter arises from
its imprisonment in the body. The water of the Ganges is the same
whether it run in the river's bed or be shut up in a dec