INTRODUCTION

“I command you to seek deliverance in the transcendental concept of Nirvana Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa; the ultimate state of spiritual liberation and the extinction of suffering, desire, and the sense of self. Thus you shall obtain deliverance from the idea of an immeasurable, innumerable, and illimitable world of sentient life; but, in reality there is no idea of a world of sentient life from which to obtain deliverance. And why? Because, in the mind of an enlightened disciple, there have ceased to exist such arbitrary ideas of phenomena as an entity, a being, a living being, or a personality.”

A similar process of reasoning appears to permeate the whole of The Diamond Sutra, and whether appertaining to a living being,¹ a virtue,² a condition of mind,³ a Buddhist kingdom,⁴ or a personal Buddha,⁵ there is implied in each concept a spiritual essence, only imperfectly described, if not entirely overlooked, in the ordinary use of each particular name. Shakespeare enquired, “What’s in a name?” and in a thought inspired by the rose and its delicious fragrance, suggested with Buddha, that there is little, or nothing, in a name which explains the real nature of an object. Even a “particle of dust” seems, to the Buddhist mind, to embody in its composition a subtle spiritual element, entirely “inscrutable,” and quite “incomprehensible.”

According to the Mahayana School Sanskrit: Mahāyāna, meaning "Great Vehicle"; a major branch of Buddhism that emphasizes the path of the Bodhisattva and the emptiness of all phenomena of Buddhist thought, objects and their respective names are alike unreal and illusory. Objects and names, in the abstract, represent merely the products of untutored and unenlightened minds. Nothing is real, in the sense that it is permanent. Everything appears to be subject to irrevocable Laws of change and decay. As the things which we see are temporal, it