is impossible for the mind to conceive either an infinite world or a world stopping abruptly with not even space beyond.  A common answer to this antinomy is that the mind is attempting to deal with a subject with which it is incompetent to deal, that the question is wrongly formulated and that every answer to it thus formulated must be wrong.  The way of truth lies in first finding the true question.  The real difficulty of the Buddha’s teaching, though it does not stimulate curiosity so much as the question of life after death, is the nature and being of the saint in this life before death, raised in the argument with Yamaka[520].

Another reason for not pressing the Buddha’s language in either direction is that, if he had wished to preach in the subtlest form either infinite life or annihilation, he would have found minds accustomed to the ideas and a vocabulary ready for his use.  If he had wished to indicate any form of absorption into a universal soul, or the acquisition by the individual self of the knowledge that it is identical with the universal self, he could easily have done so.  But he studiously avoided saying anything of the kind.  He teaches that all existence involves suffering and he preaches escape from it.  After that escape the words being and not being no longer apply, and the reason why some people adopt the false idea of annihilation is because they have commenced by adopting the false alternative of either annihilation or an eternal prolongation of this life.  A man makes[521] himself miserable because he thinks he has lost something or that there is something which he cannot get.  But if he does not think he has lost something or is deprived of something he might have, then he does not feel miserable.  Similarly, a man holds the erroneous opinion, “This world is the self, or soul and I shall become it after death and be eternal, and unchanging.”  Then he hears the preaching of a Buddha and he thinks “I shall be annihilated, I shall not exist any more,” and he feels miserable.  But if a man does not hold this doctrine that the soul is identical with the universe and will exist eternally—­which is just complete full-blown folly[522]—­and then hears the preaching of a Buddha it does not occur to him to think that he will be annihilated and he is not miserable.  Here the Buddha emphasizes the fact that his teaching is not a variety of the Brahmanic doctrine about the Atman.  Shortly afterwards in the same sutta he even more emphatically says that he does not teach annihilation.  He teaches that the saint is already in this life inconceivable (ananuvejjo):  “And when I teach and explain this some accuse me falsely and without the smallest ground[523] saying ’Gotama is an unbeliever; he preaches the annihilation, the destruction, the dying out of real being.’  When they talk like this they accuse me of being what I am not, of saying what I do not say.”