The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX some way of subtracting one from one which would leave a higher, superior kind of a nothing, or as if there were some way of blowing out a candle which would leave Moses in a much more Egyptian darkness than we ever supposed when we were children. This is not science. This is not business. This is Ameri- can Sunday journalism. The Hindu and the American are very much alike in this innocence, this naiveté which de- mands fairy stories with ever bigger giants. They cannot bear the idea of anything being complete and done with. So, they are always talking in superlatives, and are hard put to it when the facts catch up with them, and they have to invent new superlatives. Instead of saying that there are bricks of various sizes, and specifying those sizes, they have a brick, and a super-brick, and ‘one’ brick, and ‘some’ brick; and when they have got to the end, they chase through the dic- tionary for some other epithet to brick, which shall excite the sense of wonder at the magnificent progress and super-prog- ress—I present the American nation with this word—which is supposed to have been made. Probably the whole thing is a bluff without a single fact behind it. Almost the whole of the Hindu psychology is an example of this kind of journal- ism. They are not content with the supreme God. The other man wishes to show off by having a supremer God than that, and when a third man comes along and finds them disputing, it is up to him to invent a supremest super-God. It is simply ridiculous to try to add to the definition of Nibbana by this invention of Parinibbana, and only talkers busy themselves with these fantastic speculations. The se- rious student minds his own business, which is the business in hand. The President of a Corporation does not pay his 58