We do not know if the Buddha actually leads to the goal of release from the necessity of returning. He certainly leads to a preliminary goal that concerns us—to the becoming one of the soul. But he leads thither not merely (as is necessary) apart from the “thicket of opinions”, but also apart from the “illusion of form.”._ which for us is no illusion but rather the reliable world (and this in spite of all subjective paradoxes in observation connected with it for 25). His way, too, then, involves disregard; thus when he speaks of our becoming aware of the events in our body he means almost the opposite of our physical insight with its certainty about the senses. Nor does he lead the united being further to that supreme saying of the Thou that is made possible for it. His innermost decision seems to rest on the extinction of the ability to say Thou.
The Buddha knows the saying of the Thou to men—witness his intercourse with his pupils, in which, though high above them, he speaks very directly—but he does not teach it; for simple confrontation of being with being is alien to this love where “all that has become is illimitably comprised in the breast”. He certainly knows too, in the silent depths of his being, the saying of the Thou to the primal cause—away beyond all those “gods” that are treated by him like pupils. This act of his springs from & relational event that has taken on substance; this act, too, is a response to the Thou: but about this response he preserves silence.
His succession among the peoples, however, that “great vehicle”, bas contradicted him magnificently. It has addressed the eternal human Thou under the name of Buddha himself. And it awaits, as the Buddha that is to come, the last of the age, him by whom love is to be fulfilled.
All doctrine of absorption is based on the colossal illusion of the human spirit that is bent back on itself, that spirit exists in man. Actually spirit exists with man as starting-point—between man and that which is not man. In renouncing this its meaning, it meaning a8 relation, the spirit that is bent back on itself is compelled to drag into man that which is not man, it is compelled to make the world and God into functions of the soul. This is the spirit’s illusion about the soul.
“Friend”, says the Buddha, “I proclaim that in this my fathom-high ascetic’s body, affected with sensations, there dwells the world and the beginning of the world and the extinction of the world and the way that leads to the extinction of the world”.
That is true, but in the last resort it is no longer true.
Certainly the world “dwells” in me as an image, just aa I dwell in it as a thing. But it is not for that reason in me, just as I am not in it. The world and I are mutually included, the one in the other. This contradiction in thought, inherent in the situation of It, is resolved in the situation of Thou, which sets me free from the world in order to bind me up in solidarity of connexion with it.
I bear within me the sense of Self, that cannot be included in the world. The world bears within itself the sense of being, that cannot be included in the image. This sense of being, however, is not a “will” that can be thought, but simply the total status of the world as world, just as the sense of Self is not a “knowing subject” but simply the total status of the I as I. Here no further “reduction” is possible; he who does not honour the last unities frustrates their apprehensible but not comprehensible sense.