Buddhism and Immortality

by William Sturgis Bigelow

Overview

This extended essay was the 1908 Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality. Bigelow explores the nature of Karma, and the ultimate mental state, Nirvana. He relates this to concepts expressed by Western thinkers such as Darwin and Emerson.

William Sturgis Bigelow (1850-1926) was a doctor and great American collector of Japanese art. He was one of the first Americans to live in Japan, and to introduce the American public to Japanese art and culture. He was also among those who worked to establish protections for Japanese art during a time when the Japanese were willing to sell or destroy elements of their own traditional culture in a fervor of Westernization and modernization.

Instead, in 1882, Bigelow traveled to Japan with Ernest Fenollosa and Edward Sylvester Morse. This may have been intended originally as simply a vacation from the world of medicine, but in the end, Bigelow remained in Japan for seven years. There, he became an art collector, and traveled the country for some time, exploring it and studying its culture, art, and religion. Bigelow would eventually convert to Buddhism. He also contributed financially to the establishment of the Nihon Bijutsu-in (Japan Fine Arts Academy), which was founded by his friend and ofttimes traveling companion Okakura Kakuzo.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781463630898
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	06/22/2011
Pages:	50
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.10(d)

Read an Excerpt

your thought. Equally plainly it is there and then, or it would not be the thought of this morning's breakfast. It is therefore both. Now a state of consciousness conditioned by two mutually exclusive opposites is unconditioned by either. In other words, your thought is unconditioned by space and time. By what, 'then, is it conditioned ? The answer is as important as it is obvious. It is conditioned by your will, the act of volition that calls the thought of the breakfast into being, and not by the direct sensory impressions, whose forms and sum it reproduces. Herein lies the fundamental difference between the consciousness of the breakfast as you eat it, and the consciousness of it that you, being inanother place, create by an act of will twelve hours afterward. This second state of consciousness is conditioned only by the will, and we can make it what we choose. If our mental machinery is in good working order, we can recall the breakfast exactly as it was. This we call memory. Or, if we like, we can increase or diminish or alter it in any particular. For coffee and rolls, we may substitute ortolans and peacocks' tongues, and so on. There is no limit to it. This we call imagination; and what I want to emphasize is that memory and imagination are identical in being states of consciousness produced by the will, and differ only in the closeness of their correspondence with antecedent states. Here, then, at the outset are twoopposite ways in which states of consciousness may be produced. First, from without, by matter acting on matter, either through contact, direct or indirect, or by means of vibrations, such as those of sound and light. This we may call, for convenience, thesensory origin of consciousness, since it involves direct relation through the senses with the g...