There is a parable in India. When you see a body being cremated, and cremated well, you need a poker, a piece of fuel, to keep the fire burning, till the body is thoroughly consumed into pure white ash. The question then is: When every part of the body is turned into ash, you don’t take the poker fuel back home, or do you? You throw it finally into the fire itself. So causality and logic were born of the horizontal perspective of man. But when you apply it to your self, and ask the question vertically, so to say: The body is seen by the mind, and the mind is seen by what? You come to the dead end again. Infinity must coil on itself to become zero, sunyata, Nirvana. And Nirvana is Being. Nirvana, the Buddha has said, is the end of Becoming. Then, what Being knows must be Being itself. Is that not so?

And that is what the God of Death, Yama, said to Nachiketas. There is nothing, nothing else than the Self. And that is why we cremate causality by its own poker. Sacrifice is all. Thus, once again, we say ‘sacrifice itself is sacrificed in sacrifice’. And we walk home free.

* * *

There are indeed no horizontal solutions, the human has no answer ever. Logic breaking against reality, breaks itself. For finally the dialogue is between nothingness, le Nèant of Mallarmé, l’absurde of Camus—and ‘I’. If nothingness is, yet it’s an is, that is the Void is. Were it Nirvana, there must be someone to know it. And if compassion has to be in that nothingness, the void, then the question arises: who is it that has compassion? And without compassion there is no Mahayana, in fact there is no real Buddhism either. (One must remember, the Buddha’s quest began with the why of human suffering, or dukkha). Nagarjuna went as far as he could—but compassion still disturbed his logic. He came to the brink of Truth and stood suspended between dogma and Truth. And he thus prepared the way for Sri Sankara (eighth century AD?), maybe the most impressive sage India has had, after the sages of the Upanishads—a daring dialectician, who would throw the sacred texts into the flaming pit, if need be, but who could use them, when necessary, to reveal the pure Upanishadic reality: I am Brahman, Aham brahmasmi, or Svetaketu’s Tat tvam asi, That you are.