Absolute, the

94:11.7But though the cer­e­monies and out­ward ob­ser­vances of Bud­dhism be­came grossly con­tam­i­nated with those of the lands to which it trav­eled, this de­gen­er­a­tion was not al­to­gether the case in the phil­o­soph­i­cal life of the great thinkers who, from time to time, em­braced this sys­tem of thought and be­lief. Through more than two thou­sand years, many of the best minds of Asia have con­cen­trated upon the prob­lem of as­cer­tain­ing ab­so­lute truth and the truth of the Ab­so­lute.

94:11.8The evo­lu­tion of a high con­cept of the Ab­so­lute was achieved through many chan­nels of thought and by de­vi­ous paths of rea­son­ing. The up­ward as­cent of this doc­trine of in­fin­ity was not so clearly de­fined as was the evo­lu­tion of the God con­cept in He­brew the­ol­ogy. Nev­er­the­less, there were cer­tain broad lev­els which the minds of the Bud­dhists reached, tar­ried upon, and passed through on their way to the en­vi­sion­ing of the Pri­mal Source of uni­verses:

94:11.91. The Gau­tama leg­end. At the base of the con­cept was the his­toric fact of the life and teach­ings of Sid­dhartha, the prophet prince of In­dia. This leg­end grew in myth as it trav­eled through the cen­turies and across the broad lands of Asia un­til it sur­passed the sta­tus of the idea of Gau­tama as the en­light­ened one and be­gan to take on ad­di­tional at­tri­butes.

94:11.102. The many Bud­dhas. It was rea­soned that, if Gau­tama had come to the peo­ples of In­dia, then, in the re­mote past and in the re­mote fu­ture, the races of man­kind must have been, and un­doubt­edly would be, blessed with other teach­ers of truth. This gave rise to the teach­ing that there were many Bud­dhas, an un­lim­ited and in­fi­nite num­ber, even that any­one could as­pire to be­come one—to at­tain the di­vin­ity of a Bud­dha.

94:11.113. The Ab­so­lute Bud­dha. By the time the num­ber of Bud­dhas was ap­proach­ing in­fin­ity, it be­came nec­es­sary for the minds of those days to re­unify this un­wieldy con­cept. Ac­cord­ingly it be­gan to be taught that all Bud­dhas were but the man­i­fes­ta­tion of some higher essence, some Eter­nal One of in­fi­nite and un­qual­i­fied ex­is­tence, some Ab­so­lute Source of all re­al­ity. From here on, the De­ity con­cept of Bud­dhism, in its high­est form, be­comes di­vorced from the hu­man per­son of Gau­tama Sid­dhartha and casts off from the an­thro­po­mor­phic lim­i­ta­tions which have held it in leash. This fi­nal con­cep­tion of the Bud­dha Eter­nal can well be iden­ti­fied as the Ab­so­lute, some­times even as the in­fi­nite I AM.

56:9.4On first thought, a con­cept of the Ab­so­lute as an­ces­tor to all things—even the Trin­ity—seems to af­ford tran­si­tory sat­is­fac­tion of con­sis­tency grat­i­fi­ca­tion and philo­sophic uni­fi­ca­tion, but any such con­clu­sion is in­val­i­dated by the ac­tu­al­ity of the eter­nity of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity. We are taught, and we be­lieve, that the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and his Trin­ity as­so­ciates are eter­nal in na­ture and ex­is­tence. There is, then, but one con­sis­tent philo­sophic con­clu­sion, and that is: The Ab­so­lute is, to all uni­verse in­tel­li­gences, the im­per­sonal and co-or­di­nate re­ac­tion of the Trin­ity (of Trin­i­ties) to all ba­sic and pri­mary space sit­u­a­tions, in­trau­ni­ver­sal and ex­tra­uni­ver­sal. To all per­son­al­ity in­tel­li­gences of the grand uni­verse the Par­a­dise Trin­ity for­ever stands in fi­nal­ity, eter­nity, su­prem­acy, and ul­ti­macy and, for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses of per­sonal com­pre­hen­sion and crea­ture re­al­iza­tion, as ab­so­lute.

56:9.1The Un­qual­i­fied Ab­so­lute and the De­ity Ab­so­lute are uni­fied in the Uni­ver­sal Ab­so­lute. The Ab­so­lutes are co-or­di­nated in the Ul­ti­mate, con­di­tioned in the Su­preme, and time-space mod­i­fied in God the Sev­en­fold. On subin­fi­nite lev­els there are three Ab­so­lutes, but in in­fin­ity they ap­pear to be one. On Par­a­dise there are three per­son­al­iza­tions of De­ity, but in the Trin­ity they are one.

106:8.17The con­cept dif­fi­culty re­gard­ing this third mem­ber is in­her­ent in the fact that the pre­sup­po­si­tion of such a mem­ber­ship re­ally im­plies just one Ab­so­lute. The­o­ret­i­cally, if such an event could take place, we should wit­ness the ex­pe­ri­en­tial uni­fi­ca­tion of the three Ab­so­lutes as one. And we are taught that, in in­fin­ity and ex­is­ten­tially, there is one Ab­so­lute. While it is least clear as to who this third mem­ber can be, it is of­ten pos­tu­lated that such may con­sist of the De­ity, Uni­ver­sal, and Un­qual­i­fied Ab­so­lutes in some form of unimag­ined li­ai­son and cos­mic man­i­fes­ta­tion. Cer­tainly, the Trin­ity of Trin­i­ties could hardly at­tain to com­plete func­tion short of the full uni­fi­ca­tion of the three Ab­so­lutes, and the three Ab­so­lutes can hardly be uni­fied short of the com­plete re­al­iza­tion of all in­fi­nite po­ten­tials.

101:2.7Sci­ence ends its rea­son-search in the hy­poth­e­sis of a First Cause. Re­li­gion does not stop in its flight of faith un­til it is sure of a God of sal­va­tion. The dis­crim­i­nat­ing study of sci­ence log­i­cally sug­gests the re­al­ity and ex­is­tence of an Ab­so­lute. Re­li­gion be­lieves un­re­servedly in the ex­is­tence and re­al­ity of a God who fos­ters per­son­al­ity sur­vival. What meta­physics fails ut­terly in do­ing, and what even phi­los­o­phy fails par­tially in do­ing, rev­e­la­tion does; that is, af­firms that this First Cause of sci­ence and re­li­gion’s God of sal­va­tion are one and the same De­ity.

0:11.16We never use the term the Ab­so­lute as a nega­tion of aught or as a de­nial of any­thing. Nei­ther do we re­gard the Uni­ver­sal Ab­so­lute as self-de­ter­mi­na­tive, a sort of pan­the­is­tic and im­per­sonal De­ity. The Ab­so­lute, in all that per­tains to uni­verse per­son­al­ity, is strictly Trin­ity lim­ited and De­ity dom­i­nated.