With regard to the non-ego theory, the Mahāyāna followers assert that there is no àtman or ego-soul not only in its psychological signification, but in its objective sense. That is to say, they deny with the Hinayana followers that there is any such thing as an ego-entity, a concrete, simple, ultimate, and independent unit, behind our consciousness; but they go still further and declare that this objective world too has no âtman, no ego, no personal creator, no Ishvāra, who works and enjoys his absolute transcendence behind the eternal concatenation of cause and effect. This is technically known as a double negation of the subjective and the objective world, and it is on this account that the Mahāyāna school has often been called, though unjustifiably and quite incorrectly, nihilism or çûnyavâdin.
In this connection, it may be of interest to quote a Western Buddhist scholars opinion of Buddhism as typical of a prejudiced and uncritical judge. Eitel, a noted scholar of Chinese Buddhism, speaks thus of the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana in his Three Lectures on Buddhism, which were delivered in Union Church, Hong Kong, 1870-71 : “Nirvāna is to them [the Buddhists] a state of which nothing could be said, to which no attributes can be given; it is altogether an abstract, devoid alike of all positive and all negative qualities. What shall we say of such empty, useless speculations, such sickly, dead words, whose fruitless sophistry offers to that natural yearning of the human heart after an eternal rest nothing better than a philosophical myth? It is but natural that a religion which started with moral and intellectual bankruptcy should end in moral and intellectual suicide” (p. 21, column 2).
As a matter of fact, the Mahāyāna followers do not regard negation as the ultimate goal of their speculations. With them negation is but a road to reach a higher form of affirmation; for they are aware of the fact that the
