Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison.

With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
Further investigation would not shake his opinion.

For a far-oriental career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to us.

The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if one may so express it.
In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is not the individual, but the family.
We occidentals think we value family.

We even parade our pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like nature.