LIFE AND DESTINY IN BUDDHISM

In his book Man's Religions, John B. Noss sums up the Buddha's conception of life and destiny this way:

"Wherever we observe it, the living world, whether about us or within ourselves, is constantly in flux, in a state of endless becoming; there is no central, planning world-self, no sovereign Person in the heavens holding all together in unity; there is only the ultimate impersonal unity of Being itself, whose peace enfolds the individual self when it ceases to call itself "I" and dissolves in the featureless purity of Nirvana, as a drop of spray is merged in its mother sea.  The permanency of the world is an illusion, and this holds true of the empirical ego; there remain for human experience only processes of change and decay, of becoming and passing away, of appearing and disappearing."