To the Buddhist mind Nirvana did not contain any idea of deification of the Buddha. It simply meant the eternal continuation of his personality in the highest sense of the word. It meant returning to his original state of Buddha-nature, which is his Dharma-body but not his scripture-body as the formalists take it to be. Dharma means the ‘ideal’ itself which the Buddha conceived in his perfect Enlightenment. The idealists hold that the Buddha has Dharma-body — the body identical with that ideal. The ideal was expressed in the Buddha’s preachings but these preachings were always restricted by the language and the occasion and the listeners. Therefore the idealists hold that the scripture is not the Buddha’s ideal itself. This ideal ‘body’ without any restricting conditions whatever is Nirvana.

The formalists, on the other hand, hold that the scripture is the perfect representation of the ideal of the Buddha. Hence their opinion that the Buddha lives forever in the scripture-body, Nirvana being his entire annihilation and extinction otherwise.