"...The fundamental teaching of Buddha was that all life is suffering, and that man's task on earth is to overcome it by following the Eightfold Path...The path thus leads from faith to action, and ultimately to Contemplation and Meditation, ever further away from the world into a mystic unity with the Divine. Thus each individual could progress in accordance with his own spiritual potentialities...ever moving upward to the highest form of earthly existence...The end itself was Nirvana, the same state of being (or, more truly, nonbeing) which was pursued by the Jainists, when it would no longer be necessary to incarnate on earth, and all karma had been redeemed."
-The Heritage of the Past, Stewart C. Easton