We must remember that the Buddha’s message was addressed to suffering man, to man caught in the net of transmigration. For the Buddha, as for all forms of Yoga, salvation could be gained only as the result of a personal effort, of a concrete assimilation of truth. It was neither a theory nor an escape into one or another kind of ascetic effort. “Truth” must be understood and at the same time known experimentally. Now, the two roads were attended by dangers; “understanding” ran the risk of remaining mere speculation, “experimental knowledge” might overwhelm ecstasy. But, for the Buddha, one can be “saved” only by attaining nirvana—that is, by going beyond the plane of the unconditional. In other words, one can be saved only by dying to this profane world and being reborn into a transhuman life impossible to define or describe.

From Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009 (first published in 1954), pp. 164-165.