I hope in the main body of this work to have given some substance to the words of Thomas Mann and Clifford Geertz with which I conclude it. I suggested in the Introduction that Buddhist thought embodies certain specific conceptual hypotheses, which are addressed to quite specific and socially derived concerns. I hope now to have shown how the conceptual framework of Buddhist thinking is addressed to the particular concern of elaborating an account of selfhood, persons and their continuity, in the light of the overall samsāra–nirvāna dichotomy, itself predicated on the social dichotomy of layman–monk; and how this account has embodied the hypotheses of the creation of temporality by the ‘constructive activity’ of karma, the need for a coherent picture of the cessation of such creative activity if the religious goal of release is to appear intelligible, and the supposition that such a cessation takes place in the consciousness of the religious virtuoso. Let me summarise the crucial facts and ideas which I take the two quotations to point out and emphasise.