successors of the Abbés Huc, Gabet and others must prove a sorry failure; since the former have not and the latter have, an object to achieve in purposely disfiguring the unparalleled and glorious teachings of our blessed master, Shakya Thub-pa.

"In The Theosophist for October, 1881, a correspondent correctly informs the reader that Guatama the Buddha, the wise, ‘insisted upon initiation being thrown open to all who were qualified.' This is true; such was the original design put for some time in practice by the great Song-gyas, and before he had become the All-Wise. But three or four centuries after his separation from this earthly coil, when Asoka, the great supporter of our religion, had left the world, the Arhat initiates, owing to the secret but steady opposition of the Brahmans to their system, had to drop out of the country one by one and seek safety beyond the Himalayas. Thus, though popular Buddhism did not spread in Tibet before the seventh century, the Buddhist initiates of the mysteries and esoteric system of the Aryan Twice-born, leaving their motherland, India, sought refuge with the pre-Buddhistic ascetics; those who had the Good Doctrine, even before the days of Shakya-Muni. These ascetics had dwelt beyond the Himalayan ranges from time immemorial. They are the direct successors of those Aryan sages who, instead of accompanying their Brahman brothers in the pre-historical emigration from Lake Mânasasarovara across the Snowy Range into the hot plains of the Seven Rivers, had preferred to remain in their inaccessible and unknown fastnesses. No wonder, indeed, if the Aryan esoteric doctrine and our Arahat doctrines are found to be almost identical. Truth, like the sun over our heads, is one; but it seems as if this eternal truism inust be constantly reiterated to make the dark, as much as the white, people remember it. Only that truth may be kept pure and unpolluted by human exaggerations-its very votaries betimes seeking to adapt it, to pervert and disfigure its fair face to their own selfish ends-it has to be hidden far away from the eye of the profane. Since the days of the earliest universal mysteries up to the time of our great Shakya Tathagata Buddha, who reduced and interpreted the system for the salvation of all, the divine Voice of the Self, known as Kwan-yin, was heard but in the sacred solitude of the preparatory mysteries.

"Our world-honoured Tsong-kha-pa closing his fifth Dam-ngag reminds us that 'every sacred truth, which the ignorant are unable to comprehend under its true light, ought to be hidden within a triple. casket concealing itself as the tortoise conceals his head within his shell; ought to show her face but to those who are desirous of obtaining the condition of Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi'-the most merciful and enlightened heart.

"There is a dual meaning, then, even in the canon thrown open to the people, and, quite recently, to Western scholars. I will now try to correct the errors-too intentional, I am sorry to say, in the case of the Jesuit writers. No doubt but that the Chinese and

Tibetan Scriptures, so-called, the standard works of China and Japan, some written by our most learned scholars, many of whom-as uninitiated though sincere and pious men-commented upon what they never rightly understood, contain a mass of mythological and legendary matter more fit for nursery folk-lore than an exposition of the Wisdom Religion as preached by the world's Saviour. But none of these are to be found in the canon; and, though preserved in most of the Lamasery libraries, they are read and implicitly believed in only by the credulous and pious whose simplicity forbids them ever stepping across the threshold of reality. To this class belong The Buddhist Cosmos, written by the Bonze Jin-ch'an, of Pekin; The Shing-Tao-ki, or "The Records of the Enlightenment of Tathagata.' by Wang-Fuh, in the seventh century, The Hi-shai Sûtra, or 'Book of Creation,' various volumes on heaven and hell, and so forthpoetic fictions grouped around a symbolism evolved as an afterthought.

"But the records from which our scholastic author, the monk Della Penna quotes-or I should rather say, misquotes-contain no fiction, but simply information for future generations, who may, by that time, have obtained the key to the right reading of them. The 'Lha' of whom Della Penna speaks but to deride the fable, they who 'have attained the position of saints in this world,' were simply the initiated Arhats, the adepts of many and various grades, generally known under the name of Bhanté or Brothers. In the book known as the Avatamsaka Sûtra, in the section on 'the Supreme AtmanSelf-as manifested in the character of the Arhats and Pratyeka Buddhas,' it is stated that 'Because from the beginning, all sentient creatures have confused the truth, and embraced the false; therefore has there come into existence a hidden knowledge called Alaya Vijñana.' 'Who is in the possession of the true hidden knowledge?' The great teachers of the Snowy Mountain,' is the response in The Book of Law. The Snowy Mountain is the 'mountain a hundred. and sixty thousand leagues high.' Let us see what this means. The last three ciphers being simply left out, we have a hundred and sixty leagues; a Tibetan league is nearly five miles; this gives us seven hundred and eighty miles from a certain holy spot, by a distinct road to the west. This becomes as clear as can be, even in Della Penna's further description, to one who has but a glimpse of the truth. According to their law,' says that monk, 'in the west of this world, is an eternal world, a paradise, and in it a saint called Ho-pahme, which means "Saint of Splendour and Infinite I ight." This saint has many distinct "powers," who are all called "chang-chub," which-he adds in a footnote-means "the spirits of those who, on account of their perfection, do not care to become saints, and train and instruct the bodies of the reborn Lamas, so that they may help the living.'

"This shows that these presumably dead 'chang-chubs' are living Bodhisatwas or Bhanté, known under various names among Tibetan people; among others, Lha, or 'spirits,' as they are supposed to have

an existence more in spirit than in flesh. At death they often renounce Nirvana-the bliss of eternal rest, or oblivion of personality— to remain in their spiritualized astral selves for the good of their disciples and humanity in general.

"To some Theosophists, at least, my meaning must be clear, though some are sure to rebel against the explanation. Yet we maintain that there is no possibility of an entirely pure 'self' remaining in the terrestrial atmosphere after his liberation from the physical body, in his own personality, in which he moved upon earth. Only three exceptions are made to this rule:

"The holy motive prompting a Bodhisatwa, a Sravaka, or Rahat to help to the same bliss those who remain behind him, the living; in which case he will stop to instruct them either from within or without; or, secondly, those who, however pure, harmless and comparatively free from sin during their lives, have been so engrossed with some particular idea in connection with one of the human mâyâs as to pass away amidst that all-absorbing thought; and, thirdly, persons in whom an intense and holy love, such as that of a mother for her orphaned children, creates or generates an indomitable will fed by that boundless love to tarry with and among the living in their inner selves.

"The periods allotted for these exceptional cases vary. In the first case, owing to the knowledge acquired in his condition of Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi-the most holy and enlightened heart-the Bodhisatwa has no fixed limit. Accustomed to remain for hours and days in his astral form during life, he has power after death to create around him his own conditions, calculated to check the natural tendency of the other principles to rejoin their respective elements, and can descend or even remain on earth for centuries and millenniums. In the second case, the period will last until the all-powerful magnetic attraction of the subject of the thoughtintensely concentrated at the moment of death-becomes weakened and gradually fades out. In the third, the attraction is broken either by the death or the moral unworthiness of the loved ones. It cannot in either case last more than a lifetime.

"In all other cases of apparitions or communications by whatever mode, the 'spirit' will prove a wicked 'bhûta' or 'ro-lang' at best-the soulless shell of an elementary.' The 'Good Doctrine' is rejected on account of the unwarranted accusation that 'adepts' only claim the privilege of immortality. No such claim was ever brought forward by any eastern adept or initiate. Very true, our Masters teach us that immortality is conditional,' and that the chances of an adept who has become a proficient in the Alaya Vijñâna, the acme of wisdom, are tenfold greater than those of one who, being ignorant of the potentialities centred within his Self, allows them to remain dormant and undisturbed until it is too late to awake them in this life. But the adept knows no more on earth, nor are his powers greater here than will be the knowledge and powers of

the average good man when the latter reaches his fifth and especially his sixth cycle or round. Our present mankind is still in the fourth of the seven great cyclic rounds. Humanity is a baby hardly out of its swaddling clothes, and the highest adept of the present age knows less than he will know as a child in the seventh round. And as mankind is an infant collectively, so is man in his present development individually. As it is hardly to be expected that a young child, however precocious, should remember his existence from the hour of his birth, day by day, with the various experiences of each, and the various clothes he was made to wear on each of them, so no 'self,' unless that of an adept having reached Samma-Sambuddha-during which an illuminate sees the long series of his past lives throughout all his previous births in other worlds-was ever able to recall the distinct and various lives he passed through. But that time must come one day. Unless a man is an irretrievable sensualist, dooming himself thereby to utter annihilation after one of such sinful lives, that day will dawn when, having reached the state of absolute freedom from any sin or desire, he will see and recall to memory all his past lives as easily as a man of our age turns back and passes in review, one by one, every day of his existence."

We may add a word or two in explanation of a previous passage, referring to Kwan-yin. This divine power was finally anthropomorphized by the Chinese Buddhist ritualists into a distinct double-sexed deity with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes, and called Kwan-shai-yin Bodhisatwa, the Voice-Deity, but in reality meaning the voice of the ever-present latent divine consciousness in man; the voice of his real Self, which can be fully evoked and heard only through great moral purity. Hence Kwanyin is said to be the son of Amitabhâ Buddha, who generated that Saviour, the merciful Bodhisatwa, the "Voice" or the "Word" that is universally diffused, the "Sound" which is eternal. It has the same mystical meaning as the Vâch of the Brahmans. While the Brahmans maintain the eternity of the Velas from the eternity of "sound," the Buddhists claim by synthesis the eternity of Amitabhâ, since he was the first to prove the eternity of the Self-born, Kwanyin. Kwan-yin is the Vâchishvara or Voice-Deity of the Brâhmans. Both proceed from the same origin as the Logos of the neo-platonic Greeks; the "manifested deity" and its "voice" being found in man's Self, his conscience; Self being the unseen Father, and the "voice of Self" the Son; each being the relative and the correlative of the other. Both Vachishvara and Kwan-yin had, and still have, a prominent part in the Initiation Rites and Mysteries in the Brâhmanical and Buddhist esoteric doctrines.

We may also point out that Bodhisatwas or Rahats need not be adepts; still less, Brâhmans, Buddhists, or even "Asiatics," but simply holy and pure men of any nation or faith, bent all their lives on doing good to humanity.

(To be continued.)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DREAMS

HE collectivity of Lives united in a single stream of evolutionary progression makes up indifferently a being, an earth, a planet, a solar system, a universe. In little or in great, each and all of these Lives is a Soul, the out-breathing of the One Life, or Spirit, which manifests periodically for purposes of the collective progress of the countless lives.

Each Soul is integral and an indivisible part of an undifferentiated whole. It is eternal, beginningless and endless in its nature. This at once implies that there are two aspects of immortality: that of the whole and that of the "parts. The fact is one, but the knowledge of that fact is inherent in the whole, not in the parts. The parts, or Souls, have to acquire that knowledge, each for itself. This, then, is the purpose of all action or manifestation-that the parts may acquire the knowledge of the whole; in order that through the Ever-Becoming, every Soul in this infinite Universe, passing from the formless and the intangible, through the mixed natures of the semi-terrestrial, down to matter in full generation, and then back again, re-ascending at each new period higher and nearer the final goal; that each "atom," we say, may reach through individual merits and efforts that plane where it re-becomes the one unconditioned ALL.

Spirit, then, in any and all states, is that collectivity of Souls which has already acquired SELF-consciousness, and Matter is that collectivity of Souls which has not yet acquired it. Neither Spirit (or Consciousness) nor Matter (or unconsciousness) is to be regarded as an independent reality, but as the two aspects or poles. of that Absolute Principle which antedates and underlies all conditioned or manifested being: IMMORTALITY, conscious in the one case, unconscious in the other.

Between pure Spirit, or the state of full and complete SELFconsciousness, and Matter, or the state of complete ignorance of the own nature of the Soul, there lies that immense field of the gradations of acquired intelligence ranging all the way from the Spiritual or divine, through the psychic or semi-divine; the intellectual; the passional; the instinctual or cognitional; the semi-corporeal, and the purely material or physical natures. All these are included in the term Fohat of the Secret Doctrine.

These septenary degrees of intelligence cover all and everything in manifested existence, and all such terms as "the evolution of Soul and Spirit under the rule of law inherent in the whole," "the seven principles;" "the seven Hierarchies of Being;" "the seven states of matter;" "the seven planes of cosmos;" "the seven states of consciousness," and a multitude of other words and phrases-all these refer to the varying actions and inter-actions which proceed from the infinite Hosts of Souls engaged in the expression of the