Esoteric Buddhis7n. — A Review.
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��from inspiration. Many people have it. or think they have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those, perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their hold. But others have a convic- tion regarding things unseen, that no reasoning can shake, except for a moment ; because their belief, though it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some things, than he can tell how he sees ; yet he does know them, and all the world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him ; he sees, he hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure ; by his human soul, he reasons, he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics ; by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as yet, only imper- fectly active. The reality of the spirit- ual soul, the v^icle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening, faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort.
��already, pushed their development to the point that most men will reach millions of years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life — that we shall do perhaps in a few thousand years — but to this planet.
It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike our Chris- tian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism — notwithstandmg its claims to revelation — is a philosophy, not a religion.
I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to me the main points in the book under review. There are many things unexplained. Of .some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge. Others he does not make clear ; but, " take it for all in all," the book will probably give the reader a very great number of sug- gestions. I am heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were substituted for the idea of absorp- tion into Nirvana), there would be nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity. What orthodox Christians of the present day and of this country believe with regard to eternal punish- ment is a question about which they do not altogether agree among themselves. Whether the so-called heil is a place of everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to each other the name of Christian are
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