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��Esoteric Buddhism. — A Review.
��not in accord. Why, then, should it be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of rewards is also not eternal? I believe that the Christian Scriptures use the same words with reference to both conditions —
" Tb Tzvp TO aiiivcov: — elg ^uijv al6viov."
The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the separa- tion of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion of Chris- tian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word al^viog may mean something less than endless.
Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philos- ophy, I have already spoken indirectly. Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C. But he was not the founder of the system. His purpose in re- incarnating himself at that time was to reform the lives of men. Doubtless he made many explanations of doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching ; but the philosophy comes down to us from, at least, the times of the fourth root- race, the men of Atlantis.
However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will con- vince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root- race, as appears not improbable, did not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says our author. Quintilian, perhaps get- ting his idea from Cicero, says of Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is much more probable that the latter received it from
��the Atlantids — if we are to believe in them — than that it came from India. Indeed, when we seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet, — the land, above all others, of occult science, — into communication with the true Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity assumes a very attractive degree of reasonable- ness.
That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system, any one will, I believe, admit, who will read the last chapter of the Somnium Scipionis. And Cicero's ideas must have been those of the students and scholars of his day. He puts them forward in a manner too commonplace, too much as if they were things of course, for us to suppose that there was anything unusual in them. On this subject of the wide extension of that philosophy which in India we call Buddhism, I will make only one other suggestion. It is the guess that it lay at the foundation of the famous Eleu- sinian Mysteries.
Let me now come back to the idea that the succession of human races upon this earth is, like that of animal races, a development. Sinnett tells us that what we recognize as language began with the third root-race. I imagine that the preceding races had, in progressive development, some vocal means of communication ; for we find that even the lower animals have that, and the lowest man of the first race was superior to the highest possible animal, by the very fact that he had developed
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