This is the way he did it. He advanced no dogma, formulated no system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses. His aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth. He started no world- religion; founded no church—not even such a quite unchurchly church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius. He never had the masses practicing their superstitions, nor a priesthood venting its lust of power, in his name. Instead, he arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their way. So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that voice from the Spheres at song, when Shelley, reaching his topmost note, sang:

"The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity";—

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:

"Songs they can stop that earth found meet, But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme; Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet, But the Stars keep their Spring sublime, Actions and agonies control, And life and death, but not the Soul."

In a poetic age—in the time of Aeschylus, for example—Plato would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to invent another class of poets, one above the present highest; and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato. Because Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry. But he came, living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who should say: "God pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely poetic is your prose!'" So his bitterness against poetry is very natural. Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest truth; spiritual truth is poetry. But the world in general does not know this. Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of pleasurable lying. Plato went through the skies Mercury to the Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was, and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets. But Homer and others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare—a vital matter— should be classed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively, landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall spring up there presently and bloom. He prepares the soil: suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the high teachings. The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all his teachings—even Reincarnation—as hypotheses,—and men do not as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis. On the other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and heretics to deal with him? He was not to be stamped out; because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship, no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of thought. No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries; because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen. Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as Theosophy. The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he did: the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had failed of its greatest success. What we owe to him—his genius and inestimable gift to the world—is precisely that matchless camouflage. It has been effective, in spite of efforts—

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and the illumination of the Soul. He adopted much of the teaching, but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist, either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon. I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from the Encyclopedia suffice: "Philosophic differences" it says "are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."

Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration, and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message. But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics it should always be there, Aristotle or no. But for mere philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted it. It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists—who turned it back Plato-ward—to the Moslems: through Avicenna, who Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the Stagirite—and passed it on as the scientific method of today. According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.

And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting. For Pheidias of the earlier century, we have in Plato's time Praxiteles, whose carved gods are lounging and pretty nincom—- well, mortals; "they sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed, sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."—We have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree, and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard." A certain natural magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements with it.—And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one little wink of sleep over.



VII. THE MAURYAS OF INDIA

"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much. He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution' is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea, raising up splendors in one nation after another in order geographically, and with no haphazard about it. Its first and largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390; Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara, had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy; but in its universal aspect—in its strongest force—it had to roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense; it is our Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see; out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very burden of Megasthenes' song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one must admire in him. Though he overthrew the Persians, he never made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race. On the contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he felt in Europeans. The Law made use of his intention, partially, and to the furtherance of its own designs.—His method of treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent than barbarous. He took a short cut to his broad ends, and married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive women very differently. So that it was a kind of enlightenment he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan, and into the Punjab,—which, we may note, was but the outskirts of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but let that be. So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought us where we are to spend this evening.

For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even —to use a very vile drudge of a word—'unique' about India. Go else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make some shift to arrange the history. None need boggle really at any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of dynasties back through four or five millennia. But come to India, and alas, where are you? All out of it, chronologically speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of several hundred thousand years. I have no doubt the Puranas are crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to be taken as plain fact; how much as 'blinds'; how much as symbolism—only the Adepts know. The three elements are mingled beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium, Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma. You are in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual, our own savants are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet. They do not choose that their ancient history should be known; so all things are in a hopeless muddle.

One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe; not a country, like France. The population is even more heterogeneous than that of Europe. Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb —at least for many thousands of years—was ever even nominally master of the whole of it. There are two main divisions, widely different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the peninsular part to the south. The former is the land of the Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan—a race called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion, they never quite conquered or supplanted. Well; never is a long day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages of pre-history.

The Aryans came down into India through its one open door—that in the northwest. But when?—Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C., says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to launch a new name for the race: Indogermanic; and to prove Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created. Then others, to dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which at least must have the honor;—it could not be conceded to inferior Asia. All the languages of the group were examined and worried for evidence. Men said, 'By the names of trees we shall run it to earth'; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for some time. Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and find in what territory that tree is indigenous: that will certainly be the place. As thus; I will work out for you a suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:—

Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are potato and tobacco. 'From Greenland's icy mountains to Ceylon's sunny isle, Whereever prospect pleases, And only man is vile.'—you shall nearly always hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day meal by some term akin to potato, and the subtle weed that companions their meditations, by some word like tobacco. Argal, the Aryan race used these two words before their separation; and if the two words, the two plants also. You follow the reasoning?—Now then, seek out the land where these plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find the native seat of the primitive Aryans. And, glory be to Science! they do; both come from Virginia. Virginia, then, is the Aryan Garden of Eden.

Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the race—the Teutons—unacquainted with the word potato. You may argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The French say pomme de terre; but this is evidently only a corruption—potater, pomdeter—twisted at some late period by false analogy into pomme de terre, ('apple of the earth'.) But the Teuton has kartoffel, utterly different; argal again, the Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming. They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word tobacco. Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems, the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes! These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their civilization.—Then presently, after the Teutons had gone, someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes—long enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be as happy as himself? Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon him at last visibly? We shall never know. Or did he call in his neighbors at once and annouce it? Did someone ask: 'What shall we name this God-given thing?'—and did another reply: 'It looks to me like a potato; let's call it that!'? That at least must have been how it came by it name. They received the suggestion with acclamations: and all future out-going expeditions took sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to call it potato to this day. For you must not that being the only food with a name common to all the languages—or almost all —it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of before their separation. Even the words for father, mother, fire, water, and the like, have a greater number of different roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.

To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did quietus make for much philological pother and rout. No; if you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon, than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never suspect. The long and short of it is, that after pursuing the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts of Europe, Science is forced to pronouce her final judgement thus: We really know nothing about it.

The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,—who were not destined to be destroyed. It is a vast region, and there was room for them all. That emigration may have been as long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to America; probably it was; or longer. But it happened, at any rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of water will flow under the bridges. You may call English a universal language now; it might conceivably become so absolutely, after a few centuries. But history will go on and time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law. These are not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;—which, I suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times 'since created man.' In a million years from now the world will have contracted and expanded often. We have seen, in our little period called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there have been contractions, too. But contractions there will be, major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action and reaction are equal and opposite: it is a fundamental law. Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal English language?—It will have split into a thousand fragment tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology—the great expansion having happened again—will have as much confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the Indo-European.—In a million years?—Bless my soul, in a poor little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,—or however long it may be; just as they have been doing in historical times. You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts. Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of a bar.

You all know the teaching of The Secret Doctrine about the Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years. The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race's history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races would have flourished and passed; and this present sixth family-race would be about ten millenniums old. Now, no single branch of the Aryans: by which term I mean the sixth family-race; I shall confine it to that, and not apply it to the Fifth Root-Race as a whole,—no single race among the Aryans has been universal, or dominant, or prominent even, during the whole of the last ten thousand years. The Teutons (including Anglo-Saxons), who loom so largely now, cut a very small figure in the days when Latin was, in its world, something more universal than English is in ours; and a few centuries before that, you should have heard Celtic, and little else, almost anywhere in Europe. This shows how fleeting a thing is the sovereignty of any language; within the three thousand years we know about, three at least of the Aryan language-groups have been 'universal'; within the last ten milleniums there has been time enough, and to spare, for a 'universality' each of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin, Teutonic, and Celtic. So evidently none of these is the language of the family-race: we may speak of the Aryan Family-Race; not of the Celtic or Slavonic.

But it does not follow that the whole sub-race is not Aryan too. Mr. Judge says somewhere that Sanskrit will be the universal language again. Supposing that there were some such scheme of evolution here, as in the world-chain? You know the diagram in The Secret Doctrine, with the teaching as to the seven rounds. As above, so below; when H. P. Blavatsky seems to be giving you a sketch of cosmic evolution, often she is at the same time, if you can read it, telling you about the laws that govern your own and the race's history. I suspect some such arrangement as this: when the sub-race began, 160,000 years ago, Sanskrit was its 'universal' language; spoken by all the Aryans that moved out over Europe and into India. An unaccountable Sanskrit inscription has been found in Asia Minor;* and there is Lithuania, a little speech-island in northeastern Central Europe, where a nearly Sanskrit language, I believe, survives. Then Sanskrit changed imperceptibly (as American is changing from English) into the parent language of the Persian group, which became the general speech of the sub-race except in India, where Sanskrit survived as a seed-speech for future resurrection. Then, perhaps pari passu with further westward expansion, Persian changed into the parent of the Slavonic group, itself living on as a seed-speech in Iran; and so on through all the groups; in each case the type-language of a group remaining, to expand again after the passage of ages and when its cycle should return, in or about its corresponding psychic center on the geographical plane. Then this evolution, having reached its farthest limit, began to retrace its course; I would not attempt to say in what order the language groups come: which is globe A in the chain, which Globe D, and so on; but merely suggest that a 'family race' may represent one round from Sanskrit to Sanskrit; and the whole Fifth Sub-race, seven such complete rounds.

——— * Ancient India, by E. J. Rapson ———

What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race? Well: I imagine we may have the relic, the sishta or seed of it, in the Hamitic peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians, Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts, Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. We are almost able to discern a time—but have not guessed when it was—when this Iberian race, having perhaps its central seat in Egypt, held all or most lands as far as Ireland to the west, and Japan and New Zealand eastward; we find them surviving, mixed with, but by no means submerged under, Aryan Celts in Spain—which is Iberia; we find their name (I imagine) in that of Iverne, Ierine, Hibernia, or Ireland; we know that they gave the syntax of their language to that of the Celts of the British Isles; and that the Celtic races of today are mainly Iberian in blood—I daresay all Europe is about half Iberian in blood, as a matter of fact;—that the Greeks found them in Greece: I suspect that the main difference between Sparta and Athens lay in the fact that Sparta was pure Aryan, Athens mainly Iberian.—It seems to me then that we can almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own. Some have been puzzled by a seeming discrepancy between Katherine Tingley's statement that Egypt is older than India, and H. P. Blavatsky's, that Menes, founder of the Egyptian monarchy, went from India to Egypt to found it. But now suppose that something like this happened—would it not solve the problem?—In 158,000 B. C., or at the time this present Aryan Sub-race began, Egypt, one state in the huge Iberian series, was already a seat of civilization as old as the Iberian race. There may have been an Iberian Empire, almost world-wide; which again may have split into many kingdoms; and as the star of the whole race was declining, we may suppose Egypt in some degree of pralaya; or again, that it may have been an outlying and little-considered province at that time. In Central Asia the Sanskrit-speaking tribe begins to increase and multiply furiously. They pour down into Iberian Hindustan. They are strong, and the Gods are leading them; the Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire. The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not likely to. In their contests with the invaders of India, they have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong; Prince Menes is hailed in Egypt (as the last of the Ommevads, driven out from the East by the Abbasids, was hailed in Spain); he wakens Egypt, and founds a new monarchy there.—I am telling the tale of very ancient and unknown conditions in terms of historic conditions we know about and can understand; it is only the skeleton of the story I would stand for.

And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago—what an amusing idea that will seem!—But the truth is we must wage war against this mischievous foreshortening of history. I have no doubt there have been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it is an eminently convenient place for empire-building. I have no doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses—that is, founders of Egyptian monarchies,—with thousands of years between each two. But I think probably the one that came from India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which evolution was chiefly interested.

Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the 'white man's burden,' and all such nonsense as that. We might learn a lesson here. Think: since that time, during how many thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place where all things were doing? All the Setis, the grand Rameseses and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory of Egypt. You never know rightly when to say that the life of a sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.— But now to India.

We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken: it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it is now—literary language preserved by the high castes. In the days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars grown out of it: Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.—We have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of Europe: the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance; or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian and the rest sprang. No matter; they remain in the ideal world, and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall return to them, take them up, and pass through them again. But it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved. The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation: they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours. As if that which is to be preserved forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only durable casket for truth.

The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the superiorities of Indian things and people;—as they did. The Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts. Almost always they gathered two harvests in the years; and famine had never visited India.—You see, railways, quick communications, and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization could do for her in manvantara.—Then he goes on to show how that civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but much higher than our own. I said Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war: here was the custom, which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still was the custom.—The whole continent was divided into any number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with certain features of homogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more than a geographical expression. I am speaking of the India Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long. It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing war. It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so: which means were military. As this was a well-recognised principle, wars were by no means rare. But with them all, what a Utopia it was, compared to Christendom! There was never a draft or conscription. Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior alone did the fighting. While the conches brayed, and the war- cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle—the peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew no one was making war on them. They trusted Gandiva, the goodly bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and sacred to the tilling of the soil. Megasthenes notes it with wonder. War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever to non-combatants.

Kshatriya fought Kshatriya. If you were a Brahmin: which is to say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or what not of the kind—you were not even called up for physical examination. If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with your 'business as usual.' A mere patch of garden, or a peddler's tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire. Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the battlefield, and nowhere else. The victor became possessed of the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or botheration about it.

And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or beheaded. Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord, paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his disposal; and went on reigning as before. So Porus met Alexander without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his defeat. "How shall I treat you?" said the Macedonian. Porus was surprised.—"I suppose," said he in effect, "as one king would treat another"; or, "like a gentleman." And Alexander rose to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage. Manu imposed his will on him. Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received accretions of territory.—This explains why all the changes of dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little difference as hardly to be worth recording. They effected no change in the life of the people. Even the British Raj has been, to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu. Each strong native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need his Moslem or Kshatriya army.—All of which proves, I think, the extreme antiquity of the svstem: which is so firmly engraved in the prototypal world—the astral molds are so strong—that no outside force coming in has been able materially to change it. The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.

Which brings us back to Alexander. If he got as far as to the Indus;—he got no farther. There were kingdoms up there in the northwest—perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and Baluchistan—which had formed part of the empire of Darius Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece; and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus's successor. But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very different from those in Persia: there was no "unquestionable superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like. Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the Asiatic to the European." But thither the Macedonians refused to follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of terrene limits. For he knew well that there was plenty more world to conquer, could one conquer it: rich and mighty kingdoms beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to cross. He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a catspaw. Among them one in particular: as masterful a man as Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself. He was (probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors for some centuries. King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, had reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a republic—perhaps with soviets,—and King Suddhodana himself into a mere ward politician.

This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to tell of the wealth of his kinsman's kingdom, and of the extreme unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him. But two of a trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to flee the camp. Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and the enterprise with a stomach in't was, as soon as Alexander's back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons. This done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of the house of Maurya. That was in 321. Master then of a highly trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all Hindustan. In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in marriage.—and received by way of compensation 500 elephants that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere. Also he sent Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta's capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,—we get a kind of window wherethrough to look into India: the first, and perhaps the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.

Here let me flash a green lantern. If at some future time it should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of Megasthenes; nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja—the "Ionian King Antiochus" apparently,—Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator's granson: as is supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258); Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus, who began to reign in 272;—if all these identifications should fall to the ground, let no one be surprised. There are passages in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky that seem to suggest there is nothing in them; and yet, after studying those passages, I do not find that she says so positively: her attitude seems rather one of withholding information for the time being; she supplies none of a contrary sort. The time may not have been ripe then for unveiling so much of Indian history; nor indeed, in those days, had the pictures of these kings, and particularly of Asoka, so clearly emerged: inscriptions have been deciphered since, which have gone to fill out the outline; and the story, as it his been pieced together now, has an air of verisimilitude, and hangs together. Without the Greek identifications, and the consequent possibility of assigning dates to Chandragupta and his son, we should know indeed that there was a great Maurya empire, which lasted a matter of thirteen decades and a few odd years; but we should hardly know when to place it. Accepting the Greek identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time—you shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law. So, provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale.

First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under Chandragupta. There was no slavery, he notes; all Indians were free, and not even were there aliens enslaved. Crime of any kind was rare; the people were thoroughly law-abiding. Thievery was so little known, that doors went unlocked at all times; there was no usury, and a general absence of litigation. They told the truth: as a Greek, he could not help noticing that. The men were exceptionally brave; the women, chaste and virturous. But "in contrast to the general simplicity of their style, they loved finery and ornaments. Their robes were worked in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wore flowered garments of the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind held umbrellas over them...."

The system of government was very highly and minutely evolved. "Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the markets, others of the city, others of the soldiers; others superintend the canals, and measure the land, or collect the taxes; some construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and distances from place to place. Those who have charge of the city are divided into six boards of five members apiece: The first looks after industrial art. The second attends to the entertainment of strangers, taking care of them, sound or sick, and in the event of their death, burying them and sending their property to their relatives." The third board registered births and deaths; the fourth, fifth and sixth had supervision of things commercial. Military affairs were as closely organized: there were Boards of Infantry, Cavalry, War Chariots, Elephants, Navy, and Bullock Transport. And behind all these stood Chandragupta himself, the superman, ruthless and terrifically efficient; and Chanakya, his Macchiavellian minister: a combination to hurry the world into greatness. And so indeed they did.

Under Asoka, Chandragupta's grandson, the age culminated. H. P. Blavatsky says positively that he was born into Buddhism; this is not the general view; but one finds nothing in his edicts, really, to contradict it. His father Bindusara, of whom we know nothing, may have been a Buddhist. But it would appear that Asoka in his youth was the most capable, and also the most violent and passionate of Bindusara's sons. During his father's lifetime, he held one of the great vice-royalties into which the empire was divided; he succeeded to the throne in 271. His domains at that time included all Aryavarta, with Baluchistan, and as much of Afghanistan as lies south of the Hindoo Koosh; and how much of the Deccan it is difficult to determine. Nine years later he extended this realm still further, by the conquest of the Kalingas, whose country lay along the coast northward from Madras. At the end of that war he was master of all India north of a line drawn from Pondicherry to Cannanore in the south; while the tip of the Deccan and Ceylon lay at least within his sphere of influence.

He was easily the strongest monarch of his day. In China—between which country and India there was no communication: they had not discovered each other, or they had lost sight of each other for ages—an old order was breaking to pieces, and all was weakness and decay. In the West, Greek civilization was in decadence, with the successors of Alexander engaged in profitless squabbles. Rome, a power only in Italy, was about to begin her long struggle with Carthage; overseas nobody minded her. The Crest-Wave was in India, the strongest power and most vigorous civilization, so far as we can tell, in the world, and at the head of India stood this Chakravartin, victorious Asoka, flushed with conquest, and a whole world tempting him out to conquer.—

He never went to war again. For twenty-nine years after that conquest of the Kalingas, until his death in 233, he reigned in unbroken peace. He left his heart to posterity in many edicts and inscriptions cut on rocks and pillars; thirty-five of these remain, or have so far been discovered and read. In 257, or five years after the Kalinga War, he published this:

"Devanamipiya Piadasi"—

It means literally 'the Beloved of the Gods, the Beautiful of Countenance'; but it is really a title equivalent to "His Gracious Majesty,' and was borne by all the Maurya kings;—

"Devanampiya Piadasi feels remorse on account of the conquest of the Kalingas; because, during the subjugation of a preciously unconquered country slaughter, death, and taking away captives of the people necessarily occur; whereat His Majesty feels profound sorrow and regret..."

It would be in keeping with the Southern Buddhist tradition as to the ungovernable violence of Asoka's youth, that he should have introduced into war horrors quite contrary to Manu and Indian custom; but here I must say that H. P. Blavatsky, though she does not particularize, says that there were really two Asokas, two 'Devanampiya Piadasis,' the first of whom was Chandragupta himself, from whose life the tradition of the youthful violence may have been drawn; and there remains the possibility that this Kalinga War was waged by Chandragupta, not Asoka; and that it was he who made this edict, felt the remorse, and became a Buddhist. However, to continue (tentatively):—

"The loss of even the hundredth or the thousandth part of the persons who were then slain, carried away captive, or done to death in Kalinga would now be a matter of deep regret to His Majesty. Although a man should do him any injury, Devanampiya Piadasi holds that it must patiently be borne, so far as it possibly can be borne... for His Majesty desires for all animate beings security, control over the passions, peace of mind, and joyousness. And this is the chief of conquests, in His Majesty's opinion: the Conquest of Duty."

Some time later he took the vows of a Buddhist monk, 'entered the Path'; and, as he says, 'exerted himself strenuously.'

He has been called the 'Constantine of Buddhism'; there is much talk among the western learned, about his support of that movement having contributed to its decay. They draw analogy from Constantine; even hint that Asoka embraced Buddhism, as the latter did Christianity, from political motives. But the analogy is thoroughlv false. Constantine was a bad man, a very far-gone case; and there was little in the faith he adopted, or favored, as it had come to be at that time, to make him better;—even if he had really believed in it. And it was a defined religio- political body, highly antagonistic to the old state religion of Rome, that he linked his fortunes with. But no sovereign so mighty in compassion is recorded in history as having reigned, as this Asoka. He was the most unsectarian of men. Buddhism as it came to him, and as he left it, was not a sect, but a living spiritual movement. For what is a sect?—Something cut off— from the rest of humanity, and the sources of inner life. But for Asoka, as for the modern Theosophical Movement, there was no religion higher than—Dharma—which word may be translated, 'the (higher) Law,' or 'truth.' or 'duty.' He never ceased to protect the holy men of Brahminism. Edict after edict exhorts his people to honor them. He preached the Good Law; he could not insist too often that different men would have different conceptions as to this Dharma. Each, then, must follow his own conception, and utterly respect his neighbors'. The Good Law, the Doctrine of the Buddhas, was universal; because the objective of all religions was the conquest of the passions and of self. All religions must manifest on this plane as right action and life; and that was the evangel he proclaimed to the world. There was no such sharp antagonism of sects and creeds.

There is speculation as to how he managed, being a world-sovereign —and a highly efficient one—to carry out the vows of a Buddhist monk. As if the begging bowl would have been anything of consequence to such an one! It is a matter of the status of the soul; not of outward paraphernalia. He was a practical man; intensely so; and he showed that a Chakravartin could tread the Path of the Buddhas as well as a wandering monk. One can imagine no Tolstoyan playing at peasant in him. His business in life was momentous. "I am never satisfied with my exertions and my dispatch of business," he says.

"Work I must for the public benefit,—and the root of the matter is in exertion and dispatch of business, than which nothing is more efficacious for the public welfare. And for what end do I toil? For no other end than that I may discharge my debt to animate beings."

And again:

"Devanampiya Piadasi desires that in all places men of all religions may abide, for they all desire purity of mind and mastery over the senses."

Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless; even though it included within its boundaries many restless and savage tribes. Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though Akbar came near it). We know nothing as to how literature may have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have come from this time. If so, it would only have been recensions of them, I imagine. But in art and architecture his reign was everything. He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with wonderful buildings and monoliths. Patna, the capital, in Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal. His edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical teachings touching on all points necessary to right living. He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides and in all much-frequented places, where the masses could read them; and this proves that the masses could read. They are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human subjects, but for all sentient beings. "Work I must.... that I may discharge my debt to all things animate." And how he did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of those who needed help. He specifies; he particularizes; there was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.

And even then he was not content. There were foreign lands; and those, too, were entitled to his care. I said that the southern tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence: his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however. Saying that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world. Here was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but the right to do good; whose politics were the service of mankind:—it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ ran, as you may say—the writ of his great compassion,—to the Mediterranean shore:—

"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya, Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate to that Antiochus—everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two kinds of hospitals been founded: hospitals for men, and hospitals for beasts. Healing herbs, medicinal for man and medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been imported and planted. On the roads, trees have been planted, and wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."

And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his missionaries preaching the Good Law. And some of these came to Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to teach the Good Law—by name, Jesus of Nazareth.—Now consider the prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free, and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests should be the conquests of duty. Devanampiya Piadasi: the Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods: an Adept King like them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of history.



VIII. THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE

Greece shone between 478 and 348,—to give the thirteen decades of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties, but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six years) until 185. Then China flamed up brilliantly under the Western House of Han from 194 to 64;—at which time, however, we shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference: the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years before:—three times thirteen decades, with room for three national flowerings in Europe—among what peoples, who can say?— We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades;—whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the Cities of the Plain? Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.

I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—as we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them played out and mentally—because long since morally—deficient. So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort upwards. If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found—but they must be righteous, and know what they are doing—I will spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities. I dare say there was quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility—which perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis—that a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become unfit to carry on the work of evolution. It is a matter of corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice, excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance. Heaven knows how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands, or has stood, so very far, from the brink. And yet it is from the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is intended to flow.—We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead, and the religions have taken their place: there has been no sure and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and its Higher Self. Each succeeding civilization, under these circumstances, has run a greater risk.

Of what race are we? I say, of no race at all, but can view the matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where the Law bids us. Races are only temporary institutions set up for the convenience of the Host of Souls.

We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa. Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million years degenerated in that isolation to what they are. But their ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airships than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the physical, were we are pygmies. Now they are—whatever may be their potentialities, whatever they may become—actually an inferior reace. And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of dying out. What then?—I suppose indeed there must be backward races, to house backward egos;—though for that matter you would think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.

Or consider the Redskins, here and in South America: whether Atlanteans, or of some former subrace of the Fifth, at least not Aryans. Take the finest tribes among them, such as the Navajos. Here is a very small hereditary stream, kept pure and apart: of fine physique; potentially of fine mentality; unsullied with vices of any sort: a people as much nearer than the white man to natural spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy—of that alone—are a fearful Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and racial stocks other than her great and main ones, in case of accidents? Are the Redskins among these?

The Secret Doctrine seems to hint sometimes that the founders of our Fifth Root Race were of Lemurian rather than Atlantean descent. Nowhere is it actually said so; but there are a number of passages that read, to me, as if they were written with that idea, or theory, or fact, in mind. Is it, possibly, that a small pure stream of Lemurian heredity had been kept aloof through all the years of Atlantis, in reserve;—some stream that may have been, at one time, as narrow as the tribe of Navajos?—This may be a very bold conclusion to draw from what is said in The Secret Doctrine; it may have no truth in it whatever: other passages are to be found, perhaps, that would at least appear to contradict it. But if it is true, it would account for what seems like a racial anomaly—or more than one. Science leans to the conclusion that the Australian aborigines are Aryan: they are liker Aryans than anything else. But we know from The Secret Doctrine that they are among the few last remnants of the Lemurians. Again, the Ainos of Japan are very like Europeans: they have many physical features in common with the Caucasians, and none in common with the peoples of East Asia. Yet they are very low down in the scale of evolution:—not so low as the Australian Blackfellow, but without much occasion for giving themselves airs. A thousand years of contact with the much- washing Japanese have never suggested to them why God made soap and water. Like many other people, they have the legend of the flood: remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake—a cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory of the fate of Lemuria?

Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately preceding it, but from the one before? Is Mercury's caduceus, here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done? Did the Law keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the Atlanteans;—holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity —and therefore in a kind of pralaya;—at the right moment, to push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not parallel to the Atlantean, but sui generis, and to be Aryan Fifth presently?—Is the Law keeping in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear? Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth to inhabit?

When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time: when the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more with them—for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer take the splendid dyes;—and when that final flowering of Sanskrit is exhausted too—will the new Sixth Race language, as a type, be a derivation from the Aryan? Then how?—Or will it, possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through which, during all these millions of years, such great and main brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true, they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof: that is, beyond the middle point. And yet one in every four of the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the world is Atlantean still.

Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic, or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head, the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says he, 'I'm pater, and the subject; set me where you will, and I am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or, 'Now,' says he, 'I'm patrem, and the object; go look for my lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' Patrem filius amat, or filius amat patrem, or in whatever order it may be, there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) suffers the loving.—But now take a word in English. You can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence.—Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the Pyrenees; and—pardon me!—the little old time-rounded tiny Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round. There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem. There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number: all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—you can trace about as much analogy between them—as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You know how the Latin castrum became in English ciaster and then chester; the change was governed by law. The same law makes our present-day vulgar say cyar for car; that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair. The same law makes the same kind of people say donchyer for don't you; some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American. Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said Ts'in like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say Ch'in. So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do. So we ourselves have turned Ts'in into China.—And that is the one little fact—or perhaps one of the two or three little facts—that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day—after millions of years—wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is one thing; and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: Pitri, pater, vater, are clearly but varying pronunciations of the same word. In the Turanic group, however—Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu—you must expect no such well-advertised first-cousinship. They are grouped together, not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian, say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for father—you probably could not;—but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic—I draw upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica—there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your: pederin is 'father'; 'your father' becomes pederiniz; dostun means 'friend'; 'your friend' becomes not dostuniz, but dostunus; and this trick of assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish the relationship of the group. As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen: gyordunus is the Turkish for the Finnish naikke.—So here you see a degree of kinship much more remote than that you find in the Aryan. Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers—at least near relations and bosom friends,—Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in passing. And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a common father: according to legends of both peoples, the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the Mongols. (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan, in blood.)

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship. They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin—through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls—and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes. Thus I should call a Tibetan name like nGamri-srong-btsan a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like T'ang Tai-tsong a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.—The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' horse agent man kicking completion, or words to that effect,—dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for horse and man, in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as geegee and equus, and Smith and Jones. As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, shih, pronounced like the first three letters in the word shirt in English. That vocable may mean: history, or to employ, or a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house, and all such things as that;—I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus Ts'in meant one country, and Tsin another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You pronounce shih one tone—you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means poetry; you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes a corpse:—as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does.—Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters: c-a-t cat, d-o-g dog, and so on;—but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,—and above all, musical tones. Now then, which is the more primitive? Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?

———- * Encyclopaedia Britannica: article, China: Language. ———-

More primitive—I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

"They prayed, but their worship was only The wonder of nights and of days,"

—when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:—it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language: seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps: and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of God. And then—was it like this?—they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization—its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed—many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America—as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;—and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;—till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:—Chinese. And meanwhile—I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of them;—meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,— but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:—and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes in The Secret Doctrine, and see how the last ones, the sixth and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:—until presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away and ahead of us? Were there first of all billiard-balls; and did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together; this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;—from monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional, complex—Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;—then Pyrenean by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains; and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier pronunciation,—stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing intolerant of changes within itself;—fitting itself to the weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;— dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds there are;—till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was Chinese? Is it primitive, or ultimate? I am almost certain of this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,—Fifth certainly? Is this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago—the time of the beginning our our sub-race? A pralaya, like sleep, is a period of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits: whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright Immortal Self within. Africa entered such a rest-period from an orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams and sorceries, and her people became what they are. But if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu, the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would have been—it might have been—with a bent not towards intellectual, but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all we have at present.—She attained marvelous heights; but they were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity only in the impersonal and dispassionate: never mistook for its voice, the voices of the flesh. She sinned much, no doubt; but not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art and Poetry. She was faithful to the high Gods there. She never produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares. But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism—one might name a hundred of them—beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies. Nor have we had any to compare with her masters of landscape-painting: even the Encyclopaedia Britannica comes down flat-footed with the statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the world has seen.—And why?—Because it is based on a knowledge of the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite. So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.

But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare? No Dante or Homer? No epic—no great drama! Pooh! you say, where is the great creative energy? Where is the sheer brain force?—

It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is the highest possible type. Well; it may be: but the deeper you go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to become as to the absoluteness of standards. The time to award the prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of the differences. Warily let us go to work here!

Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as energies. I think, through channels nearer this material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.—No: there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your head if you say he gave the greater gift.—Or I will leave Pope, and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West incomparably greater in brain energy. And I am not making such a foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean, Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze. In the West, the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous basis in that, I think, to work in and upon. It has reached lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully— and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection. Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by religious emotion;—they don't readily gush over a personal god. It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality: have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will seem so the more because until very recently China has been constantly misrepresented to us. And yet I think it is pretty much the truth.