THE EQUINOX
Ulysses, and the East her Wooden Horse. [Maha (great)
and Hina (little) are quite meaningless epithets, only serv-
ing to distinguish Hinduized Tibetan Buddhism from ca-
nonical Cingalese-Burmese-Siamese Buddhism.—Eb.]
2. ’Tis well, Shravaka. Prepare thyself, for thou wilt
have to travel on alone. The Teacher can but point the way.
The path is one for all, the means to reach the goal must vary
with the Pilgrims.
It is here admitted that there are many ways of reaching
the same end. In order to assist a pupil, the Teacher should
know all these ways by actual experience. He should know
them in detail. There is a great deal of pious gassing about
most Teachers—it is very easy to say “Be good and you
will be happy,” and I am afraid that even this book itself
has been taken as little better by the majority of its ad-
mirers. What the pupil wants is not vague generalisa-
tions on virtue, not analyses of Nirvana and explorations in
Hindu metaphysics, but a plain straightforward statement
of a practical character. When a man is meditating and
finds himself interfered with by some particular class of
thought, he does not want to know about the glory of the
Buddha and the advantages of the Dhamma and the frater-
nal piety of the Sangha. He wants to know how to stop
those thoughts arising, and the only person who can help
him to do that is a Teacher who has been troubled by those
same thoughts, and learnt how to stop them in his own case.
For one Teacher who knows his subject at all, there are at
least ten thousand who belch pious platitudes. I wish to
name no names, but Annie Besant, Prentice Mulford, Tro-
ward, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and so on, down—right down
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