THE SEVEN PORTALS
alike of the Beginning, the Way and the End. In this par-
ticular passage it is however principally synonymous with
Will, and Will has been so fully dealt with in Book 4, Part II,
that it will save trouble if we assume that the reader is fa-
miliar with that masterpiece.
(Subsection VI.) This, too, has been carefully described
in Book 4, Part I.
There is a distinction between Buddhist ‘Jhana’ and San-
skrit ‘Dhyana,’ though etymologically the former is a cor-
ruption of the latter.
The craze for classification which obsesses the dull minds
of the learned has been peculiarly pernicious in the East. In
order to divide states of thought into 84 classes, which is—
to their fatuity!—an object in itself, because 84 is seven
times twelve, they do not hesitate to invent names for quite
imaginary states of mind, and to put down the same state of
mind several times. This leads to extreme difficulty in the
study of their works on psychology and the like. The origi-
nal man, Buddha, or whoever he may have been, dug out of
his mind a sufficient number of jewels, and the wretched in-
tellectuals who edited his work have added bits of glass to
make up the string. The result has been that many scholars
have thought that the whole psychology of the East was
pure bluff. A similar remark is true of the philosophy of the
West, where the Schoolmen produced an equal obfuscation.
Even now people hardly realize that they did any valuable
work at all, and quote their controversies, such as that con-
cerning the number of angels who can dance on the point of
a needle, as examples of their complete fatuity and donnish-
ness. In point of fact, it is the critic who is stupid. The
question about the angels involves the profoundest consider-
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