The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING not. Free alike from fawning and from dislike do I do service to him who has bought me. This, your Majesty, is the basis of the Act of Truth by the force of which I turned the Ganges back.* In other words, by ignoring all accidents, all matters of chance, and setting to work, without favour or prejudice, to accomplish the one object in view, and so finally “to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with the soul.” In truth this is an “Act of Truth,” the Power begot by Concentration and nothing else. We have seen at the commencement of this chapter how the Atman (that Essence beyond Being and Not Being) allegorically fell by crying “It is I,” and how the great Hypocrisy arose by supposing individual Atmans for all beings, and things which had to incarnate again and again before finally they were swallowed up in the One Atman of the Beginning. This Individualistic Conception Gotama banned, he would have none of it; a Soul, a Spirit, a separate entity was anathema to him; but in overthrowing the corrupt Vedanta of the latter-day pundits, like Luther, who many centuries later tore the tawdry vanities from off the back of prostitute Rome, approximating his reformed Church to the communistic brotherhood of Christ, Gotama, the Enlightened One, the Buddha, now similarly went back to Vedic times and to the wisdom of the old Rishis. But, fearing the evil asso- ciations clinging to a name, he, anathematizing the Atman, in * “The Questions of King Milinda,” iv, 1, 48. See also the story of the Holy Quail in Rhys Davids’ “ Buddhist Birth Stories,” p. 302. These Iddhis are also called Abhijnyds. There are six of them: (1) clairvoyance; (2) clairaudience; (3) powers of transformation; (4) powers of remembering past lives; (5) powers of reading the thoughts of others; (6) the knowledge of comprehending the finality of the stream of life. See also “Konx om Pax,” pp. 47, 48. Iv I 129