Magick Without Tears

232 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS The Dhammapada, and many other classics, together with numerous writings on the Tantra and Yoga of such men as Patanjali, Vivekananda, etc. etc. Not a few of these teachings are as yet wholly unknown to scholars. I made the scope of my studies as comprehensive as possible omitting no school of thought however unimportant or repugnant. I made a critical examination of all these teachers in the light of my practical experience. The physiological and psychological uniformity of mankind guaranteed that the diversity of expression concealed a unity of significance. This discovery was confirmed, furthermore, by reference to Jewish, Greek, and Celtic traditions. One quintessential truth was common to all cults, from the Hebrides to the Yellow Sea; and even the main branches proved essentially identical. It was only the foliage that exhibited incompatibility. When I walked across China in 1905-6, I was fully armed and accoutred by the above qualifications to attack the till-then-insoluble problem of the Chinese conception of religious truth. Practical studies of the psychology of such Mongolians as I had met in my travels, had already suggested to me that their acentric conception of the universe might represent the correspondence in consciousness of their actual psychological characteristics . I was therefore prepared to examine the doctrines of their religious and philosophic Masters without prejudice such as had always rendered nugatory the efforts of missionary sinologists; indeed, all oriental scholars with the single exception of Rhys Davids. Until his time, translators had invariably assumed, with absurd naivete, or (more often) arrogant bigotry, that a Chinese writer must be putting forth either a more or less distorted and degraded variation of some Christian conception, or utterly puerile absurdities . Even so great a man as Max Muller, in his introduction to the Upanishads, seems only half inclined to admit that the apparent triviality and folly of many passages in these so-called sacred writings might owe their appearance to our ignorance of the historical