e, as historical facts, the allegories
which you relate; show us, indeed, that you are the authors of all this
doctrine; for we will demonstrate, if necessary, that you have only
stolen and disfigured it; that you are only the imitators of the ancient
paganism of the West; to which, by an ill assorted mixture, you have
allied the pure and spiritual doctrine of our gods--a doctrine totally
detached from the senses, and entirely unknown on earth till Beddou
taught it to the nations."*

* All the ancient opinions of the Egyptian and Grecian
theologians are to be found in India, and they appear to
have been introduced, by means of the commerce of Arabia and
the vicinity of Persia, time immemorial.

A number of groups having asked what was this doctrine, and who was this
god, of whom the greater part had never heard the name, the Lama resumed
and said:

"In the beginning, a sole-existent and self-existent God, having passed
an eternity in the contemplation of his own being, resolved to manifest
his perfections out of himself, and created the matter of the world.
The four elements being produced, but still in a state of confusion, he
breathed on the face of the waters, which swelled like an immense bubble
in form of an egg, which unfolding, became the vault or orb of heaven,
enclosing the world.* Having made the earth, and the bodies of animals,
this God, essence of motion, imparted to them a part of his own being
to animate them; for this reason, the soul of everything that breathes
being a portion of the universal soul, no one of them can perish; they
only change their form and mould in passing successively into different
bodies. Of all these forms, the one most pleasing to God is that of
man, as most resembling his own perfections. When a man, by an absolute
disengagement from his senses, is wholly absorbed in self-contemplation,
he then discovers the divinity, and becomes himself God. Of all the
incarnations of this kind that God has hitherto taken, the greatest
and most solemn was that in which he appeared thirty centuries ago in
Kachemire, under the name of Fot or Beddou, to preach the doctrines of
self-denial and self-annihilation."

* This cosmogony of the Lamas, the Bonzes, and even the
Bramins, as Henry Lord asserts, is literally that of the
ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians, says Porphyry, call Kneph,
intelligence, or efficient cause of the universe. They
relate tha