y
have been reabsorbed and forgot. Brahm still is. The cohorts of Cyrus
might pray Ormuzd to peer where he glowed. There, the phalanxes of
Alexander might raise altars to Zeus. Parthians and Tatars might
dispute the land and the god. Muhammadans could bring their Allah and
Christians their creed. Indifferently Brahm has dreamed, knowing that
he has all time as these all have their day.

The conception of that apathy, grandiose in itself and marvellous in
its persistence, was due to unknown poets that had in them the true
_souffle_ of the real ideal. But that also demanded a climax. They
produced it in the theory that the afflictions of this life are due to
transgressions in another.

From afflictions death, they taught, is not a release, for the reason
that there is no death. There is but absorption in Brahm. Yet that
consummation cannot occur until all transgressions, past and present,
have been expiated and the soul, lifted from the eddies of migration,
becomes Brahm himself.

To be absorbed, to be Brahm, to be God, is an ambition, certainly
vertiginous yet as surely divine. But to succeed, consciousness of
success must be lost. A mortal cannot attain divinity until
annihilation is complete. To become God nothing must be left of man.
To loose, then, every bond, to be freed from every tie, to retire from
finite things, to mount to and sink in the immutable, to see Death
die, was and is the Hindu ideal.

Of the elect, that is. Of the higher castes, of the priest, of the
prince. But not of the people. The ideal was not for them, salvation
either. It was idle even to think about it. Set in hell, they had to
return here until in some one of the twenty-four lakhs of birth which
the chain of migrations comports, and which to saint and soudra were
alike dispensed, they arrived here in the purple. Then only was the
opportunity theirs to rescale a sky that was reserved for prelates and
rajahs.

Suddenly, to the pariah, to the hopeless, to those who outcast in hell
were outcast from heaven, an erect and facile ladder to that sky was
brought. The Buddha furnished it. If he did not, a college of
dissidents assumed that he had, and in his name indicated a stairway
which, set among the people, all might mount and at whose summit gods
actually materialized.

To those who believe in the Dalai Lama--there are millions that have
believed, there are millions that do--he is not a vicar of the divine,
he is himself divine, a god i