ollowed were
afterthoughts of the divine. They were revelations sometimes more
intelligible, in one instance inexpressibly more luminous, yet
invariably reminiscent of an anterior light.

The light of contemporaneous Buddhism is that of Catholicism--heaven
deducted, a heaven, that is, of ceaseless Magnificats. The latter
conception is Christian. But it was Persian first. Otherwise, in
common with the Church, Buddhism has saints, censers, litanies,
tonsures, holy water, fasts, and confession. Barring confession, the
extreme antiquity of which has been attested, the other rites and
ceremonies are, it may be, borrowed, but not the high morality, the
altruism, the renunciation and effacement of self, which Buddhists no
longer very scrupulously observe, perhaps, but which their religion
was the first to instil.

Buddhism originally had neither rites nor ritual. It was merely a
mendicant order in which one tried to do what is right, with, for
reward, the hope of Pratscha-Paramita, the peace that is beyond all
knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is--or was--the
complete absence of anything, extinction utter and everlasting, a
state of absolute non-existence which no whim of Brahm may disturb.

Buddhism denied Brahm and every tenet of Brahmanism, save only that
which concerned the immedicable misery of life. Of final deliverance
there was in Brahmanism no known mode. None at least that was
exoteric. Brahmanism rolled man ceaselessly through all forms of
existence, from the elementary to the divine, and even from the
latter, even when he was absorbed in Brahm, flung him out and back
into a fresh circle of unavoidable births.

The theory is horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime.
To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the
categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and
demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really
absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized
by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more
peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were
crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had resulted but in the
production of an earlier New Testament. From the depths of the ideal,
swarms of bedecked and bejewelled divinities escorted Brahm back to a
lotos of azure. Coincidentally Gotama, enthroned in the zenith,
contemplated clusters of gods that dangled through twenty-eight