es come down of the fiendishness of their kings: of
a man that for his sport would have elephants hurled from the top
of precipices; it may be that the Indian manvantara closed with
the Gupta fall;--though we get the finical dandiacal 'great'
reign of Harsha in 700. The light certainly was dying from India
now: the Crest-Wave had been there, in all its splendor; they
had made good use of it in all but the spiritual sense, and very
bad use of it in that. The year in which you may say (as nearly
as history will tell you) the light died there, was precisely
this year of 520; and that effected a change in the spiritual
center of gravity of the world of the most momentous kind: so
much so that we may think of a new order of ages as beginning
then; and looking at world-history as a whole, we may say, Here
endeth the lesson that began where we took things up in the time
of the Six Great Teachers; and here beginneth a new chapter,--
with which these lectures will hardly concern themselves. But we
may glance at the event that opens it.

It made very little stir at the time. It was merely the landing
at Canton of an old man from India: a 'Blue-eyed Brahmin,'--but
a Buddhist, and the head of all the Buddhists at that;--and his
preaching there until Liang Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had
heard of his fame, and invited him to court; and his retirement
thence to a cave-temple in the north. Beyond this there is very
little to tell you. He was a king's son from southern India;
his name Bodhidharma; and one would like to know what the records
of the Great Lodge have to say about him. For he stands in
history as the founder of the Dhyana or Zen School, another form
of the name of which is _Dzyan;_ when one reads _The Voice of
the Silence,_ or the Stanzas in _The Secret Doctrine,_ one might
remember this. Outwardly,--I think this is true,--he refused to
cut into history at all: was a grand Esoteric figure, whose
campaigns, (super-Napoleonic, more mirific than those of Genghiz
Khan), were all fought on spiritual planes whence no noise of the
cannonading could be heard in this outer world. He was the
twenty-eighth Successor of the Buddha; of a line of Masters that
included such great names as those of Vasubandhu, and of
Nagarjuna, founder of the Mahayana,--"one of the four suns that
illumine the world." We have seen that he had been preceded:
Kumarajiva had come to China a century before; but experimentally,
leaving the