Center of the Movement in India; there must have
been thousands of disciples in the Middle Kingdom in 520 when
Bodhidharma came, bringing with him the Buddha's alms-bowl,
the symbol of the Patriarchate, to make in China his headquarters
and that of his successors. For a thousand years the Buddha's
Movement had been in India a living link with the Lodge;--in
that land of esoteric history which hides from us what it
means to be so linked and connected. Now India had failed.
The Guptas had reigned in great splendor; but they had flourished
upon a reaction away from the Light. I suppose it means this:
that the burden of fighting upward had been too much for this
people, now wearied with old age; they had dropped the burden
and the struggle, and found in the relief a phantom of renewed
youth to last them a little day.

Whatever may be true of Buddhism now,--however the long cycles
may have wasted its vitality, and to whatever depths it may have
fallen,--we should remember this: that certainly for about
fourteen centuries there was contained within it a living link
with the Masters' Lodge. It was not like any other existing
religion (so far as one knows): like none of the dominant
religions of today, at any rate. At its head, apparently,
through all those long centuries, was a line of Adepts, men of
spiritual genius, members of the Lodge. So what Bodhidharma's
coming meant, I take it, was that in China that was established
actually which in the West first Pythagoras, and then Plotinus
had tried to establish, and tried in vain. It was, as you may
say, the transplanting of the Tree of Life from a soil that had
grown outworn to one in which it could flourish; and the result
was, it appears to me, a new impulse given to the ages, to
all history.

Hitherto, in the main, we have seen (except in China) a downward
trend of cycles; from this point an upward trend began. We have
been dealing, latterly, with dullish centuries, and history in a
febrile and flickering mood;--but give this wonderful change time
to take effect, and the centuries begin to flame up, and history
to become a roaring conflagration. We might here spy out into
that time, which will lie beyond the scope of these lecture; and
see the glory of the T'angs begin in China in 618; Corea's one
historic age of splendor, in art and also in military prowess, at
its highest point about 680; the era of Shotoku Daishi, saint,
sage, prince and protagonist of civi