rs of a
thousand years before had prepared the way for it: Confucius
when he gave her stability; Laotse when he dropped the Blue
Pearl into her fields. That Pearl had shone, heaven knows. Now
Ta-mo, this Bodhidharma, breathed on it; and it glowed, and
flame shot up from it, and grew, and foamed up beautiful, till it
was a steady fountain of wonder-fire spraying the far stars.
Heretofore we have had a background of Taoist wizardry: in its
highest aspects, Natural Magic,--the Keatsism of the waters and
the wild, the wood, the field, and the mountain; henceforth
there was to be a sacred something shining through and inmingled
with this: the urge of the Divine Soul, the holy purposes of
evolution. We may say this in Art, to take that one field alone,
the most perfect, the fullest, the divinest, expression of
Natural Magic

"whereof this world holds record"

was to come in the school of the Successors of Bodhidharma,
directly the result of his 'Doctrine of the Heart.'

His school remained esoteric; but it was established, not among
the secret mountains, nor in far unvisited regions; but there in
the midst of imperial China: an extension of the Lodge, you may
say, visible among men. Bodhidharma--are you to call him a
_Messenger_ at all? He hardly came out into the world. It was
known he was there; near by was the northern capital;--he taught
disciples, when they had the strength to insist on it. Yet he
dwelt aloof too, and wrapped about in the seclusion Masters must
have, to carry on their spiritual work. One must suppose that
Messengers of the Lodge had been very busy in China between 375
and 400, in the days of Tao Yuang-ming and Ku Kai-chih; that
they had been very busy again in the last quarter of the fifth
century; for it seems as if somehow or other there was such an
atmosphere in China in the first half of the sixth century,--when
ordinarily speaking the Doors of the Spiritual World would be
shut,--that the Lodge was enabled partly to throw off its
seclusion, and it was possible for at least one of its Members to
take up his abode there, and to be known to the world as doing
so.

A Messenger was sent out into the Chinese world from the School
of Bodhidarma in 575: Chih-i, the founder of the Tientai School
which was the spiritual force underlying the glory of the
T'ang age; but he was a Messenger from the Dzyan School of
Bodhidharma, not its Head. As far as I have been able to
gather the thre