The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX Ulysses, and the East her Wooden Horse. [Maha (great) and Hina (little) are quite meaningless epithets, only serv- ing to distinguish Hinduized Tibetan Buddhism from ca- nonical Cingalese-Burmese-Siamese Buddhism.—Eb.] 2. ’Tis well, Shravaka. Prepare thyself, for thou wilt have to travel on alone. The Teacher can but point the way. The path is one for all, the means to reach the goal must vary with the Pilgrims. It is here admitted that there are many ways of reaching the same end. In order to assist a pupil, the Teacher should know all these ways by actual experience. He should know them in detail. There is a great deal of pious gassing about most Teachers—it is very easy to say “Be good and you will be happy,” and I am afraid that even this book itself has been taken as little better by the majority of its ad- mirers. What the pupil wants is not vague generalisa- tions on virtue, not analyses of Nirvana and explorations in Hindu metaphysics, but a plain straightforward statement of a practical character. When a man is meditating and finds himself interfered with by some particular class of thought, he does not want to know about the glory of the Buddha and the advantages of the Dhamma and the frater- nal piety of the Sangha. He wants to know how to stop those thoughts arising, and the only person who can help him to do that is a Teacher who has been troubled by those same thoughts, and learnt how to stop them in his own case. For one Teacher who knows his subject at all, there are at least ten thousand who belch pious platitudes. I wish to name no names, but Annie Besant, Prentice Mulford, Tro- ward, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and so on, down—right down 8