The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE SEVEN PORTALS alike of the Beginning, the Way and the End. In this par- ticular passage it is however principally synonymous with Will, and Will has been so fully dealt with in Book 4, Part II, that it will save trouble if we assume that the reader is fa- miliar with that masterpiece. (Subsection VI.) This, too, has been carefully described in Book 4, Part I. There is a distinction between Buddhist ‘Jhana’ and San- skrit ‘Dhyana,’ though etymologically the former is a cor- ruption of the latter. The craze for classification which obsesses the dull minds of the learned has been peculiarly pernicious in the East. In order to divide states of thought into 84 classes, which is— to their fatuity!—an object in itself, because 84 is seven times twelve, they do not hesitate to invent names for quite imaginary states of mind, and to put down the same state of mind several times. This leads to extreme difficulty in the study of their works on psychology and the like. The origi- nal man, Buddha, or whoever he may have been, dug out of his mind a sufficient number of jewels, and the wretched in- tellectuals who edited his work have added bits of glass to make up the string. The result has been that many scholars have thought that the whole psychology of the East was pure bluff. A similar remark is true of the philosophy of the West, where the Schoolmen produced an equal obfuscation. Even now people hardly realize that they did any valuable work at all, and quote their controversies, such as that con- cerning the number of angels who can dance on the point of a needle, as examples of their complete fatuity and donnish- ness. In point of fact, it is the critic who is stupid. The question about the angels involves the profoundest consider- 89