The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE SEVEN PORTALS Here once more we perceive the ignorance of the Author with reference to all matters of mystic terminology, an ignorance which would have been amusing indeed had she lived ten years later. A Bodhisattva is simply a being which has culminated in a Buddha. If you or I became Buddhas to-morrow, then all our previous incarnations were Bodhisattvas, and therefore, as there shall not be a single grain of dust which shall not attain to Buddhahood, every existing thing is ina way a Bodhisattva. But of course in practice the term is confined to these special incarnations of the only Buddha of whom we have any such record. It is, therefore, ridiculous to place Srotapatti as a Soul of inferior grade to Bodhisattva. Buddha did not become a Srotapatti until seven incarnations before he attained to Buddhahood. The last part of the verse and the long note (of which we quote the gist) are nonsense. To describe a complete Buddha as “an ideal breath; Consciousness merged in the Universal Consciousness, or Soul devoid of every attribute,” is not Buddhism at all, and is quite incompatible with Buddhism. 98. Now bend thy head and listen well, O Bodhisattva— Compassion speaks and saith: “Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?” Now thou hast heard that which was said. Again we descend to the anti-climax of a somewhat mawkish sentimentality. Again we find the mistake of duality, of that opposition between self and others which, momentarily destroyed even in the most elementary periods of Samadhi, is completely wiped out by progress through 131