The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING taught to expect. Indeed its translation into worldly comments was a matter of education, so it came about that he discovered that the Great Attainment fer se was identical in all systems irrespective of the symbol man sought it under. Thus Yah- weh as a clay phallus in a band-box was as mucha reality to the Jews of Genesis as Brahman in Brahma-loka was to the Aryas of Vedic India; that the vision of Moses when he beheld God as a burning bush is similar to the vision of the fire-flashing Courser of the Chaldean Oracles; and that Nib- bana the Non-existent is little removed, if at all, from the Christian heaven with its harps, halos and hovering angels. And the reason is, that the man who does attain to any of these states, on his return to consciousness, at once attributes his attainment to his particular business partner—Christ, Buddha, Mrs. Besant, etc., etc., and attempts to rationalize about the suprarational, and describe what is beyond descrip- tion in the language of his country. P., under the gentle guidance of Ananda Metteya, at first found the outward simplicity most refreshing; but soon he discovered that like all other religious systems Buddhism was entangled in a veritable network of words. Realizing this, he went a step further than Gotama, and said: “ Why bother about Sorrow at all, or about Transmigration? for these are not ‘wrong viewyness,’ as Mr. Rhys Davids would so poetic- ally put it, but matters of the Kindergarten and not of the Temple; matters for police regulation, and for underpaid curates to chatter about, and matters that have nothing to do with true progress.” He then divided life into two compart- ments; into the first he threw science, learning, philosophy and all things built.of words—the toys of life; and into 139