Book 4 (Part I)

80 with.” Ari/22' means “Lord,” and a reasonable translation of the whole word would be “Union with God,” the exact term used by Christian mystics to describe their attainment. Now there is great confusion, because the Buddhists use the word Samadhi to mean something entirely different, the mere faculty of attention. Thus, with them, to think of a cat is to “ make Samadhi ” on that cat. They use the word Jhana to describe mystic states. This is excessively misleading, for as we saw in the last section, Dhyana is a preliminary to Samadhi, and of course Jhana is merely the wretched plebeian Pali corruption of it.1 There are many kinds of Samadhi.2 Some auf/2073 consider Alma- dars/zana, z'lze Universe as a single plzenomenon wir/zeu! conditions, to öe z‘lzefirsz‘real Samao’nz'. If we accept this, we must relegate many less exalted states to the class of Dhyana. Patanjali enumerates a number of these states: to perform these on different things gives different 1 The vulgarism and provincialism of the Buddhist canon is infinitely repulsive to all nice minds; and the attempt to use the terms of an ego-centric philosophy to explain the details of a psychology Whose principal doctrine is the denial of the ego, was the work of a mischievous idiot. Let us unhesitatingly reject these abominations, these nastinesses of the beggars dressed in rags that they have snatched from corpses, and follow the etymological signification of the word as given above! 2 Apparently. That is, the obvious results are different. Possibly the cause is only one, refracted through diverse media.