THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING
not. Free alike from fawning and from dislike do I do service to him who has
bought me. This, your Majesty, is the basis of the Act of Truth by the force of
which I turned the Ganges back.*
In other words, by ignoring all accidents, all matters of
chance, and setting to work, without favour or prejudice, to
accomplish the one object in view, and so finally “to interpret
every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with the
soul.” In truth this is an “Act of Truth,” the Power begot
by Concentration and nothing else.
We have seen at the commencement of this chapter how
the Atman (that Essence beyond Being and Not Being)
allegorically fell by crying “It is I,” and how the great
Hypocrisy arose by supposing individual Atmans for all
beings, and things which had to incarnate again and again
before finally they were swallowed up in the One Atman of
the Beginning. This Individualistic Conception Gotama
banned, he would have none of it; a Soul, a Spirit, a separate
entity was anathema to him; but in overthrowing the corrupt
Vedanta of the latter-day pundits, like Luther, who many
centuries later tore the tawdry vanities from off the back of
prostitute Rome, approximating his reformed Church to the
communistic brotherhood of Christ, Gotama, the Enlightened
One, the Buddha, now similarly went back to Vedic times and
to the wisdom of the old Rishis. But, fearing the evil asso-
ciations clinging to a name, he, anathematizing the Atman, in
* “The Questions of King Milinda,” iv, 1, 48. See also the story of the Holy
Quail in Rhys Davids’ “ Buddhist Birth Stories,” p. 302. These Iddhis are also
called Abhijnyds. There are six of them: (1) clairvoyance; (2) clairaudience;
(3) powers of transformation; (4) powers of remembering past lives; (5) powers
of reading the thoughts of others; (6) the knowledge of comprehending the
finality of the stream of life. See also “Konx om Pax,” pp. 47, 48.
Iv I 129