232 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
The Dhammapada, and many other classics, together with 
numerous writings on the Tantra and Yoga of such men as 
Patanjali, Vivekananda, etc. etc. Not a few of these teachings 
are as yet wholly unknown to scholars. I made the scope of 
my studies as comprehensive as possible omitting no school 
of thought however unimportant or repugnant. 
I made a critical examination of all these teachers in the 
light of my practical experience. The physiological and 
psychological uniformity of mankind guaranteed that the 
diversity of expression concealed a unity of significance. This 
discovery was confirmed, furthermore, 
by reference to 
Jewish, Greek, and Celtic traditions. One quintessential truth 
was common to all cults, from the Hebrides to the Yellow 
Sea; and even the main branches proved essentially identical. 
It was only the foliage that exhibited incompatibility. 
When I walked across China in 1905-6, I was fully armed 
and accoutred by the above qualifications to attack the 
till-then-insoluble problem of the Chinese conception of 
religious truth. Practical studies of the psychology of such 
Mongolians as I had met in my travels, had already suggested 
to me that their acentric conception of the universe might 
represent the correspondence in consciousness of their actual 
psychological characteristics . I was therefore prepared to 
examine the doctrines of their religious and philosophic 
Masters without prejudice such as had always rendered 
nugatory the efforts of missionary sinologists; indeed, all 
oriental scholars with the single exception of Rhys Davids. 
Until his time, translators had invariably assumed, with 
absurd naivete, or (more often) arrogant bigotry, that a 
Chinese writer must be putting forth either a more or less 
distorted 
and degraded 
variation of some Christian 
conception, or utterly puerile absurdities . Even so great a 
man as Max Muller, in his introduction to the Upanishads, 
seems only half inclined to admit that the apparent triviality 
and folly of many passages in these so-called sacred writings 
might owe their appearance to our ignorance of the historical