“His alert attention having become possessed of this knowledge, he can call to mind many former states of existence, as, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, and so on, in the words of the text.”

This quotation casts an interesting light upon Eastern monasticism.  The Buddhist monasteries are here revealed as schools of practical psychology, the life of the monk a life of arduous and unceasing labor, but labor of a sort which seems but idleness.  The successive “initiations” which are the milestones on the “Path of Perfection” upon which the devotee has set his feet represent successive emancipations of consciousness gained through work and knowledge.  Their nature may best be understood by means of a fanciful analogy.

RELEASE

If we assume that all life is conscious life, as much aware of its environment as the freedom of movement of its life vehicle in that environment permits, a corpuscle vibrating in a solid would have a certain sense of space and of movement in space gained from its own experience.  Now imagine the solid, which is its world, to be subjected to the influence of heat.  When the temperature reached a certain point the solid would transform itself into a liquid.  To the corpuscle all the old barriers would seem to be broken down; space would be different, time would be different, and its world a different place.  Again, at another increase of temperature, when the liquid became a gas, the corpuscle would experience a further emancipation:  it would possess a further freedom, with all the facts of its universe to learn anew.

Each of these successive crises would constitute for it an initiation, and since the heat has acted upon it from within, causing an expansion of its life vehicle, it would seem to itself to have attained to these new freedoms through self-development.

The parallel is now plain to the reader:  the corpuscle is the Yogi, bent on liberation:  the heat which warms him is the Divine Love, centered in his heart, his initiations are the successive emancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attains Nirvana—­inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world.  As latent heat resides in the corpuscle, so is Release hidden in the heart—­release from time and space.  The perception of this prompted the exultant apostrophe of Buddha, “Looking for the maker of this tabernacle, I have run through a course of many births, not finding him; and painful is birth again and again.  But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again.  All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained the extinction of all desires.”