So, with respect to the traditions concerning this island, and apart from the (to them) historical records of this preserved in the Chinese and Tibetan sacred books, the legend is alive to this day among the people of Tibet.  The fair island is no more, but the country where it once bloomed remains there still, and the spot is well known to some of the “great teachers of the Snowy Mountains,” however much convulsed and changed its topography by the awful cataclysm.  Every seventh year these teachers are believed to assemble in Scham-bha-la, the “Happy Land.”  According to the general belief it is situated in the north-west of Tibet.  Some place it within the unexplored central regions, inaccessible even to the fearless nomadic tribes; others hem it in between the range of the Gangdisri Mountains and the northern edge of the Gobi desert, south and north, and the more populated regions of Khoondooz and Kashmir, of the Gya-Pheling (British India), and China, west and east, which affords to the curious mind a pretty large latitude to locate it in.  Others still place it between Namur Nur and the Kuen-Lun Mountains, but one and all firmly believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile fairy-like land once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the legendary island.

In connection with the archaic legend of the Asian Sea and the Atlantic Continent, is it not profitable to note a fact known to all modern geologists-that the Himalayan slopes afford geological proof that the substance of those lofty peaks was once a part of an ocean floor?

Note iv.

We have already pointed out that, in our opinion, the whole difference between Buddhistic and Vedantic philosophies was that the former was a kind of Rationalistic Vedantism, while the latter might be regarded as transcendental Buddhism.  If the Aryan esotericism applies the term jivatma to the seventh principle—­the pure and per se unconscious spirit—­it is because the Vedanta, postulating three kinds of existence—­(1) the paramarthika (the true, the only real one), (2) the vyavaharika (the practical), and (3) the pratibhasika (the apparent or illusory life)—­makes the first life or jiva, the only truly existent one.  Brahma, or the one’s self, is its only representative in the universe, as it is the universal Life in toto, while the other two are but its “phenomenal appearances,” imagined and created by ignorance, and complete illusions suggested to us by our blind senses.  The Buddhists, on the other hand, deny either subjective or objective reality even to that one Self-Existence.  Buddha declares that there is neither Creator nor an Absolute Being.  Buddhist rationalism was ever too alive to the insuperable difficulty of admitting one absolute consciousness, as in the words of Flint, “wherever there is consciousness there is relation, and wherever