Four years after the accession of this greatest of the Byzantines, the greatest of the Sassanids came to the throne in Persia:  Chosroes Anushirwan:  a wise and victorious reign until 579.  There was an ‘Endless Peace’ sworn with Rome in 533; and not peace merely, but friendship and alliance; it was to last for all time, and did last for seven years.  The Chosroes, jealous of the western victories of Justinian, listened to the pleadings of the Ostrogoths, and declared war; peace came again in 563, on the basis of a yearly tribute from Rome to Persia,—­ but with compensations, such as toleration for the Christians in Persia.—­there were reforms in the army and in taxation; improvements in irrigation; encouragement of learning; revision of the laws; some little outburst in literature and culture generally:  the culmination, in all but extent of territory, of the whole Sassanian period.—­We may throw in one item from the future,—­that is from 620:  in that year Sassanian Persia had flowed out to the full limits of the empire of Darius Hystaspes:  held Egypt, Syria, all West Asia to within a mile of the walls of Constantinople.  Within three years the fall had begun; within twenty it was completed.

As to India, this (520) is among the hidden times:  the Ephthalites had overturned the Guptas; they were Huns of the Hunniest; they had over-turned the Guptas and all else (in the north).  Tales come down of the fiendishness of their kings:  of a man that for his sport would have elephants hurled from the top of precipices; it may be that the Indian manvantara closed with the Gupta fall;—­though we get the finical dandiacal ‘great’ reign of Harsha in 700.  The light certainly was dying from India now:  the Crest-Wave had been there, in all its splendor; they had made good use of it in all but the spiritual sense, and very bad use of it in that.  The year in which you may say (as nearly as history will tell you) the light died there, was precisely this year of 520; and that effected a change in the spiritual center of gravity of the world of the most momentous kind:  so much so that we may think of a new order of ages as beginning then; and looking at world-history as a whole, we may say, Here endeth the lesson that began where we took things up in the time of the Six Great Teachers; and here beginneth a new chapter,—­ with which these lectures will hardly concern themselves.  But we may glance at the event that opens it.

It made very little stir at the time.  It was merely the landing at Canton of an old man from India:  a ’Blue-eyed Brahmin,’—­but a Buddhist, and the head of all the Buddhists at that;—­and his preaching there until Liang Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had heard of his fame, and invited him to court; and his retirement thence to a cave-temple in the north.  Beyond this there is very little to tell you.  He was a king’s son from southern India; his name Bodhidharma; and one would like to know what the records of the Great Lodge have to say