about him.  For he stands in history as the founder of the Dhyana or Zen School, another form of the name of which is Dzyan; when one reads The Voice of the Silence, or the Stanzas in The Secret Doctrine, one might remember this.  Outwardly,—­I think this is true,—­he refused to cut into history at all:  was a grand Esoteric figure, whose campaigns, (super-Napoleonic, more mirific than those of Genghiz Khan), were all fought on spiritual planes whence no noise of the cannonading could be heard in this outer world.  He was the twenty-eighth Successor of the Buddha; of a line of Masters that included such great names as those of Vasubandhu, and of Nagarjuna, founder of the Mahayana,—­“one of the four suns that illumine the world.”  We have seen that he had been preceded:  Kumarajiva had come to China a century before; but experimentally, leaving the Center of the Movement in India; there must have been thousands of disciples in the Middle Kingdom in 520 when Bodhidharma came, bringing with him the Buddha’s alms-bowl, the symbol of the Patriarchate, to make in China his headquarters and that of his successors.  For a thousand years the Buddha’s Movement had been in India a living link with the Lodge;—­in that land of esoteric history which hides from us what it means to be so linked and connected.  Now India had failed.  The Guptas had reigned in great splendor; but they had flourished upon a reaction away from the Light.  I suppose it means this:  that the burden of fighting upward had been too much for this people, now wearied with old age; they had dropped the burden and the struggle, and found in the relief a phantom of renewed youth to last them a little day.

Whatever may be true of Buddhism now,—­however the long cycles may have wasted its vitality, and to whatever depths it may have fallen,—­we should remember this:  that certainly for about fourteen centuries there was contained within it a living link with the Masters’ Lodge.  It was not like any other existing religion (so far as one knows):  like none of the dominant religions of today, at any rate.  At its head, apparently, through all those long centuries, was a line of Adepts, men of spiritual genius, members of the Lodge.  So what Bodhidharma’s coming meant, I take it, was that in China that was established actually which in the West first Pythagoras, and then Plotinus had tried to establish, and tried in vain.  It was, as you may say, the transplanting of the Tree of Life from a soil that had grown outworn to one in which it could flourish; and the result was, it appears to me, a new impulse given to the ages, to all history.