enlightened human spirit, who had submitted to incarnation for the sake of teaching mankind, was not one of those rare failures spoken of above; on the contrary, it was a signally successful choice in all respects, and nothing interfered with the accomplishment of adeptship by the Buddha in his new body. The popular narrative of his ascetic struggles and temptations, and of his final attainment of Buddahood under the Bo-tree, is nothing more of course than the exoteric version of his initiation.

From that period onward, his work was of a dual nature; he had to reform and revive the morals of the populace and the science of the adepts-for adeptship itself is subject to cyclic changes, and in need of periodical impulses. The explanation of this branch of the subject, in plain terms, will not alone be important for its own sake, but will be interesting to all students of exoteric Buddhism, as elucidating some of the puzzling complications of the more abstruse "Northern doctrine."

A Buddha visits the earth for each of the seven races of the great planetary period. The Buddha with whom we are occupied was the fourth of the series, and that is why he stands fourth in the list quoted by Mr. Rhys Davids, from Burnouf,-quoted as an illustration of the way the Northern doctrine has been, as Mr. Davids supposes, inflated by metaphysical subtleties and absurdities crowded round the simple morality which sums up Buddhism as presented to the populace. fifth, or Maitreya Buddha, will come after the final disappearance of the fifth race, and when the sixth

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race will already have been established on earth for some hundreds of thousands of years. The sixth will come at the beginning of the seventh race, and the seventh towards the close of that race.

This arrangement will seem, at the first glance, out of harmony with the general design of human evolution. Here we are in the middle of the fifth race, and yet it is the fourth Buddha who has been identified with this race, and the fifth will not come till the fifth race is practically extinct. The explanation is to be found, however, in the great outlines of the esoteric cosmogony. At the begining of each great planetary period, when obscuration comes to an end, and the human tide-wave in its progress round the chain of worlds, arrives at the shore of a globe where no humanity has existed for milliards of years, a teacher is required from the first for the new crop of mankind about to spring up. Remember, that the preliminary evolution of the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms has been accomplished in preparation for the new round period. With the first infusion of the life-current into the "missing link" species the first race of the new series will begin to evolve. It is then that the Being, who may be considered the Buddha of the first race, appears. The Planetary Spirit, or Dhyan Chohan, who is-or to avoid the suggestion of an erroneous idea by the use of a singular verb, let us defy grammar and say, who are--Buddha in all his or their developments, incarnates among the young, innocent, teachable forerunners of the new humanity, and impresses the first broad principles of right and wrong, and the first truths of

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the esoteric doctrine on a sufficient number of receptive minds, to ensure the continued reverberation of the ideas so implanted through successive generations of men in the millions of years to come, before the first race shall have completed its course. It is this advent in the beginning of the round period of a Divine Being in human form that starts the ineradicable conception of the anthropomorphic God in all exoteric religions.

The first Buddha of the series in which Gautama Buddha stands fourth, is thus the second incarnation of Avaloketiswara-the mystic name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans or Planetary Spirits belonging to our planetary chain-and though Gautama is thus the fourth incarnation of enlightenment by exoteric reckoning, he is really the fifth of the true series, and thus properly belonging to our fifth race.

Avaloketiswara, as just stated, is the mystic name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans; the proper meaning of the word is manifested wisdom, just as Addi-Buddha and Amitabha both mean abstract wisdom.

The doctrine, as quoted by Mr. Davids, that "every earthly mortal Buddha has his pure and glorious counterpart in the mystic world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life, or rather that the Buddha under material conditions is only an appearance, the reflection, or emanation, or type of a Dhyani Buddha" is perfectly correct; the number of Dhyani Buddhas or Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits, perfected human spirits of former world periods, is infinite, but only five are

practically identified in exoteric and seven in esoteric teaching, and this identification, be it remembered, is a manner of speaking which must not be interpreted too literally, for there is a unity in the sublime spirit-life in question that leaves no room for the isolation of individuality. All this will be seen to harmonize perfectly with the revelations concerning Nature embodied in previous chapters, and need not in any way be attributed to mystic imaginings. The Dhyani Buddhas, or Dhyan Chohans, are the perfected humanity of previous Manwantaric epochs, and their collective intelligence is described by the name "Addi-Buddha," which Mr. Rhys Davids is mistaken in treating as a comparatively recent invention of the Northern Buddbish. Addi-Buddha means primordial wisdom, and is mentioned in the oldest Sanscrit books. For example, in the philosophical dissertation on the Mandukya Upanishad," by Gowdapatha, a Sanscrit author contemporary with Buddha himself, the expression is freely used and expounded in exact accordance with the present statement. A friend of mine in India, a Brahmin pundit of first-rate attainments as a Sanscrit scholar, has shown me a copy of this book, which has never yet, that he knows of, been translated into English, and has pointed out a sentence bearing on the present question, giving me the following translation: "Prakriti itself in fact, is Addi-Buddha, and all the Dharmas have been existing from eternity." Gowdapatha is a philosophical writer respected by all Hindoo and Buddhist sects alike, and widely known. He was the guru, or

spiritual teacher of the first Sankaracharya, of whom I shall have to speak more at length very shortly.

Adeptship, when Buddha incarnated, was not the condensed, compact hierarchy that it has since become under his influence. There has never been an age of the world without its adepts; but they have sometimes been scattered throughout the world, they have sometimes been isolated in separate seclusions, they have gravitated now to this country, now to that; and finally, be it remembered, their knowledge and power has not always been inspired with the elevated and severe morality which Buddha infused into its latest and highest organization. The reform of the occult world by his instrumentality was, in fact, the result of his great sacrifice, of the self-denial which induced him to reject the blessed condition of Nirvana to which, after his earth-life as Buddha, he was fully entitled, and undertake the burden of renewed incarnations in order to carry out more thoroughly the task he had taken in hand, and confer a correspondingly increased benefit on mankind. Buddha reincarnated himself, next after his existence as Gautama Buddha, in the person of the great teacher of whom but little is said in exoteric works on Buddhism, but without a consideration of whose life it would be impossible to get a correct conception of the position in the Eastern world of esoteric sciencenamely, Sankaracharya. The latter part of this name, it may be explained—acharya-merely means teacher. The whole name as a title is perpetuated to this day under curious circumstances, but the