it. It may seize on the higher opportunities in two ways; it may throw up the struggle in two ways; it may attain sublime spirituality for good or sublime spirituality for evil; it may ally itself to physically for (not evil but for) utter annihilation; or, on the other hand, for (not good but for) the negative result of beginning the educational processes of incarnation all over again.

CHAPTER IX.

BUDDHA.

THE historical Buddha, as known to the custodians of the Esoteric Doctrine, is a personage whose birth is not invested with the quaint marvels popular story has crowded round it. Nor was his progress to adeptship traced by the literal occurrence of the supernatural struggles depicted in symbolic legend. On the other hand, the incarnation, which may outwardly be described as the birth of Buddha, is certainly not regarded by occult science as an event like any other birth, nor the spiritual development through which Buddha passed during his earth-life, a mere process of intellectual evolution, like the mental history of any other philosopher. The mistake which ordinary European writers make in dealing with a problem of this sort, lies in their inclination to treat exoteric legend either as a record of a miracle about which no more need be said, or as pure myth, putting merely a fantastic decoration on a remarkable life. This, it is assumed, however remarkable, must have been lived according to the theories of Nature at present accepted by the nineteenth century. The account which has now been given in the foregoing pages, may prepare the way for a statement

as to what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches concerning the real Buddha, who was born, as modern investigation has quite correctly ascertained, 643 years before the Christian era, at Kapila-vastu, near Benares.

Exoteric conceptions, knowing nothing of the laws which govern the operations of Nature in her higher departments, can only explain an abnormal dignity attaching to some particular birth, by supposing that the physical body of the person concerned was generated in a miraculous manner. Hence the popular notion about Buddha, that his incarnation in this world was due to an immaculate conception. Occult science knows nothing of any process for the production of a physical human child other than that appointed by physical laws; but it does know a good deal concerning the limits within which the progressive "one life," or "spiritual monad," or continuous thread of a series of incarnations, may select definite child-bodies as their human tenements. By the operation of Karma, in the case of ordinary mankind, this selection is made, unconsciously as far as the antecedent, spiritual Ego emerging from Devachan is concerned. But in those abnormal cases where the one life has already forced itself into the sixth principle-that is to say, where a man has become an adept, and has the power of guiding his own spiritual Ego, in full consciousness as to what he is about, after he has quitted the body in which he won adeptship, either temporarily or permanently— it is quite within his power to select his own next incarnation. During life even, he gets above

the Devachanic attraction. He becomes one of the conscious directing powers of the planetary system to which he belongs, and great as this mystery of selected reincarnation may be, it is not by any means restricted in its application to such extraordinary events as the birth of a Buddha. It is a phenomenon frequently reproduced by the higher adepts to this day, and while a great deal recounted in popular Oriental mythology is either purely fictitious or entirely symbolical, the reincarnations of the Dalai and Teshu Lamas in Tibet, at which travellers only laugh for want of the knowledge that might enable them to sift fact from fancy, is a sober scientific achievement. In such cases the adept states beforehand in what child, when and where to be born, he is going to reincarnate, and he very rarely fails. We say very rarely, because there are some accidents of physical nature which cannot be entirely guarded against; and it is not absolutely certain that with all the foresight even an adept may bring to bear upon the matter, the child he may choose to become-in his reincarnated state-may attain physical maturity successfully. And, meanwhile, in the body, the adept is relatively helpless. Out of the body he is just what he has been ever since he became an adept; but as regards the new body he has chosen to inhabit, he must let it grow up in the ordinary course of Nature, and educate it by ordinary processes, and initiate it by the regular occult method into adeptship, before he has got a body fully ready again for occult work on the physical plane. All these processes are immensely simplified, it is true, by the peculiar spiritual force

working within; but at first, in the child's body, the adept soul is certainly cramped and embarrassed, and, as ordinary imagination might suggest, very uncomfortable and ill at ease. The situation would be very much misunderstood if the reader were to imagine that reincarnation of the kind described, is a privilege which adepts avail themselves of with pleasure.

Buddha's birth was a mystery of the kind described, and by the light of what has been said, it will be easy to go over the popular story of his miraculous origin, and trace the symbolic references to the facts of the situation in some even of the most grotesque fables. None for example can look less promising as an allusion to anything like a scientific fact, than the statement that Buddha entered the side of his mother as a young white elephant. But the white elephant is simply the symbol of adeptship-something considered to be a rare and beautiful specimen of its kind. So with other anti-natal legends pointing to the fact that the future child's body had been chosen as the habitation of a great spirit already endowed with superlative wisdom and goodness. Indra and Brahma came to do homage to the child at his birth-that is to say, the powers of Nature were already in submission to the Spirit within him. The thirtytwo signs of a Buddha, which legends describe by means of a ludicrous physical symbolism, are merely the various powers of adeptship.

The selection of the body known as Siddhartha, and afterwards as Gautama, son of Suddhodana, of Kapila-Vastu, as the human tenement of the