Alexandrian Buddhism

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 41 of 54

Alexandrian Buddhism
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, September 17, 1985

Transcript:

This lecture was delivered by Roger Wheeler at the Whirling Rainbow School on Tuesday, September 17th, 1985.

Um, Alexandrian Buddhism, let's call it that. We've been trying to understand, and we have found that it's very difficult to understand. Not only in a Krishnamurti sense of the difficulties of understanding and his sense of the difficulties of understanding, is that the speaker keeps interjecting his presence in the conversation at inopportune times. Our difficulty in understanding is that we keep interjecting our time, our 1985 consciousness and traditions, our history into what we're trying to understand. And it's very, very difficult. We have all been given a very complete mythology from little ones right on up, and it doesn't much matter what tradition we have come from, all those mythologies have dovetailed, and it's an airtight, open and shut case. Only, it turns out, on deep introspection over a long time, that none of those cases are completely right and that they mythologies tend to not quite connect. And that in between those lines, in the context of the increasing fragmentation of our worldview, we glimpse a light. And that's the only way that I can describe it. And the light is that there was at one time, about 17 or 1800 years ago, a world civilization, one that stretched from Britain to China, and that somehow the ecumenical understanding of that civilization was completely truncated and lost in a psychological catastrophe that closed out the third century A.D. and that we have in our time in the 19th century, archetypal memories of that which we have projected back to fantastic times like Atlantis or Mu.

And actually it's much closer. And that the crumbling of the world civilization left its traces. Through all of the civilizations that succeeded it, and that somehow Alexandria is the key place that we have to look continuously to try and understand. Tonight, we're going to take a look at the relationship that Alexandria had with India. And we started last week somewhat, but this week we'll go deeper into it. When Alexander conquered the world, as we talked about last week, he stopped his armies at the city called Taxila, which has been excavated in the early 20th century. And we have the three big volumes here by Sir John Marshall. One of the curious things about the. Greek savants at that time is that they recognized in India a common mythology with the Greeks, which led them to suppose either that the Indians were descendants of the Greeks, or that the Greeks were descendants of Indians, or that they had common ancestors. We know today from archaeology, from philology, from all kinds of scholarly studies, that archaic Greek and early Sanskrit are a common root language, and that they shared their linguistic origins with a lot of the Phoenician and early Semitic languages like Ugaritic, and that the same language family was spoken from Greece to India and the entire Fertile Crescent in between. We can see that the mythological motifs are so close that we can even set up the same kinds of patterns now, and that there is a great deal of evidence that Shiva and Dionysius are similar, that Indra and Zeus are similar.

The difficulty in this is that in between Greece and India was always the Middle East, and the Middle East was always much more attuned and much more sensitive to integration, to interpenetration than either the Greeks of the Indians, the Greeks or the Indians were very interested in preserving the old traditions as they were. The Middle East was interested in finding the inner essence of all the traditions, and to settle for nothing less than that. And so we have in the Semitic lands the birth of universal religion, not just the tradition which one would receive blindly or not so blindly, but the quest to try to see behind the tradition. What is the, uh, essence? Or finally it would come to be what was the quintessence for it? There must be a unity somehow, underneath all the appearances. And so the great Semitic psyche sought a single god without reserve, whereas the Greek and the Indian minds were quite content to explore the unity of the divine in its structure, in its pattern. And so for the Greeks and the Indians there was the urge to see into the world the patterning of the divine manifestation. Whereas in between, in the Semitic lands there was the interiorization of the investigation to come to some single focus.

That focus could never be named. And the converse of that was that the Greek and the Indian minds could never put a final shape around the Divine's influence on the world. And so, in a way, the Greek and the Indian minds are very similar in that they respect divinity as an infinite expression. And the Semitic mind understands the divine as plumb line zero, where there is no manifestation whatsoever in terms that we would recognize it. So that the Semitic mind goes for the fulcrum of reality and will not have anything else. The Greek and the Indian minds go for the indefinite exploration. These two views come together and they produce what we know colloquially as the mystery religions. And the mystery religions have their basic procedure with the initiation of the ordinary person into the extraordinary realm, to take the ordinary person out of the life that they thought they were living into the true life that they are capable of living. And we will see tonight that this is the very essence of what transformed classic Buddhism into Mahayana, transformed the certain sects of Judaism into Christianity, and transformed Hellenistic Judaism, uh, Judaism into Rabbinical Judaism. And these three movements, these three religions, uh, occur together. And they are so intertwined together that they actually constitute a family of religions. They are like three brothers, and there is almost no real difference between the three.

Uh, peculiarly enough, there is every difference in the expression of them. We talked last week about Ashoka, about how Ashoka was a very strange child. He had mottled skin because he was an interracial child. His mother was a Greek princess. His father was an Indian king. Chandragupta, very powerful, the first great empire builder in Indian history. India never had a Sargon, never had a Agamemnon until after Alexander the Great brought the idea of a world emperor to India, and in the very next generation was Chandragupta maurya. And Ashoka was partially legitimate. But he was the child of Chandragupta in his old age, so that Ashoka, even though physically he was a son, was more like a grandson, and because he was such a strange boy and had such a strange kind of mind, he did not fit in to the normal patterns. Now, Ashoka was one of the great geniuses of history. He is the most potent military, uh, person in Asian history up to that time. And when he conquered India, almost all of what we remember as British India from, um, Assam all the way over to Afghanistan and from the Hindu Kush, all the way down almost to Bangalore in southern India. The price of this, as we discussed last week, was horrendous. The mounds of dead, hundreds of thousands of them was an appalling sight to Ashoka. And he had a psychological trauma of extraordinary dimensions and he had to temporarily take himself out of the world.

And he was, uh, sick at heart, sick in his mind in such a way that he felt that he might never be cured. There was no chance to adjust him to the reality of the situation, for it was horrendous beyond concern. And so Ashoka was taken into a Buddhist monastery, and it took two and a half years just to acclimate him to the true conditions of his life. And in that two and a half years, he made absolutely no advance towards being cured at all. It was like just being brought current to himself, because there can be no cure until we are present to ourselves. And it took two and a half years to do this, and once that was done, it took just one more year to part that veil. And this is the time honored technique and the mystery religions. And in, uh, uh, Buddhism, one brings oneself to oneself so that there is a coincidence between the mental image that one has of oneself and one's life, uh, process as one is. And then one parts the mental image and sees that taking away the mental image does not destroy one's. Sell that you are not the mental image and that the waywardness of the mental image. Traveling like an astral body in one's imagination and memory was actually a deception. It was an appearance.

And that the complications that such an image encountered was like a dream. But in fact was not a dream, but was a product of ignorance. And so coming to to oneself cures this mental disease. Ashoka, then in the 12th year of his reign, converted the entire kingdom to Buddhism, but without a sword and without making a big deal out of it. He took statements of his own condition, the basic laws of the land, the basic insights that had cured him, and he had them posted throughout the kingdom at all the strategic cities and all the strategic passes. They were put on pillars, they were carved on rocks, and they were made absolutely public. And Ashoka then disbanded his armies. He is the first military ruler in history to do this. And for 50 years, Ashoka's Mauryan Empire survived without an army, without a police force, with no coercion of any kind whatsoever. And Ashoka put the army to work building a series of connecting roads, planting groves of trees every so often, building a sheltering spots, and placing in these sheltering spots hospitals which would cure people of diseases, and monasteries which would cure people of mental diseases and attendant upon these hospitals were guarded inns where medicinal herbs and so forth were planted. And Ashoka, in his edict, says that he extended this network of medical healing all the way to Alexandria. Alexandria in Egypt, and that this was done in the reign of the Yavana king Antiochus the Second.

And the inscription that records this fact is in fact in a very interesting spot in India. It's in very close to where Gandhi was born in Gujarat state. And we have a in this publication of the Government of India. This is a the revised edition of 1967 Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. The inscriptions of Ashoka and we have a photograph here among a number of them. And this rock edict numbers one and two. In Gujarat state, Girnar is the little village where it is, and this is a photograph of the rock inscription of Ashoka and it reads as follows. Everywhere in the dominions of King Piara Darcy, that was Ashoka's name. For himself it means beloved of the gods or beloved of the angels, and likewise in the bordering territories such as those of the Cholas and Pandyas, as well as of the Satya Putra and the Kerala Putra. As far south as Tamraparni and in the territories of the Yavana king. This is Greek Yavana, the Yavana king Antiochus, that's Antiochus, and also the kings who are the neighbors of the said Antiochus, beloved of the gods, has arranged for the two kinds of medical treatment the medical treatment for men and the medical treatment for animals. And wherever there were no medicinal herbs beneficial to men and beneficial to animals, they have been caused to be imported and planted wherever there were no roots and fruits, they have been caused to be imported and planted on the roads.

Wells have been caused to be dug, and trees have been caused to be planted for the enjoyment of animals and men. Now in this, if we read it in a provincial sense, we think of animals and their beasts of burden. But remember that Ashoka has gone through a conversion. He has gone through a mystery process of coming back to himself from the depths of madness. Personal psychosis. And when he talks about men and animals, he means that men who have not had this experience are like animals, that they are on the same level of prosaic reality that animals are, that men who have not come true to themselves are not really men, yet they are not really human beings in the way in which human beings can know themselves. So we have this, and we have also the fact that many of Ashoka's inscriptions on the pillars and on the rocks were written in several languages, like on the Rosetta Stone and two of the languages that were used besides Magadhi and besides Sanskrit, were Greek and Aramaic, and this was 250 BC, 250 years before Jesus was born, speaking the Aramaic language. Ashoka's laws of piety were inscribed in the passes of Afghanistan and into Persia in Aramaic and Greek together, which shows a very peculiar arrangement.

Why would it be that Greek and Aramaic would be put on the same inscriptions? The reason for this is that just before Ashoka in Alexandria was the great Ptolemy Philadelphus, who had for the first time brought the Hebrew Old Testament into a translation of the Greek, and so that Greek and Semitic languages were fused together in a religious vision in Alexandria, and that one generation later, when Ashoka was putting up his documents, the Yavana people, the Greek people were seen to be close and Intermeshed with the Semitic people. The first perception of the Hellenization of Judaism and the Judaization of the Greek mind was seen in India by Ashoka, about 30 years after it began to happen in Alexandria. This was also about 80 years after Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great. And so we have to understand that the translating of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint version, which we have, was not the beginning of the interpenetration of the Greek and the Hebrew minds, but was a culmination of about 50 years or three generations of this development. Now, remember, Alexandria was never a village. It never grew like most cities grew. Alexandria was the first city in the world that was made to be the international capital from the word go. It was like San Francisco. It was never a little town. It was always a big city. From the very beginning. It was always the royal city.

And the first thing that Alexander did was use up all of the grain of his soldiers to map out the city, and he mapped out where the palaces were going to be and where the harbors were going to be and where the, uh, the world center of his empire was going to be in Alexandria. This was it. And he fully intended to extend his empire as far to the west as he had to the east. So that in Alexandria we have a very interesting situation. Now. Philadelphia's was succeeded by the third Ptolemy, whose name was Euergetes, and he was succeeded by another Ptolemy named Philopator. Contemporaneous with the third Ptolemy was Antiochus the second, called Theos, who ruled the Hellenistic Persian Empire, which linked up. Alexandria with India so that there was only one empire in between. Now the Oxford Classical Dictionary says of Antiochus the second Theos, who ruled roughly from about 260 BC to about 247 BC, which was contemporaneous with Ashoka, that his reign comprises the most obscure period of Seleucid history. The Seleucids were the Persians at that time. Most of the known facts bear on his relations with Egypt, and show that by the Second Syrian War of 260 to 255 BC in alliance with Macedonia, he recovered most of what his father had lost, namely the coast of Asia minor and places in Coele-syria. Coele-syria, of course, is what is known today as Israel and Lebanon, so that what has come to be Israel today was a scene of contest of power between the Seleucid Hellenistic kingdom and the Egyptian or Ptolemaic Hellenistic kingdom.

It was a point of contact between them, which was full of tension. And we have seen through this year in our lecture series that that tension produced in the indigenous people who were there, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Canaanites, the desire to mitigate this constant struggle between the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic kingdoms. And it was they who invited the Romans to come in and solve this problem, that the tension was too much. Having these two kingdoms constantly vying, and that the Romans first sent invoice about this time pledging their eternal friendship to the Hebrew peoples. And this is the tap root of the involvement of the Roman Empire with this region of the world, and the tap root of the whole incredible complexity that the future of the Roman Empire hung upon the balance of this fulcrum. Remember now that to the Semitic mind, the experience of the divine is a fulcrum, focus, experience. This is the core of reality. It was the implosion of Roman power increasingly over 200 years into this area, focusing more and more that brought the consciousness rising up, that there was some eternal plan involved in this, and that they had become the focus for some divine plan. This was the consciousness that rose to a fever pitch around the turn of the millennium.

Now the son of Antiochus the Second or Antiochus the Great, ruled from lived from 241 to 187 BC, which takes him down into Maccabean times, which takes him down into the times when the Enochian literature was being written, so that the son of the Antiochus that Ashoka was talking about is the man who is a powerful in this region of the world at this time. It reads here that, um, his first attempt to conquer Ptolemaic Syria and Palestine was foiled by a Ptolemaic victory at Raphia. And we've talked about this in the war. That was about 216 BC, but he finally regained Parthia and Bactria as vassal kingdoms. These are Greek Buddhist kingdoms in the northwest of India, what is now today Kashmir, Bactria and then Parthia as, uh, southern Afghanistan and northern Persia. These two regions were recovered by Antiochus the Great, and then he recovered the area, which they referred to as Ptolemaic Syria and Palestine around 198 uh BC, so that Antiochus the Great in the early one 80s BC brought together northern India and Palestine in the sense that they were the farthest reaches of his kingdom, so that between Alexandria and India was just the frontier of what is today the Gaza Strip, and that there was a tremendous seesaw power struggle over this Gaza Strip area, if you recall, and the power struggle there was so great that it, um, sapped the energy of Ptolemaic Egypt and sapped the energy of the Seleucid, uh, Empire.

And this allowed for the rise of the Maccabean kings and the Maccabean powers, because both sides had so weakened each other that they were both able to be expelled. And the rise of the Maccabees was a direct result of this, and they were conscious of the fact that in their focus of Roman power, in their focus of divine involvement, they had managed to push back these two powerful foes, and had made their way and were now kings again for the first time in about 300 years in in Judea. And they were conscious that this was a new revolution, a new turn in some great divine plan. And this was the period which in Jewish history is called the Second Temple, the period of the Second Temple. The first temple is Solomon's, but the second temple belongs to the Maccabean kings. And so the idea of a Jewish kingship as a sacred power in human history gains great foothold at this time in the second century BC, and its power behind it was a vision which culminated in the Enochian literature, the vision that somehow the nature of man's focusing of divine power had allowed him to expand himself so that he could now contact the heavenly regions. Enoch is the first person in all of Hebrew literature to be taken up, uh, by.

By angelic powers and shown not only the future, but shown the heavens and shown the architecture of the heavens. If you remember, we did about six lectures on this and then returned back to earth. In Greek literature, the archetypal journey was into the underworld. Odysseus goes into the underworld and the Roman copies of the Greek literature, uh, um, Virgil's Aeneas goes into the underworld. But there is no experience whatsoever in Greek literature of a man going to the upper world of going to the heavens. And so the Enochian literature initiates something absolutely new in this literature, in this whole region, in this bell letters, that capacity within about 40 years became a visionary capacity which was manifesting itself in certain Jewish sages. And around 146 BC, as we saw about four months ago, one of those Jewish sages wrote the Book of Daniel and set it back in the time of Darius, back in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, back in the time of the Babylonian exile, but was writing of contemporaneous events, and the whole purpose of the Book of Daniel was to show that human beings, in this God focus, had acquired the technique of being able to see not only dreams and interpret them, but visions of reality and interpret them. Visions of future history, visions of what we would today call archetypal levels of reality. That the penetrating inner vision had become sharpened to this extent.

This, we are able to see this week also coincides with the development of the Asean sects of Judaism, that the Asean sects of Judaism come specifically because finding that this was true of certain individuals and that this could be passed on genetically, as we would say today, or that this could be engendered, communally, caused the beginnings of the experiments in the desert, of setting up communities of people to try and learn these techniques, to try and develop in themselves these capacities. And from the 140 or 130 BC onward, the development of the Asean communities, especially along the Dead Sea, were moving apace. At the very same time, outside of Alexandria, uh, Alexandria is between the Mediterranean Sea and a very large lake called Mareotis, and on the north bank of Mareotis and Low Hill, where the climate was really good, a sea climate with a desert air, much like Los Angeles was the community of the therapeutics. And the therapeutics were Alexandrian as scenes and had a little bit different emphasis. The Essenes around the Dead Sea had this peculiar Daniel like visionary quality, which was the quality of seeing in terms of, uh, imminent penetration. God coming into a focus, coming into a single column of spiritual reality within a person. But the therapeutics were more oriented towards the externalization. They were more oriented towards seeing the patterning of the divine as it played itself out in terms of history.

This then set up a reverberation, and there was an interchange between these two communities, and they exchanged their whole focus. In the first century BC, the Asean communities began to, uh, around the Dead Sea, began to suddenly look out in terms of historical development. And we have the documents at that time that come out are the Book of Jubilees, the idea of a jubilee being every 49, every 50 50th a generation or every 50th day, uh, every 50th week, every 50th year being a great node in some large process. And so the Essenes become increasingly in the first century BC. Aware of what their Alexandrian counterparts had become aware of in the second century BC. They become aware that there is some great pattern of history moving towards a point, moving towards a person which they would call the Messiah. And the Alexandrian thérapeutes in the first century BC, taking on the Dead Sea, A-scene ideas of purity and so forth begin not looking so much at external history anymore as Greco Egyptians would, but more and more interior izing the experience so that it would come down within the transformation of the individual. So by the time of zero BC zero AD, the Asean communities around where the Jordan River came into the Dead Sea were looking for the advent of the Messiah. They had computed the rhythms, they had computed the esoteric understanding of their history. And this was the time.

And the Alexandrian thérapeutes had discovered that inner transformation was a viable therapy that actually did work, and that individuals, independent of any kind of historical pattern, were able to become an eternal spiritual beings. This is the odd milieu into which Jesus was born. It's extremely difficult, though, to appreciate this without bringing in the Indian situation. And in India we we have to now look after Ashoka, the Mauryan Empire, because it had no force, it had no army, began to be dependent upon the spread of the social work of the Buddhist religion, the doing good for for others, the running of hospitals, the planting of medicinal herbs, the caring for wayfarers, and so forth. There was a change because when power politics rose up again, it forced the Buddhists away from involvement in social work and forced them into reserves called monasteries. And the rise of the monasteries. And actually the word monastery is a Greek terme. It never occurs in Sanskrit. It never occurs in Pali or in any of the Indian languages. The whole idea of a monastery is a Greek idea. It is a Greek idea to limit good people to a certain area and not to kill them off their competition with you, but instead of killing them off, you allow them to live, but only within a certain preserve. They can stay on the monastery grounds. They can stay in the monasteries and practice what they they want.

But you take over the highways, you take over the countryside, you take over the cities, the revenues and everything else, so that the rise of the next generation of Indian empires after Ashoka, within about, uh, 15, 20 years of his death, his sons and grandsons were unable to hold this Mauryan Empire. Together we see the rise of power politics and these Indian kings, knowing that they can't really run a power show like this, imported Greek mercenary generals to train their armies for them. And they brought in a powerful Greek, uh, provincial governors to make sure that what they had conquered would stay conquered. And so, by the 100 BC time, there was a great contrast, all of a sudden, between the Buddhist monastic communities and the power structures which were run by Greek mercenary generals and small petty kings, actually. And it was at this time that one of the classics of Indian literature was written. I guess I didn't bring it to the table here. It's called The Questions of King Melinda and Melinda is the Pali pronunciation of the Greek name Menander. And Menander is a very powerful Greek king, an autocrat, and he runs the Kingdom of northwest India, and his conversations are with a Buddhist monk because he becomes curious. Just who are you people, anyway? Um. Why is it that we have to take care of you? How come you get these places? What are you good for? And so this pious old Buddhist monk, very, very old, has a series of conversations with King Menander which are recorded by royal decree, so that at the end he can decide whether or not he's going to kill him or whether he's going to let him live.

And this record is recorded in Greek, and it's the first Buddhist scripture that's written in Greek. It's part of the Buddhist canon and translated into the Pali language later on in the Greek original has been lost. The Pali copy we have. And in this conversation, an archetypal structure comes to bear, because it's the story of the king and the wise man. It's the story of King Arthur and Merlin. It's the story of a king realizing that the real substrate for power is man's control of himself, that if he can't control himself, he has no chance to control a kingdom or others whatsoever. And that true control of oneself is being able to not be baffled by one's mind. And so Menander is initiated almost surreptitiously into this mystery religion, and by the end of the questions of King Menander, he is a Greek Buddhist king. And it's done completely aboveboard and recorded by the royal scribes and so forth. After about 150 years, these Greek kingdoms began to also in their time crumble, also began to lose sway, and there arose around 75 to 80 A.D.

in the Central Asian part, just over the Hindu Kush range. A great world conqueror. You may not have ever heard of him, but he's extremely famous in Asian history. His name was Kanishka, and Kanishka decided that he was strong enough, and that he had enough armies that he was going to conquer and re-establish Ashoka's empire and extended even further. And there are many, uh, uh, esoteric books, esoteric because they're scholarly and difficult to find. This one's called papers and the Date of Kanishka, published in Leiden, Netherlands, 1968. Almost nobody has things like this except, uh, uh, old hunters like me who don't give up. Kanishka was a contemporary of Trajan, the great Roman emperor who established the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire. And in fact, the reason that Trajan could not extend the Roman Empire any farther to the east was because it came up against Kanishka's great, uh, Kushan Empire, his, uh, tribal, uh, uh, affinities were with the Kushans, and Kanishka not only reconquered all of Ashoka's empire, the whole of what we would understand as British India, but he moved the bridge over the Himalayas, over the Hindu Kush, into the vast stretches of Central Asia, the Gobi desert regions. And so Kanishka is one of the great figures in world history, because he links India with the Gobi Desert, and he links India with the, uh, Persian and the Gobi Desert. And so he sets up all of the trade routes, all of the idea that this is a single kingdom and this is all done around 75 to 80 AD and because Kanishka admires the Greek archetype, the Greek prototype, he searches by messenger throughout his whole kingdom to find out who is the wisest man and the wisest man by great popular acclaim comes back.

The word is a man named Ashvaghosha, who lives in a great, beautiful Buddhist monastic city near the site of the Buddha's, uh, uh, great, uh, first sermon. And so Kanishka puts together an army of thousands of elephants, and the riders have huge conch shells, and they have huge, uh, feathered plumes on their heads. They're they're not dressed in armor to fight, but they're dressed in gorgeous array to impress. And the clouds of this army of elephants and so forth just rise up as high as mountains. This is the way the the legends run. And Kanishka then surrounds this great city and sets up a great clamor and then sends his honor guard to the city gates, saying that he has come and will not be refused to have the greatest treasure of the Kushan Empire returned to its rightful owner, Kanishka, who is the king of this, and that is the personage of this monk. Ashvaghosha. And little Ashvaghosha comes out from the city gates and surrenders himself, and the army, taking its treasure, turns around and goes off into the sunset.

This is just the way that the the Indian mythological history has it, and Ashvaghosha writes a book which is called The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. And he wrote it about the same time that Saint John was writing his gospel around, uh, 85 to 90 A.D. and the Gospel of Saint John and Ashvaghosha is discourse on the awakening of Faith in the Mahayana are extremely close together, and the accuracy of their presentation of spiritual transformation is almost akin to each other. Um, here is a quotation from it. Those who have transcended the stage of Bodhisattva hood and attained the ultimate goal possess a consciousness which is consistent and harmonious. They have recognized the origin from which consciousness starts. This will truly be called enlightenment. Having transcended the attributes of enlightenment and the subtlest form of particularization, they have gained a perfect and eternal insight into the very nature of the soul, because the latter now presents itself to them in its absolute and immutable form. Therefore, they are called those who have gone beyond, and theirs is perfect enlightenment. And therefore it is said in the sutras that those who have an insight into the non-reality of all subjectivity attain to this wisdom the Sophia of those who have gone beyond. And this is a quotation from Ashvaghosha, uh, awakening of faith in the Suzuki translation. Part of the extreme difficulty in appreciating and understanding all of this comes from our description, which we read last week from Philo of his his description of the way in which the therapeutic community was set up in Alexandria, the way that the individual people had their own little meditation huts all within the same compound, and that in the center of the compound there was a larger structure, a little bit more permanent, where on every seventh day they came together and ate a meal together, that the Sabbath was a communion of all of these individuals who were working to perfect themselves and their visionary qualities six days a week.

This is the origin of the esoteric, uh, hermetic statement. The six days work. The six days work is the code of of applying oneself to work upon your own interiorization. And so the Sabbath was no longer a Sabbath in terms of exterior rhythm, but it was a coming together in terms of an interior focus. It's the difference between a rhythm which has a sociological, uh, import and an interior focus, which has a transcendental quality. And every seventh Sabbath or every 49th day on the Jubilee, on the 50th day, they would not only come together to have a communion together, a meal together, but that the Eucharist would be raised to a different level, and they would spend the entire night together, each of them singing to one another in turn the songs which they had learned in their visions, and that at the end of giving this recitation of these secret songs which they had learned in their visions, they would then join their voices together in a mystical choral, and they would sing together in hymn to the Rising Sun, and then they would go back into the cycle again.

And this is what happened north of Alexandria. And this is the way that the therapeutic community was set up. And this is quite different from almost anything else in the world at the time, except for the way that Buddhist monasteries were organized, and they were organized in the very same way and have, in fact, until up until this day. A been kept very much in the same shape. It is a difficult thing for us to appreciate the development of spiritual gifts. We are so convinced in our late age that spirituality is only a condition of grace, or is only a condition which comes when you understand doctrine, or only a condition when you blend into a legitimate tradition. But the fact is, is that 2000 years ago, the spiritual avant garde of mankind was absolutely, um, practicing the development of spiritual gifts for oneself, and that these gifts would manifest in terms of a vision which could be sung, and that it was the merging of the harmonies of the voices together that produced the cosmic resonance, and that it was that that focused reality. This was the thérapeutes and this was their idea, the acenes.

Very similar to them, kept the idea that purity was to return then oneself back to the tradition and purify the tradition. That the transformation that happened within oneself did not stop there. You didn't wink out like some transcendental light, but that you carried that light back into the tradition that had been polluted and reinstated the purity of history, and reinstated the purity of the tradition, and reinstated the purity of the temple. And so it was purifying the temple. That was the prime directive of the Essenes. Whereas for the Thérapeutes it was inner transformation into the kingdom of the within. Two different movements. The Thérapeutes actually were the core of this Semitic tradition, because the Semitic tradition, as we have said, was always classically the bringing together of the focus of the divine into a single column of spiritual thread within. And the Essenes actually became a Greco-Roman structure, which made the Christian church in which made Rabbinical Judaism, which was to, uh, develop an exterior that would go on indefinitely in its infinity, that it had application indefinitely. And so we see a very, very, very peculiar change. And from the Alexandrian therapeutic tradition comes the development of the Hermetic tradition and the development of Gnosticism. And from the Essenes comes the development of the Christian church as a church and the development of Rabbinic Judaism. The Mahayana tradition is very much like Christianity and Judaism.

It is to develop a world church. Whereas the old Theravada Buddhist tradition is very much like the Hermetic or the Gnostic tradition to transform the individual. And that's it. That when you are transformed, you don't want to have anything more to do with the world. Whereas the Mahayana and Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, say, when you have transformed yourself, take that back to the world and help make it better, because the world must be purified also and not left bereft. And this was the great watershed that happened in the first century A.D., and the tension between these two spiritual movements, which were so close and so similar in so many ways, produced a worldwide civilization in the second century A.D. and we're going to see more of that next week. But as it produced a worldwide civilization, the powers that controlled those worldwide civilizations the Roman Empire, the Kushan Empire, the Han Chinese Empire saw themselves threatened by both of these movements and seizing upon power. Politics, managed to convince these two different traditions, these two sibling or brother or sister spiritual traditions, that they were actually different and working counterproductively and forced them apart. And it was the forcing of those two apart in the third century AD that split the world civilization into fragments. It actually happened. Well, we'll see more of that next week. We're going to move into the first century AD and the development of all these things.

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