Chinese Influence in Hellenistic World

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 44 of 54

Chinese Influence in Hellenistic World
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 8, 1985

Transcript:

This lecture was given by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on October 8th, 1985.

Chinese influences in the Hellenistic world. We're coming to a very difficult occurrence, and that is, we're going to have to now begin to move into the ad centuries. We're going to have to move into the first century AD, and the first century AD is the most difficult century to understand. It just simply is almost beyond our capacity to orient ourselves enough to actually have occurred to us the reality that the first century AD was we just historically. It's beyond belief. Now, the Roman story of what happened in the first century AD is told by one of the greatest of all historians, Tacitus and Tacitus, in two large volumes. We do not have the complete works, but we have large chunks of them, several hundreds of pages, the histories and the annals. And they portrait of the age that Tacitus gives us is one of complete madness of human society, of human civilization, raised up to a power level that had never been seen in the world before, a power level that the pharaohs of Egypt, or the mythical rulers of Atlantis or anybody had never dreamed of before. And this Roman power imploded upon human personalities in a way that dissolved them. And for the whole of the first century AD, Roman rule was one nightmare after another, and no sanity was restored until the very end of the century. 96 A.D. was the first time that there was any kind of stability, and because of the pressures, because there was so much psychological pressure.

There were four different emperors that year, one after another, like the changing of the seasons, they were just smashed aside by events until an old man, almost too old to care, named Nerva, took the reigns long enough to restore a little stability. And then a very, very great figure in world history, Trajan took control of the Roman Empire again and righted the ship of state. And Trajan is one of the really great figures in world history. Trajan is the first man since Augustus to be able to handle the pressures of office, and because of Trajan's great nature, he realized that only a growing dynamic empire was stable. And so under Trajan, the Roman Empire grew to its largest extent, and Trajan again instituted the ancient Roman policy of continually adding on and pushing the frontier out and being very wise. He trained his successor, a very, uh, exquisitely intelligent and elegant man named Hadrian, and he counseled Hadrian. The way to govern this empire is not to stay in Rome, that Rome has become like a psychological anvil that crushes men, and only the sycophants are able to exist. And the higher up the pyramid of power, where sycophants turn into rulers of power, they are destroyed. And so Hadrian would spend almost all of his long career is emperor, traveling throughout the Roman Empire. And he spent only a few days in Rome, and that way survived. And the long reigns of Trajan and Hadrian comparatively long allowed the Roman Empire to write itself.

And after Hadrian came a very fine individual named Antoninus Pius the Pious one, and in this age, the age of the Antonines, Rome achieved its greatest glory and greatest splendor. And Antoninus Pius, taking a cue from Trajan, raised a very intelligent, uh, successor, whose name is known to all as. Marcus Aurelius, and thus for about 90 years, the Roman ship of state was righted in the second century A.D., but after Marcus Aurelius. Slowly but surely, the corrosive powers, the psychological pressures grabbed hold again, and at the end of the second century, Rome was heading again into the same old nightmare. So we have to understand the first century AD in order to understand that the false stability, the grandeur of Rome of the second century AD was absolutely a sham, absolutely an illusion, and that the third century is the most crucial, crucial century outside of the 20th in human history. But the first century is the key to it. The first century AD is like the trigger on what has happened in world history for the last 2000 years. And the trigger was pulled in the first century A.D.. What makes it so mysterious is that we are still carrying around in ourselves schmeared images on a deeply unconscious level, which forbids us from understanding in the two most primordial ways. We are forbidden to differentiate and thus understand analytically. And we are forbidden to integrate and thus understand synthetically.

And so these two primordial human capacities are stymied in us when it comes to the first century AD, in fact, almost everyone that you meet or will ever meet has accepted the mythology of the fourth century AD, and it's the mythology of the fourth century AD that eventually obtained and created, and all the rest of the histories of the West up until the present day. And it is simply revivals of the mythology of the fourth century AD that still serve the nation states, the empires, the alliances, all of the political structures in the Western world for all these many, many centuries are versions and variants of a mythology constructed out of desperation about 1700 years ago. So the lecture tonight is fun. It's not a solemn thing, because I want to break it up a little bit, so I'm going to attack it in two different ways. The first thing that we have to realize, I want to address an image which is extremely potent in all of us, and that is of the Virgin Mary, because the archetypal energy of the virgin goddess is absolutely rampant at this time, late in the 20th century. And remember Jung's admonition, now we don't have archetypes. They have us. And this archetypal energy of the virgin goddess is a busy at work now everywhere. In order to let just a little light in on that archetypal image, I would remind us that the Virgin Mary did not remain a virgin.

She slept with Joseph. A lot of times she had a lot of children by Joseph. She had two daughters, and she had four other sons. So there were seven children in that family, and six of them, at least by Joseph. In fact, if you look at the gospel of Mark, this is chapter six. Going from that district, he went to his hometown and his disciples accompanied him with the coming of the Sabbath. He began teaching in the synagogue, and most of them were astonished when they heard him. They said, where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him and these miracles that are worked through him? This is the carpenter, surely the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph, and Jude and Simon, his sisters too. Are they not here with us? And they would not accept him. And Jesus said to them, A prophet is despised in his own country, among his own relations, and in his own house, and he could work no miracle there, though he cured a few sick people by laying his hands on them, he was amazed at their lack of faith. So the Virgin Mary was not a virgin forever. It's a very important thing to realize. The sister's names were Lydia and Lycia. Lycia. Like Asia, only with an lie. The second thing in here is that Jesus could work no miracles because there was no faith. There was no faith.

It's an insight in Mark that it's not some one overpowering a situation by their energy, but someone who works with the energy that is there only. And if that energy is not there, nothing works. No miracles. No miracles today. Because no one believes. The belief that was being alluded to here is perhaps shown most clearly in the acts of John and I'll give you just a little rendition of the acts of John that illuminates it, and then we'll go to tonight's lecture. John lived a long time, the disciple John. He lived to be in his late 90s, and he had been taken to Rome as a captive, um, largely under the aegis of a command from the Roman emperor at the time, Domitian. Domitian was one of the real terrors at the end of the first century AD, a great persecutor of Christians at that time and, um, on the way to Rome. John had been just a tremendous influence on the Roman galley that had taken him to Rome. His stateliness, his holiness, his asceticism, his kindly wisdom had just impressed them no end. And so when he was taken in front of Domitian, he was given a cup of poison to drink, which he drank, and nothing happened, and they gave the dregs of the cup to a slave nearby, and he eventually died while the audience of John before Domitian was being held. The reason that John was taken before Domitian was the same reason that Paul was taken before the Caesar in his time, uh, which was, uh, Claudius, and that is that Egypt and Alexandria were very special provinces.

The province of Egypt was the personal property of the Roman Emperor. It was not a part of the Roman Empire that belonged to the Senate and people of Rome. Almost every other province of the Roman Empire belonged to the SPQR. Senatus populusque Romanorum. The Senate and the people of Rome. But Egypt belonged personally to the emperor because Augustus, in order to handle the tremendous psychological energy which was implicit in deposing Cleopatra and vanquishing Mark Antony, decided that only the emperor in his magical king form could handle this property. And it makes us think, then, that John was probably associated with Alexandria. His Greek shows him to have been extraordinarily learned, and it also shows that in being brought before the emperor, he had become very conspicuous. So he was exiled to the island of Patmos, where it is said that he wrote revelation. But revelation was written much later, and not by John at all. John, leaving Patmos, went into the mainland, which was one of the Greek cities of Asia minor, called Miletus, on his way up to Ephesus, and he was called and beseeched by a man named Lycomedes that his wife Cleopatra was dying, and John was taken to the house, ostensibly to raise Cleopatra from the dead and a huge crowd. Many hundreds of people had been gathered around this house, the reason being that the Christian community in Asia minor was extremely public by this time.

This was around the late 80s AD and before John could work his miracle, Lycomedes also died of heart. Drake and the word went out through the city that Lycomedes had died, that the direct disciple of Jesus not only could not raise Cleopatra from the dead, but that the man who had besieged him had also died. Lycomedes was a job like figure in this city, and so the crowd grew to thousands, and John cried out in a long prayer, which, incidentally, is a very good model for a prayer of great humility. It's in the Acts of John, which was written by the disciple of John named Lucius Lusius Lusius, written probably around 130 A.D. John made a large outcry to the Lord, saying, this is not a time to withhold your mercy. And he opened his soul in a very special way, says Lucius. In the acts of John, and then reached down and called out Cleopatra by name. And she with a great shout, came alive from the dead. And as she came up, she recognized where she was. And John immediately told her that if she could keep her soul unmoved, he would show her something which was devastating to her, but that it could be rectified. And so he took her by the hand into the next adjoining room, probably through crowds of people. And there was her husband dead.

And the acts of John says that tears rolled down her cheeks, but in silence she gritted her teeth, bit her tongue as they said, ground her teeth, and stood there, and John cautioning her all the while to keep her soul unmoved. But the open, unmoved soul is the vehicle, the prism by which this power works. And then he said to Cleopatra, now you raise your husband from the dead. And so Cleopatra, managing to heed the apostle's way and words, called out to her husband and raised him from the dead. And it was an extraordinary show of what faith does, that it's not the person, it's not the Christ, it's not the apostle. Any one can do it if they are able to learn the technique, as we would say today. And the technique was to keep an open, unmoved soul filled with the divinity, or if you need, filled with the belief in the efficacy of the divinity. And this was one of the great events in early church history. It was weeded out of the Bible very, very late in church history. Late councils. I forget which one. The Acts of John was the first book that the Manichaeans chose to make a new set of gospel books. The Manichaeans put five books together to replace the Gospels. They said by Mani's time that the Gospels were so corrupt that one could not any longer get a sense of the true religious importance of Jesus of the Christ.

And so The Acts of John was the first book that they put together out of five, and that was the Manichaean gospel sequence, which, incidentally, went into Central Asia. It was the Central Asian experience of Manichaean and Nestorian Christianity that was to prove to be the salvation of the esoteric tradition in Western Europe. Why did the manichaeans, why why did the Nestorians flee to Central Asia? Because there was no place in the Roman Empire that was safe, and the only other civilized place in the whole world that was accessible to them was Central Asia, China. And this is a most peculiar situation, because we're not used to thinking that there are any Chinese influences in Western history at all. And to be told that there are enormous Chinese influences in Jesus is one of the most startling statements that one could make in this time. Nobody has written on this, nobody has said this. So we'll pioneer it and open the doors a little bit this week and next week. This week, the Chinese influence is one. That is extraordinarily unusual, and it seems like an unlikely story until we hear it and we think about it, and we realize that what we're about to be told is really a central part of Jesus's whole personality and whole method of operation. And the origin of it is not Jewish. It's not Greek, it's not Roman, it's not Buddhist, it's Chinese. So let's put our minds on China for a moment.

China had enjoyed several tremendously powerful dynasties. Contemporaneous with the Mycenaean Greeks was the Shang dynasty, a Bronze Age of great power and warlords, and so forth. And just like the Mycenaean age, the Shang dynasty, the Bronze Age in China came to a crashing halt. Within two generations, the whole power structure was completely dismembered. And if you need a symbol for this, the symbol is that an iron spear could pierce a bronze shield, just like a knife through butter. And these beautiful, glorified Bronze Age warriors, with their polished armor and their colorful plumes and their royal manner, were absolutely pushed aside by people coming in with iron weapons. The discovery of how to temper iron produced a weaponry which was so superior to bronze that there was absolutely no question. But psychologically, it was even more devastating because bronze had been the glorious alchemical emblem of the sun's energy, bent into metal for the nobles to use, for their decoration, for their armor and so forth. And here some piece of rusty, dirty old iron just pierced all that. It was a psychological trauma that was a huge catastrophe. It meant that the power source of heaven, guaranteeing to man the right to rule, had changed its emphasis, and there was a mad scramble to find a new basis upon which man could hold power. In China, the Shang dynasty was displaced by the Zhou dynasty, who the Zhou Dynasty and the power of the Zhou dynasty. The first emperor was named King Wen.

Wen and King Wen and his uncle, the Duke of Zhou, were the men who made the I Ching, and they're the ones who understood that there was a very peculiar kind of a transformation that was centered not around the armor on the outside of a man, but upon the understanding on the inside of a man. And the Zhou dynasty made great headway in this way. In fact, the Zhou dynasty was so, uh, well founded that the fifth emperor named, incidentally mu King. Mu mu was able to take a several years tour of his whole empire, and in fact was the first Chinese emperor to ever visit the West. Around 950 BC, he visited the Queen of Sheba, who he called the Royal Queen of the West, and left a written record of it, and it's in the Chinese annals. The next time we hear of Chinese contacting the West is almost 800 years later, around 135 BC, and there was a Chinese traveler named Chang Chen who pioneered the route from China to the Greek states in Bactria in northwest India. And this was right around the time that the Book of Daniel was being written in between the Zhou dynasty, which had survived for hundreds and hundreds of years, began to collapse and dissolve, but it was not displaced by another dynasty. There was not another discovery. There was not another alchemical transformation of understanding. Instead, the Zhou dynasty, when it fell, the parts of the empire became little separate feudal kingdoms, and that period of Chinese history is called the period of Warring States, and it was incessant warfare for about 200 years.

Madness upon madness. It was the first time that highly organized, powerful bands of men were loosed upon civilian populations, like packs of wild dogs, and they almost decimated the Chinese population. It was the first time that whole cities were beheaded and put to the torch. So the period of warring states was absolute chaos and anarchy, and this led to the belief that a new dynasty had to be founded, that, in fact, heaven needed to be besieged, to have a new kind of an, of a man, a new kind of an emperor. Come. And the man who unified China was named Shang Wuti. And he founded the Chen dynasty, from which we get our terms. China and the Chen dynasty remade the people of that area of the world, so that they called themselves Chinese. And they were different from the people who had been there for thousands of years. They were different mentally. They realized that it took a divine man to manifest the true kingdom. Wu TI was the man who built the Great Wall of China. He's the man who built the great, um, uh, burial tombs that had statues of his whole army that were buried with them. Tens of thousands of lifelike figures. He's the greatest builder in world history. He built more large monuments than any other person combined.

Then all the pharaohs combined. But Shang TI unifying China did not make a line of succession. He unified it as an individual. And it was because of this that the power structure decided that they would have to have a dynasty and not just wait for the next great man to come along. And so the Han dynasty was born of this tremendous compromise of many powerful individuals coming together and realizing we will have an emperor who will represent us, and he will bestow the kind of order that Shang mu t bestowed, but he will be accountable to all of us. Therefore, the Empire will be based upon a legal understanding, a system of laws, and the Han dynasty. Converted the personal triumph of Xiang Wu Tai into the first really great powerful Chinese dynasty, and the Han dynasty lasted for about 400 years and was a direct contemporaneous entity to the Roman Empire from 221 BC to about 210 AD, in the period of Warring States leading up to Xiang Wu Tai. There developed in Chinese society individuals who could not tolerate this mass immoral killing, and slowly the idea came about that there needed to be protectors of the poor. Those individuals who were tremendously skilled at warfare, who were able to own horses and armor. And so what was born in the Warring States period in China around 300 BC to around 250 BC, was the birth of the idea of a figure so familiar in Western history that we almost don't know that it's of Chinese origin, and that is the figure of the knight errant.

The knight errant. The origin of Don Quixote. The origin of Robin Hood of Lancelot du Lac is Chinese. The origin of the idea of the powerful man who is the helper of the poor. Who is the defender of the poor by the excellence of his command of the tools of combat. Is born in China in this Warring States period, and Shang Wu Tai, the great unifier of China, is simply the knight errant, raised to an ultimate level, the protector of all the people. This idea of the Chinese knight errant is extremely potent when we look at it. And in fact, because the literature is not extensive on this. Um, the first account of Chinese knight Errants, in fact, is almost, um, left out of Chinese histories. We have, um, just a few passing comments in the Han dynasty because they wanted to legitimize their power because it was based upon a legal structure. They commissioned a royal dynastic history of China to be written. And in order to ensure that the man who is going to write this would finish the task, they castrated him so that he was, uh, unable to dream up of any life other than the one that they gave him. His name was Summa Chen, and he and his father are the first great, uh, historians in China.

There were histories before them, but nothing on this comprehensive level. So Sima Qian is a historian of the quality of Thucydides or Tacitus. And in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian there is a chapter, chapter 124, which treats of biographies of the wandering knights, and it's the only reference there is in Chinese history in the official record that there even existed such things. Here's what Sima Qian says. And of course, the power structure tried to weed out this information, tried to leave out these images because they were so potent, because nothing appeals to humankind like the hero who really does help the other people, who really does bring almost from another world the saving grace, the power, the incredible capacity to buck the authorities, to buck the Caesars, to buck the Han dynasty officials and help the little people and help return them back to wholeness. This is the idea of the knight errant. Sima Qian writes, saving others in distress, helping those who cannot help themselves. Is this not what a benevolent man does? Never betraying a trust, never going back on one's word? This is the conduct of a righteous man. Thus I made the biographies of the wandering knights. You can recognize that figures like the Western heroes, like Shein and so forth, are all knights errant. They're all from this tradition. Sima Qian writes, Han Feizi has remarked, the Confucians, with their learning, pervert the laws. The knights, with their contentiousness, violate the prohibitions.

Thus he condemns both groups. Han Feizi was the author of the great treatises in which the legalists based their power structure. Uh, corporate America is very much like the Han dynasty power structure and the Roman Empire power structure, very much that same sort of thing. But Sima Shen says, yet the Confucian scholars have often been praised by the world, some of them, by their knowledge of statesmanship, succeeded in becoming prime ministers and high officials and acted as aides to the rulers of the time. Their achievements are fully recorded in the annals of the Zhou states, and there is no reason to discuss them here. As for the wandering knights, though, their actions may not conform to perfect righteousness, yet they are always true to their word. What they undertake, they invariably fulfill what they have promised. They invariably carry out without thinking of themselves. They hasten to the side of those who are in trouble, whether it means survival or destruction, life or death for them. Yet they never boast of their accomplishments, but rather consider it a disgrace to brag of what they have done for. Others, so there is much about them which is worthy of admiration, particularly when trouble is something that comes to almost everyone some time. And then he goes into giving a little bit of account and he says, ignorant people have a saying, why bother to understand benevolence and righteousness? Whoever does you some good must be a virtuous man. Poey hated the Zhou dynasty and chose to starve on Xiaoyang mountain rather than serve under it.

But Kings Wen and Wu did not give up their thrones on that account. Benevolence and righteousness. No one automatically acquires them. These are not empty words. Men who stick fast to their doctrines and observe every minute principle of duty, though it means spending all their lives alone in the world, can hardly be discussed in the same breath, with those who lower the tone of their discourse to suit the vulgar bob along with the current of the times, and thereby acquire a glorious name. One sense is already affinities. One sense is already the kind of formation of character that Jesus had, not the theological consciousness which is stressed all the time, but the character of the events, a knight errant of the spirit, very, very influenced by this doctrine, by not a doctrine so much, but a way of life. Sima Qian writes, yet among the knights of the common people, there are men who are fair in their dealings, and true to their promises, who will risk death for others without a thought to their own safety, and who are praised for their righteousness a thousand miles around. So they have their good points too. They do not simply strive to get ahead at any price. Therefore, when people find themselves in trouble, they turn to these men for help and entrust their lives to them. Is it not just this sort of men that people mean when they talk about the worthy and the eminent? As a matter of fact, if we speak in terms of actual authority and power, the effect with which their actions had upon their own times, the knights of the hamlets and villages so far surpass men like Xu and Yuan XI warlords, that there is hardly any basis for comparison, and this is true mainly because their achievements were immediately apparent to everyone and because they were faithful to their word.

How then, can we say that the righteousness of these knights and retainers is insignificant? It is no longer possible to discover much about the knights of the common people. In ancient times. But in more recent ages, there were princes who took this way of life upon themselves. They were related to ruling families, and they could count wealth as landlords and high officials, able to summon worthy men to join them. And this was the beginning, that there were not just knights errant. Then, when the princes and wealthy men began emulating this, but they were able to bring others to help them, and bands of helpers were formed, and societies of helpers were formed from these bands, and they would train young people and other people to come in and practice this way of life. The medieval Western archetype of this is Robin Hood and his merry men. Where do they live? Not in a castle, in the forest. They live in nature. They live in the natural realm.

You see, the fairy tales are true. More so true than anything we could possibly have understood. So the Chinese knight errant changes. Around 150 BC and becomes the royal prince who becomes a helper of the people. This image, incidentally, was something that aided the incursion of Mahayana Buddhism into China because they recognized the historical Buddha's personal story as being the perfect biography of of a knight errant prince. The same thing about Jesus and the acceptance of Christianity in early China. We're talking about third, fourth century AD was because they understood that this was a recognizable path of the good man. Around 134, a Chinese traveler named Chang Chen was the first to pioneer the route that led through Central Asia to the Greek states in northern India. And it happened that around this time, the Greek states in northwest India. This is just the generation after King Milinda. Menander had in fact been taken over by an incursion of Central Asian Indo-Europeans. Scythians are usually called, and these are, um, people who are related to the Greeks, but from Central Asia. They're, uh, rather Celtic like peoples. And these peoples had been driven out by the Central Asian Khans at that time. The Huns, as they're called in popular language. Later on, the descendants of these Huns would be marshalled by Attila, and in the fourth century AD, Attila and the Huns would scourge almost all of what was left of the borders of the Roman Empire.

The interesting thing is that the chapter about the visit to the Greek Bactrian Hellenistic states by the Chinese is translated only one place. It isn't. In the Columbia University edition of summation. The chapter was left out, and it's curious because the chapter just before the discussion of the knights errant, because the discussion of the knights errant is chapter 124, and the discussion of the Chinese contact for the first time with the Greek Hellenistic states of Northwest India as chapter 123. But fortunately it was printed in 1917, in an obscure scholarly journal. In about 20 years ago, a woman who was doing a book on great Chinese travelers excerpted the chapter translation from this obscure journal and put it into a nice little book, which we have whirling rainbow libraries, good library. He was not only a glorified messenger. The Chinese remember him as the man who brought back the grapevine to China, as well as alfalfa and several other things. And the curious thing is that in the paintings, in the sculpture, in the iconography of early Central Asian art, we see the grape. We see grape vines, we see wine. For a long time, people said there was no wine, really, in China, that the wine was a rice wine. And it's true that usually what is translated into English as wine is rice wine, except that in early Central Asian China there was really grape wine, Greek grape wine. It's just that all the vineyards that were planted there for many centuries were swallowed up by the Gobi Desert.

And in fact, that whole civilization in Central Asia was swallowed up by the sands of the Gobi Desert. And the first person to discover that all this was true, that all these fabulous fabled stories were true, was Sir Aurel Stein. Early in the 20th century, around 1901, he's the first one to go digging in the cemeteries of Loulan, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, and unearthed the documents, unearthed the art and the treasures. And he has in one of his books called Innermost Asia, a piece of fabric tapestry, which was of a religious robe that has a hermetic caduceus on it, with the Chinese looking figure plus all of the various other images which I'll show you slides of in about two weeks, maybe next week if I can get to them. The making of these. The important thing is that that Changcheng brought back the grapevine, brought back alfalfa, brought back a lot of the Hellenistic ideas to China, but he brought with him a lot of imports. He brought, um, to, uh, the West, the pear tree, the peach tree, the orange tree, the rose, the peony, the azalea, the camellia and the Chrysanthemum. Fruits and flowers. They're all Chinese in origin. They're not Persian in origin. They're Chinese. After Chang Chen had pioneered this route, and incidentally, it took him 13 years, ten years of which he was a prisoner of the Khan, it was a very nice imprisonment.

He was given a wife and told that if he leaves his house, they'll kill him. But after ten years they began to relax the guard, and he finally made it. And he came back to China after 13 years. And then the Chinese pieced together his account, which is a very large account. It runs to some 750 pages, and they realized that they didn't have to go all the time through Central Asia, that they could, in fact, go through the south of China and go across the mountain ranges into, um, eastern India. And they, in fact pioneered that trail, too. It turned out to be, uh, less fruitful, though, because the huge river valleys, the Salween and, uh, and several of the other, the Mekong, these valleys are very deep and the jungle areas and wild tribes. So it was never very popular. The Burma Road, I guess, was the first time that anybody ever really put a road through that area. Also brought back from the Greeks were the figs to China. There were no figs in China before that. The sesame, the safflower, the walnut, coriander, chive, cucumber, the herbs and many vegetables were taken from the Hellenistic kingdoms of North India back to China. And this was the beginning and a very tenuous road was made and contact. But the importation of ideas also followed along that road. But Chang Chen was the kind of swashbuckler that these knights errant had been.

He was of that same ilk, and in fact, anybody who could travel the distance was put at 12,000 li a li of 2/5 of a mile. So this is a tremendous distance of about 7000 miles. Anybody strong enough to be able to do this would have been related to the knights errant, but the only people who could have managed this, and in fact, we notice in the first century BC, the beginnings of a sense of the man of personal dignity who was able to withstand the system and to carry out individual personal plans of helping others. We almost never see this in Western history before this. There's the idea of the man who is the leader of a military party. There's the idea of a king or a prince. There's the idea of a mythological hero, but there's almost never the idea of the knight errant. And after this, slowly it begins to take hold. But the. Really first important knight errant in Western history is Jesus. He's the first one to exemplify the whole doctrine, the complete understanding that wealth used as power is a usurpation, and that those in poverty and need should be administered to and protected and defended, and that the essential core of helping was not just giving them food, not just giving them protection, but showing them that a man's word may be believed, that the truthfulness and the accuracy and the dependability of his word, of his pledge was exactly the core of the belief that produces courage in the human spirit.

And without spiritual courage, nothing can be done. It can be any kind of a genius. Mentally, nothing can be done. It's like having a huge, powerful engine in a car and no wheels on the car. You have to have spiritual courage in order to move oneself. And the core of spiritual courage is the unmoving soul, the ability to be present to oneself without any flightiness, without any flitting, without any doubt, without any druthers. And this was the core of the Chinese knight errant. And this was the core of the personality of Jesus, his administering of this. Another aspect was brought from China at the same time. And while the knight errant aspect took hold in Parthia, took hold in what became Persia, the other Chinese aspect took hold in Alexandria. And the other aspect that the Chinese brought over the thin line. The other developments they brought along with the fruits and the flowers, was the secrets of alchemy. And Chinese alchemy came into Alexandria about this time, about the first century BC. The idea that the material world can be transformed, that it doesn't stay like it, is, that there are ways, there are secrets of structure which, if tapped, the world changes. And when you couple alchemy with Knight Errantry, you have one of the most powerful combinations of spiritual insight that there is. Both of these manifest themselves in Jesus, and we'll talk about his, uh, Alchemical revolution next week. So.

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