336
Lamb's North Briton friend, whose sense of propriety was outraged by the commonest figures of speech.
The tenour of the whole argument on theistic or atheistic character of "Esoteric Baddhism," most unmistakably betrays a great want of comprehension on the part of the critic of Buddhism in general, and esoteric Buddhism especially. A system, of which one part appears as theistic and another part atheistic, ought certainly not to be placed in either of the categories and then condemned as self-contradictory, so long as a third course remains open. And unless he has shown that the division of religious philosophy, as above, into theism and atheism, is a division by dichotomy, it is unreasonable for him to talk of Mr. Sinnett's wholly untenable "radical inconsistencies and contradictions;" and at the same time, it shows him hardly acquainted with the subtle monism of the pantheistic philosophy as taught in our great schools. Mr. Maitland seems to have endeavoured to lay the doctrines contained in "Esoteric Buddhism" on the Procrustean bed of his own ideas, and, failing in the attempt, is now seeking to discredit them as inconsistent with themselves. As well call Shankaracharya, the greatest Occultist and adept of all the ages, the founder, of the Adwita school, the master whose followers are to this day referred to as Prachanna Bauddhas (Buddhists in disguise), so identical are the two teachings—one day an atheist, and a theist the next.
The next argument that Mr. Maitland brings forward (p. 15), comes to this: since law implies a person, the expression of whose will the law is, therefore, Mr. Sinnett by speakig of "the law of evolution" tacitly admits the existence of a personal God, whose impressed will is the law of the Universe. This is a very extraordinary argument. I could hardly believe that the talented Vice-President of the London Lodge would have failed to recognize the difference between the command of the sovereign power in a political body, and the sequence of causation implied in a natural law, especially after such a masterly exposition of the subject by such thinkers as Mill
