Chaise informs the world, in modern French, that Abelard
and she are united and happy; St. Paul writes himself
(
Greek characters) (meaning, we may suppose, (Greek characters));
and Hippokrates the physician (who spells
himself Hippōkratĕs) attended M. de Guldenstubbé at his
lodgings in Paris, and gave him a signature which of itself
cured a sharp attack of rheumatism in a few minutes.[1]
The miracle of rising and floating in the air is one fully recognized in the literature of ancient India. The Buddhist saint of high ascetic rank attains the power called 'perfection' (irdhi), whereby he is able to rise in the air, as also to overturn the earth and stop the sun. Having this power, the saint exercises it by the mere determination of his will, his body becoming imponderous, as when a man in the common human state determines to leap, and leaps. Buddhist annals relate the performance of the miraculous suspension by Gautama himself, as well as by other saints, as, for example, his ancestor Maha Sammata, who could thus seat himself in the air without visible support. Even without this exalted faculty, it is considered possible to rise and move in the air by an effort of ecstatic joy (udwega prîti). A remarkable mention of this feat, as said to be performed by the Indian Brahmans, occurs in the third-century biography of Apollonius of Tyana; these Brahmans are described as going about in the air some two cubits from the ground, not for the sake of miracle (such ambition they despised), but for its being more suitable to solar rites.[2] Foreign conjurers were professing to exhibit this miracle among the Greeks in the second century, as witness Lucian's jocular account of the Hyperborean conjurer: —
- ↑ 'Pneumatologie Positive et Expérimentale; La Réalité des Esprits et le Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe démontrés,' par le Baron L. de Guldenstubbé. Paris, 1857.
- ↑ Hardy, 'Manual of Budhism,' pp. 38, 126, 150; 'Eastern Monachism,' pp. 272, 285, 382; Köppen, 'Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. p. 412; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 390; Philostrati Vita Apollon. Tyan. iii. 15. See the mention among the Saadhs of India (17th century), by Trant, in 'Missionary Register,' July, 1820, pp. 294-6.
