heresies and false knowledge. Yoga is a scientific method of removing the dust from the mirror and the earthy particles from the water. It is only when the mind is thus made clear and limpid that it can reflect the Light of Reality and man can come to know himself. Māyā, or Illusion, is the Veil of Isis hiding from man the Unsullied and Unsulliable Reality; the piercing of this Veil and the seeing of that which it hides is accomplished through methods as definite and certain in psychical results as those employed in a European or American chemical laboratory are in physical results. As gold can be separated from impurities by methods of chemistry, so can Truth be divorced from Error by methods of Yoga.
Like the root teachings of Buddhism, the root teachings of the Bardo Thödol are incapable of being practically applied without Right Knowledge; Right Knowledge to be at all effective in a devotee's life should not depend merely upon belief or theory, but upon realization; and realization of Right Knowledge is impossible without such mind control as Yoga implies. That this is so, the canonical scriptures of all schools of Buddhism confirm.[1]
It is not our purpose to discuss here the intricacies of the various aspects and schools of Yoga; for, though technical terms and some of the purely philosophical or theoretical parts of the Hindu, Buddhist, and other systems of the science of mind-control often differ widely, we are convinced, after much research carried on while living among yogīs of various schools, that the goal for all yogīs is, in the last analysis of esotericism, identical, namely, emancipation from the thraldom of sangsāric, or phenomenal, existence, the Hindus calling it Mukti and the Buddhists Nirvāṇa.[2]
Intellectual understanding of much of the Bardo Thödol is,
- ↑ Yoga practice was introduced into Mahāyāna Buddhism by Asaṅga, a monk of Gāndhāra (Peshawar, India). He is said to have been inspired directly by the Bodhisat Maitreya, the coming Buddha, and so produced the Scriptures of the Yogā-cārya (i.e. 'Contemplative') School called The Five Books of Maitreya (cf. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, p. 128).
- ↑ The editor possesses a number of very important translations, by the late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, of Tibetan treatises on Yoga, one of them having originated in ancient India. If there should be encouragement to publish them, the editor hopes then to put'on record in more detail the results of his own researches in Yoga.
