iful and gracious manifestation of the
Supreme, or dream that He could take the mighty form of an Avatara in
order to mislead.

But there is another point to put about this Avatara, on which, perhaps,
I may come into conflict with people on another side. For this is the
difficulty of keeping the middle path, the razor path which goes neither
to the left nor to the right, along which the great Gurus lead us. On
either side you find objection to the central teaching. The Lord Buddha,
in the ordinary sense of the word, was not what we have defined as an
Avatara. He was the first of our own humanity who climbed upwards to
that point, and there merged in the Logos and received full
illumination. His was not a body taken by the Logos for the purpose of
revealing Himself, but was the last in myriads of births through which
he had climbed to merge in I'shvara at last. That is not what is
normally spoken of as an Avatara, though, you may say, the result truly
is the same. But in the case of the Avatara, the evolving births are in
previous kalpas, and the Avatara comes after the man has merged in the
Logos, and the body is taken for the purpose of revelation. But he who
became Gautama Buddha had climbed though birth after birth in our own
kalpa, as well as in the kalpas that went before; and he was incarnated
many a time when the great Fourth Race dwelt in mighty Atlantis, and
rose onward to take the office of the Buddha; for the Buddha is the
title of an office, not of a particular man. Finally by his own
struggles, the very first of our race, he was able to reach that great
function in the world. What is the function? That of the Teacher of Gods
and men. The previous Buddhas had been Buddhas who came from another
planet. Humanity had not lived long enough here to evolve its own son to
that height. Gautama Buddha was human-born. He had evolved through the
Fourth Race into this first family of the A'ryan Race, the Hindu. By
birth after birth in India He had completed His course and took His
final body in A'ryavarta, to make the proclamation of the law to men.

But the proclamation was not made primarily for India. It was given in
India because India is the place whence the great religious revelations go
forth by the will of the Supreme. Therefore was He born in India, but His
law was specially meant for nations beyond the bounds of A'ryavarta, that
they might learn a pure morality, a noble ethic, disjoined--because of the
darkne