d there for him an order at Nazareth called
the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to
teach the Good Law--by name, Jesus of Nazareth.--Now consider the
prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his
agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in
Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free,
and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched
out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests
should be the conquests of duty. Devanampiya Piadasi: the
Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods: an Adept King like
them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of
history.

VIII. THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE

Greece shone between 478 and 348,--to give the thirteen decades
of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we
lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties,
but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six
years) until 185. Then China flamed up brilliantly under the
Western House of Han from 194 to 64;--at which time, however, we
shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference:
the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I
guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years
before:--three times thirteen decades, with room for three
national flowerings in Europe--among what peoples, who can say?--
We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have
come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China
we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a
fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age
of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel
no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but
only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about
thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another
day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long
pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning
of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle,
Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240
to 1500: twenty-six decades;--whereas the nations that have held
hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be
at pains to discover what relation sh