The ease with which charitable acts might be performed is amusingly illustrated by a story told in Huc’s travels in Tibet. A certain zealous fellow-traveller (who considered that it was quite possible to be at the same time a good Buddhist and a good Christian) invited the French missionaries to co-operate with him in performing charitable acts to commemorate the termination of a fatiguing journey, especially by providing worn-out travellers, like themselves, with horses. The missionaries pleaded their own poverty, but to their surprise were told that they were only required to draw horses on paper, which were taken to the edge of a precipice, thrown up into the air, and, certain formularies being recited, were carried away by the wind and changed into real horses by the power of Buddha. Let us by no means, however, shut our eyes to the praiseworthy feature of the Buddhist system mentioned at page 125—its recognition of the need of inner purity and sanctification—an inner Buddhism of the heart, without which even a monk was no true Buddhist. Of course the Law could be observed superficially without any real heart-belief or heart-purity. When the inner heart-condition of a Buddhist is described, he is said to be walking on one of four paths (ćattāro Maggā), and is then called Ariyo (= Ārya), ‘worthy of reverence’ (distinguished from Pṛithag-jana, ‘an ordinary professing Buddhist’). To avoid confounding these paths with the eightfold path (p. 44) it would be better to speak of them as four stages of inner sanctification. Dhyāna, ‘meditation,’ of four kinds, is the chief means of entering and passing through these stages (p. 32), which once entered can never be abandoned. The first stage is that of the man—be he monk or layman—who is just converted, by an inner awakening, to true heart-Buddhism. This man has freed himself from the first three fetters—namely, delusion of self, doubts about the Buddha’s doctrine, and dependence on external rites (p. 127). He is called Sotāpanno, ‘one who has entered the stream’ (Srota-āpanna), _inevitably_ carrying him onwards—though not necessarily in the same body—to the calm ocean of Nirvāṇa, and his state is called Sotāpatti. He can only be re-born as a god or man, but not in the four lower births (p. 121). Mark that the doctrine of ‘perseverance’ is a remarkable feature in this phase of the Buddhist system. The second stage is that of the man who has nearly freed himself from the first five fetters, but has a sufficient number left to cause one more birth on the earth. He is called Sakad-āgāmī (Sakṛid-āg°). The third stage is that of the man who is quite free from the first five fetters. Such a man can only be re-born in a Brahmā heaven, from which he reaches Nirvāṇa. He is therefore called An-āgāmī, ‘one who will not come back to earth.’