The gospel according to Sakya the Eremite is divine. It is divine in its limitless compassion, and though compassion, when analyzed, becomes but egotism in an etherialized form, yet the gospel had other attractions. In demonstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is evil too, that to be born even a god is evil still,--in demonstrating these things, while insisting that all else, Buddhism included, is but vanity, it fractured the charm of error in which man had been confined. Sakya saw men born and reborn in hell. He saw them ignorant, as humanity has always been, unaware of their abjection as men are to-day, and over the gulfs of existence, through the torrents of rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But in the ferrying they had to aid. The aid consisted in the rigorous observance of every virtue that Christianity afterward professed. Therein is the beauty of Buddhism. Its profundity resided in a revelation that everything human perishes except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews. Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due to Cathay. To the Hindu life was an incident between two eternities, an episode in the string of deaths and rebirths. To Mongolians it was a unique experience. They had no knowledge of the supersensible, no suspicion of the ideal. Among them Buddhism operated a conversion. It stimulated a thirst for the divine. The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder, an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy culminated in a superstition. That is the history of creeds. II ORMUZD "The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of things." So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra. "And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked. "There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in the course of a conversation that the _Avesta_ reports. In a similar manner _Exodus_ provides a revelation which Moses received. There Jehovah said: _'ehyeh '[)a]sher 'ehyeh_. In the _Avesta_ Ormuzd said: _ahmi yad ahmi_.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each means _I am that I am_.[8] [Footnote 6: Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393]. [Footnote 7: Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.] [Footnote 8: Exodus iii. 14.]