This lasted so long as the _Vedas_ and the _Brâhmanas_ remained in the sole and exclusive keeping of the temple‐Brâhmans—while no one else had the right to study or even read them outside of the _sacred_ caste. Then came Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu. After _learning_ the whole of the Brâhmanical wisdom in the _Rahasya_, or the _Upanishads_, and finding that the teachings differed little, if at all, from those of the “Teachers of Life” inhabiting the snowy ranges of the Himâlayas,(415) the disciple of the Brâhmans, feeling indignant because the Sacred Wisdom was thus withheld from all but Brâhmans, determined, by popularizing it, to save the whole world. Then it was that the Brâhmans, seeing that their Sacred Knowledge and Occult Wisdom was falling into the hands of the Mlechchhas, abridged the texts of the _Upanishads_, which originally contained thrice the matter of the _Vedas_ and the _Brâhmanas_ together, without altering, however, one word of the texts. They simply detached from the MSS. the most important portions, containing the last word of the Mystery of Being. The key to the Brâhmanical secret code remained henceforth with the Initiates alone, and the Brâhmans were thus in a position to publicly deny the correctness of Buddha’s teaching by appealing to their _Upanishads_, silenced for ever on the chief questions. Such is the esoteric tradition beyond the Himâlayas. Shrî Shankarâchârya, the greatest Initiate living in the historical ages, wrote many a Bhâshya (Commentary) on the _Upanishads_. But his original treatises, as there are reasons to suppose, have not yet fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for they are too jealously preserved in his monasteries (mathams). And there are still weightier reasons to believe that the priceless Bhâshyas on the Esoteric Doctrine of the Brâhmans, by their greatest expounder, will remain for ages still a dead letter to most of the Hindûs, except the Smârtava Brâhmans. This sect, founded by Shankarâchârya, which is still very powerful in Southern India, is now almost the only one to produce students who have preserved sufficient knowledge to comprehend the dead letter of the Bhâshyas. The reason for this, I am informed, is that they alone have occasionally real Initiates at their head in their mathams, as for instance, in the Shringa‐giri, in the Western Ghâts of Mysore. On the other hand, there is no sect, in that desperately exclusive caste of the Brâhmans, more exclusive than is the Smârtava; and the reticence of its followers, to say what they may know of the Occult sciences and the Esoteric Doctrine, is only equalled by their pride and learning.