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254 SOME ANCIENT AND EXTINCT FAITHS
however, is long and involves many hardships. The novice must first acquire esoteric knowledge of the Truth at the feet of an Adept. He should then establish himself in the principle of 'Quietism,' devoting his whole spare time to self-introspection; he must also develop complete contempt for material things and worldly relations. Then alone will he be qualified to enter into Tao, that is Life Eternal.
The above account which is taken from the article on Chinese Mysticism in the ERE. is really an abridgement of the teaching of Religion proper, and shows at a glance how widely prevalent its doctrines were in the ancient days. According to a French work the 'Histoire des Religions (vol. iii)., quoted in Metchnikoff's 'Nature of Man,'
"One of the chief claims of Taoism was the possession of a specific against death....... And some of the masters of Taoism, such, for instance, as Chang-Tao-Ling, ascended to heaven without dying, by climbing a lofty peak and vanishing into the skies.......To arrive at this, Lao-teen simply expanded and applied to mankind generally an idea that was already familiar to him, the conception of the transmigration of one soul through several successive bodies. By means of......expiatory transformations, a man who had not reached it directly through the holiness of his life, could attain the immortality of the genii and the blessed."
I suppose this only means that if a man failed to attain to immortality in one life, by reason of death intervening before the destruction of the causes of
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