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BUDDHISM available forever to every suffering, striving creature in the world.
The peculiar and especial path of the Mahāyāna Bodhisattva represents the final spiritual refinement--the compassionate counterpart, as it were-of the primordial Indian discipline of tapas. This, as we have seen, was a technique for cultivating in oneself a state of glowing psychophysical heat. The internal energies, systematically controlled and retained, and stored within the body, generated a condition of high temperature, comparable to a fever, and bestowed a certain sovereignty over the forces of the macrocosm by virtue of the conquest of the parallel forces in the microcosm; because it is a fact that every form of asceticism results in its own type of freedom from the usual needs and consequent laws of nature, and therefore affords its own boon of independence. The glowing ascetic cannot be crushed or frustrated by the forces of his environment-nature, the weather, animals, or society. Asserting his superior strength, he defies them. He is fearless and cannot be intimidated; he is in control of his own reactions and emotions.
The only peril that can touch such self-sufficiency is that of being surprised or tricked into some involuntary reaction. This could precipitate an unpremeditated outburst of the concentrated store of tyrannically repressed feeling. Indian epics and romances abound in accounts of holy men who explode irritably in this way at some slight annoyance. (They are, in fact, a standard device of the Oriental storyteller for complicating plots.) The old fellows blast with the lightning of a curse any poor innocent who chances to disturb them in their spiritual exercise, letting go the full force of their extraordinary power and thus forfeiting, in a single flash, their hard-won equilibrium. This is a major catastrophe for the holy man as well as for his shattered, unfortunate, and unwitting-often charming-victim. Or (as we also read), whenever Indra, the jealous king of the gods, feels that his cosmic sovereignty is being jeopardized by the in
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