B255 <=> B257 [BTG XXII Beelzebub’s first time Tibet, p. 256]

“The particular strangeness of this peculiarity of theirs consists in this, that those who belong to any such sect never call themselves ‘sectarians,’ the name being considered offensive; they are named ‘sectarians’ only by those beings who do not belong to their sect.

“And the adherents of any sect are sectarian for other beings only as long as they have no ‘guns’ and ‘ships,’ but as soon as they get hold of a sufficient number of ‘guns’ and ‘ships,’ then what had been a peculiar sect at once becomes the dominant religion.

“The beings both of this settlement and of many other regions of Pearl-land became sectarians, having separated just from the religion the doctrine of which, as I have already told you, I studied there in detail and which later was called ‘Buddhism.’

“These sectarians who called themselves the Self-tamers arose owing to that distorted understanding of the Buddhist religion which, as I have already told you, they called ‘suffering-in-solitude.’

“And it was in order to produce upon themselves the said famous ‘suffering,’ without hindrance from other beings similar to themselves, that these beings with whom we passed the night, had settled so far away from their own people.

“Now, my boy, because everything I learned that night and saw the next day of the followers of that sect then produced so painful an impression upon me that for very many of their centuries I could never recall it all without, as is said, ‘shuddering’ – not until very much later, when I made perfectly clear to myself all the causes of the strangeness of the psyche of those favorites of yours – I wish to tell you in greater detail about all I then saw and learned.