I brought back from my Eastern researches a small bronze head about nine hundred years old. Before leaving, I somewhere found a native woodcarver who made a lotus-petaled rosewood base and fitted it neatly on. The bronze was given to me as a parting remembrance by a man I met while studying the Angkor antiquities. We had prolonged talks far into several nights. He taught me much about the mysteries of Asiatic occultism and also gave a second key to the higher wisdom of Asiatic philosophy, without which the books are mere alphabets. With these two keys--the first from an Indian and the second from a Chinese-Mongolian source--I could proceed to unlock some of the baffling paradoxes of the world's existence. "We shall not meet again," he said finally, "so take this and keep it. It represents the bodhisattva with whom I am linked."
-- Notebooks Category 15: The Orient > Chapter 5 : Ceylon, Angkor Wat, Burma, Java > # 56
