Then the Messenger gathered the little children and took them into the forest, saying, “These are your flowers, your streams, your trees. No one has … - Helena Roerich

The Great Gotama gave to the world a complete Teaching of the perfect construction of life. Each attempt to make a god of the great revolutionist, leads to absurdity. Previous to Gotama there was, of course, a whole succession of those who bore the common welfare, but their teachings crumbled to dust in the course of millenniums. Therefore the Teaching of Gotama should be accepted as the first teaching of the laws of matter and the evolution of the world. Contemporary understanding of the community permits a wondrous bridge from Gotama Buddha up to the present time. We pronounce this formula neither for extolling nor for demeaning, but as an evident and immutable fact.

I shall quote an interesting passage from The Secret Doctrine... "...Anyhow, it is curious to see how prophetic in almost all things was the writer of Vishnu-Purana when foretelling... a man if rich will be reputed pure; dishonesty... will be the universal means of subsistence, weakness the cause of dependence, menace and presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; mutual assent, [will replace] marriage; fine clothes [will be regarded as] dignity. . . . He who is the strongest will reign.. the people, unable to bear the heavy burden, Kara-bhara (the load of taxes) will take refuge among the valleys. . . Thus, in the Kali age will decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its annihilation (pralaya). . . . When the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine being which exists, if its own spiritual nature . . . shall descend on Earth . . . as Kalki (Avatar) endowed with the eight superhuman faculties. . . . He will re-establish righteousness on Earth, and the minds of those who live at the end of Kali-Yuga shall be awakened and become as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed. . . shall be the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, (the age of purity). As it is said, 'When the sun and moon and the lunar asterism Tishya and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion the Krita (or Satya) age shall return.'

Buddha, directing all possibilities toward the affirmation of evolution, bade his disciples venerate the future Buddhas more than the Buddhas of the past. “Thus as the new moon is worshipped more than the full moon, so those who have faith in Me must reverence Bodhisattvas more than Buddhas.” History has not revealed to us elsewhere such a living example of self-denial. According to tradition, the Blessed One preordained the Bodhisattva Maitreya as his successor.