In part, Ron found the answer to that question in the Western Hills outside Peking. Dotted with Tibetan lamaseries that had been established in the wake of the Kublai Khan’s invasion, these hills had long been a place of mystery. Although peasants in surrounding villages were tolerated, they were never admitted past the temple gates. Foreigners too, were denied entry, but given Ron’s obvious inquisitiveness and sincere desire to study and understand religious wisdom, those gates were opened to him.
"I saw a great many things which you would call miracles," Ron wrote in reference to those lamaseries, "and I could not put these things from my mind. I have seen such things as eight matches floating in a bowl of water being made to drill by an individual who simply looked at them. He [the Buddhist monk] actually looked at these eight matches floating in a bowl and would rack them up, just by looking at them, so that they made an orderly line, one line, and then make them all turn sideways so that they looked like a picket fence, and then make them form something that looked like a star. Intriguing, to say the least. A parlor trick. Fakirism. Yet it was very impressive."
In the lamaseries, Ron met monks with the ability to conjure windstorms and mystics who remained seated for years on end contemplating their enlightenment. In all his travels in China, he witnessed countless phenomena unknown to the West.
Yet for all these wonders, Ron could not ignore a key flaw: Oriental philosophy, in all its spiritual wisdom, did nothing to alleviate the poverty and degradation of Asia.
"I was convinced of two things," Ron explained. "One, that the Asiatic magician -- the seer, the wise man and the holy man -- were all very, very wise and had a great deal of information. I came to that conclusion.
"The other conclusion I came to was that it wasn’t doing them a bit of good. I came to the conclusion very broadly, that they were intensely impractical. Therefore, their great wisdom had never been integrated. Whatever it was, we could say, today, it was not integrated with livingness. And when a man sought this trail, he parted from this life."
