James Allen was inspired to tread the Path by this book:
At the age of 24, he {Allen] came across Sir Edwin Arnold's "The Light of Asia." Describing his sensations on reading it, he has said,
" I could not stir from my seat till I read every word. When I did rise from the reading of this book, it was as though I had become a different man. A curtain seemed to have rolled back from the face of the Universe, and I saw the causes and meaning of things which had hitherto been dark mysteries. There was a revelation which was almost blinding in its brilliance and suddenness, an exaltation which alarmed me while it transported me into a felicitous insight. The vision quickly faded, but its influence remained, the memory of it saving me in many an hour of darkness and temptation, until that calmer time of meditation and knowledge, ten years later, when it returned never again to fade from the mind."
From Herald of the Star, March 1916.
