"I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world: and thus I incarnate from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness."—Bhagavad-Gita
"The world had fallen into decay, and right principles had perished. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had grown rife; ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers. Confucius was frightened at what he saw, and undertook the work of reformation."—Mencius
Men were expecting an avatar in old Judaea; and, sure enough, one came. But they were looking for a national leader, a Messiah, to throw off for them the Roman yoke; or else for an ascetic like their prophets of old time: something, in any case, out of the way;—a personality wearing marks of avatarship easily recognisable. The one who came, however, so far from leading them against the Romans, seemed to have a good deal of sympathy with the Romans. He consorted with centurions and tax-gatherers, and advised the Jews to render unto Roman Caesar the things which were his: which meant, chiefly, the tribute. And he was not an ascetic, noticeably; bore no resemblance to their prophets of old time; but came, as he said, 'eating and drinking'; even went to marriage-feasts, and that by no means to play killjoy;— and they said, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber!' (which was a lie).—Instead of supporting the national religion, as anyone with half an eye to his interests would have done, he did surprising things in the temple with a whip of small cords.— "Here," said they, "let us crucify this damned fellow!" And they did.
Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so perverse is man!—as the one and only possible avatar. If ever another should appear, said our western world, it could but be this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would come again. So when the pressure of the times and the intuition of men warned them that a great incarnation was due, they began to look for his coming.
That was in our own day, say in the last half-century; during which time a mort of books have been written about a mysterious figure turning up in some modern city, whom you could not fail to recognise by certain infallible signs. Generally speaking, the chief of these were: long hair, and a tendency to make lugubrious remarks beginning with Verily, verily I say unto you. In actual life, too, lots of men did grow their hair long and cultivate the verily-verily habit; hoping that, despite their innate modesty, their fellow-men might not fail to take the hint and pierce the disguise afforded, often by a personal morality you might call oblique.
But if an avatar had come, it is fairly certain that he or she would have followed modern fashions in hair and speech; first, because real avatars have a sense of humor; and secondly, because his or her business would have been to reform, not the language or style of hair-dressing, but life.—'He or she' is a very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the feminine include the masculine, and say 'she' simply.—Her conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic verilies and peradventures, would have been in form much like that of the rest of us. It is quite unlikely she would have shone at Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, or Bazaars of the Young Women's Christian Association; quite unlikely that she would have been in any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies. As she would have come to preach Truth, you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan.
"Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep
On the sands."
Says Ssu-k'ung T'u,—
"….. in no one form may Tao abide.
But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep
On the mountainside";
—the sea is one, but the tides drift and eddy; the roc, or maybe the dragon, is one, but the shadow of his wings on the mountain sward shifts and changes and veers. When you think you have set up a standard for Tao: when you imagine you have grasped it in you hands:—how fleet it is to vanish! "The man of Tao," said the fisherman of the Mi-lo to Ch'u Yuan, "does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adapts himself to them";—and perhaps there you have the best possible explanation of the nature of those Great souls who come from time to time to save the world.