Tables self-spread with glass and silver, food self-cooks and is served, not by working women, but by handmaidens, "adepts in a mystery".Ms Lethbridge is good on the mystifications that enveloped both employers and employed.
Ink monochrome painting was also employed by Zen adepts as a form of participatory spiritual exercise.
The Atharvaveda describes another class of religious adepts, or specialists, the vratyas, particularly associated with the region of Magadha (west-central Bihar).
He also wrote a famous commentary on the Tao-te ching and several important hagiographical accounts of Taoist immortals and adepts.
It is likely, however, that the rituals were not regularly performed except by a small group of highly trained adepts; the usual Tantric ceremony was purely symbolic and even more fastidious than the pujas in Hindu temples.
Through these methods, adepts become Immortals (xian) who live 1,000 years in this world if they so choose and, once satiated with life, "ascend to heaven in broad daylight".
Only the mystical adepts are in possession of the one true wisdom, the ground of both the external expressions of the divine law and the phenomenal world of human experience and thought.
Many are used in worship, as are the branches of the bilva (wood-apple tree) among the adepts of Shiva, and the tulasi (basil), symbol of Lakshmi (Hindu goddess of prosperity and Vishnu's wife) and sacred plant of the Vaishnavites.
These include volumes of letters to adepts, collections of conversations by important sheikhs, mystical commentaries on the Qurʾān, and treatises on Sufi topics.
Adepts often search for their divine teacher in all the holy mountains of China until they finally discover him in one of the "palaces" inside their heads.
Other rituals of the Celestial Masters were allowed to continue in use among the Maoshan adepts but were relegated to a subordinate position.
