III. The work under consideration represents Malabar as the seat of

Bhattapada's triumphs over the Buddhists, and says that this teacher established himself in Malabar and expelled the Buddhists from that country. This statement alone will be sufficient to show to our readers the fictitious character of the account contained in this book. According to every other Hindu work, this great teacher of Purva Mimamsa was born in Northern India; almost all his famous disciples and followers were living in that part of the country, and according to Vidyaranya's account he died at Allahabad. For the foregoing reasons we cannot place any reliance upon this account of Malabar. From an examination of the traditions and other accounts referred to above, Mr. Wilson comes to the conclusion that Sankaracharya lived in the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century of the Christian era. The accounts of the Sringeri, Kudali and Cumbaconum Mathams, and the traditions current in the Bombay Presidency, as shown in the biographical sketches published at Bombay, place Sankara in some century before the Christian era. On the other hand, Kerala Utpatti, the information obtained by Dr. Buchanan in his travels through Malabar, and the opinions expressed by Dr. Taylor and Mr. Colebrooke, concur in assigning to him an antiquity of about 1,000 years. The remaining traditions referred to by Mr. Wilson are as much opposed to his opinion as to the conclusion that Sankara lived before Christ. We shall now leave it to our readers to say whether, under such circumstances, Mr. Wilson is justified in asserting that "the weight of authority is altogether in favour" of his theory. We have already referred to the writings of almost all the European Orientalists who expressed an opinion upon the subject under discussion; and we need hardly say that Sankara's date is yet to be ascertained. We are obliged to comment at length on the opinions of European Orientalists regarding Sankara's date, as there will be no probability of any attention being paid to the opinion of Indian and Tibetan initiates when it is generally believed that the question has been finally settled by European Sanskritists. The Adepts referred to by "An English F.T.S." are certainly in a position to clear up some of the problems in Indian religious history. But there is very little chance of their opinions being accepted by the general public under present circumstances, unless they are supported by such evidence as is within the reach of the outside world. As it is not always possible to procure such evidence, there is very little use in publishing the information which is in their possession until the public are willing to recognize and admit the antiquity and trustworthiness of their traditions, the extent of their powers, and the vastness of their knowledge. In the absence of such proof as is above indicated, there is every likelihood of their opinions being rejected as absurd and untenable; their motives will no doubt be questioned, and some people may be tempted to deny even the fact of their existence. It is often asked by Hindus as well as by English men why these Adepts are so very unwilling to publish some portion at least of the information they possess regarding the truths of physical science. But, in doing so, they do not seem to perceive the difference between the method by which they obtain their knowledge and the process of modern scientific investigation by which the facts of Nature are ascertained and its laws are discovered. Unless an Adept can prove his conclusions by the same kind of reasoning as is adopted by the modern scientist they remain undemonstrated to the outside world. It is of course impossible for him to develop in a considerable number of human beings such faculties as would enable them to perceive their truth; and it is not always practicable to establish them by the ordinary scientific method unless all the facts and laws on which his demonstration is to be based have already been ascertained by modern science. No Adept can be expected to anticipate the discoveries of the next four or five centuries, and prove some grand scientific truth to the entire satisfaction of the educated public after having discovered every fact and law of Nature required for the said purpose by such process of reasoning as would be accepted by them. They have to encounter similar difficulties in giving any information regarding the events of the ancient history of India. However, before giving the exact date assigned to Sankaracharya by the Indian and Tibetan initiates, we shall indicate a few circumstances by which his date may be approximately determined. It is our humble opinion that the Sankara Vijayams hitherto published can be relied upon as far as they are consistent with each other regarding the general outlines of Sankara's life. We cannot, however, place any reliance whatever upon Anandagiri's Sankara Vijaya published at Calcutta. The Calcutta edition not only differs in some very material points from the manuscript copies of the same work found in Southern India, but is opposed to every other Sankara Vijayam hitherto examined. It is quite clear from its style and some of the statements contained therein, that it was not the production of Anandagiri, one of the four chief disciples of Sankara and the commentator on his Upanishad Bhashyam. For instance, it represents Sankara as the author of a certain verse which is to be found in Vidyaranya's Adhikaranaratnamala, written in the fourteenth century. It represents Sankara as giving orders to two of his disciples to preach the Visishtadwaitee and the Dwaitee doctrines, which are directly opposed to his own doctrine. The book under consideration says that Sankara went to conquer Mandanamisra in debate, followed by Sureswaracharya, though Mandanamisra assumed the latter name at the time of initiation. It is unnecessary for us here to point out all the blunders and absurdities of this book. It will be sufficient to say that in our opinion it was not written by Anandagiri, and that it was the introduction of an unknown author who does not appear to have been even tolerably well acquainted with the history of the Adwaitee doctrine. Vidyaranya's (otherwise Sayanachary, the great commentator of the Vedas) Sankara Vijaya is decidedly the most reliable source of information as regards the main features of Sankara's biography. Its authorship has been universally accepted, and the information contained therein was derived by its author, as may be seen from his own statements, from certain old biographies of Sankara existing at the time of its composition. Taking into consideration the author's vast knowledge and information, and the opportunities he had for collecting materials for his work when he was the head of the Sringeri Matham, there is every reason to believe that he had embodied in his work the most reliable information he could obtain. Mr. Wilson, however, says that the book in question is "much too poetical and legendary" to be acknowledged as a great authority. We admit that the style is highly poetical, but we deny that the work is legendary. Mr. Wilson is not justified in characterizing it as such on account of its description of some of the wonderful phenomena shown by Sankara. Probably the learned Orientalist would not be inclined to consider the Biblical account of Christ in the same light. It is not the peculiar privilege of Christianity to have a miracle-worker for its first propagator. In the following observations we shall take such facts as are required from this work. It is generally believed that a person named Govinda Yogi was Sankara's Guru, but it is not generally known that this Yogi was in fact Patanjali--the great author of the Mahabhashya and the Yoga Sutras-- under a new name. A tradition current in Southern India represents him as one of the Chelas of Patanjali; but it is very doubtful if this tradition has anything like a proper foundation. But it is quite clear from the 94th, 95th, 96th, and 97th verses of the 5th chapter of Vidyaranya's Sankara Vijayam that Govinda Yogi and Patanjali were identical. According to the immemorial custom observed amongst initiates, Patanjali assumed the name of Govinda Yogi at the time of his initiation by Goudapada. It cannot be contended that Vidyaranya represented Patanjali as Sankara's Guru merely for the purpose of assigning some importance to Sankara and his teaching. Sankara is looked upon as a far greater man than Patanjali by the Adwaitees, and nothing can be added to Sankara's reputation by Vidyaranya's assertion. Moreover, Patanjali's views are not altogether identical with Sankara's views; it may be seen from Sankara's writings that he attached no importance whatever to the practices of Hatha Yog regarding which Patanjali composed his Yoga Sutras. Under such circumstances, if Vidyaranya had the option of selecting a Guru for Sankara, he would no doubt have represented Vyasa himself (who is supposed to be still living) as his Guru. We see no reason therefore to doubt the correctness of the statement under examination. Therefore, as Sankara was Patanjali's Chela, and as Goudapada was his Guru, his date will enable us to fix the dates of Sankara and Goudapada. We may here point out to our readers a mistake that appears in p. 148 of Mr. Sinnett's book on Esoteric Buddhism as regards the latter personage. He is there represented as Sankara's Guru; Mr. Sinnett was informed, we believe, that he was Sankara's Paramaguru, and not having properly understood the meaning of this expression, Mr. Sinnett wrote that he was Sankara's Guru. It is generally admitted by Orientalists that Patanjali lived before the commencement of the Christian era. Mr. Barth places him in the second century before the Christian era, accepting Goldstucker's opinion, and Monier Williams does the same thing. Weber, who seems to have carefully examined the opinions of all the other Orientalists who have written upon the subject, comes to the conclusion that "we must for the present rest satisfied with placing the date of the composition of the Bhashya between B.C. 140 and A.D. 60, a result which considering the wretched state of the chronology of Indian Liturgy generally is, despite its indefiniteness, of no mean importance." And yet even this date rests upon inferences drawn from one or two unimportant expressions contained in Patanjali's Mahabhashya. It is always dangerous to draw such inferences, and especially so when it is known that, according to the tradition current amongst Hindu grammarians, some portions of Mahabhashya were lost, the gaps being filled up by subsequent writers. Even supposing that we should consider the expression quoted as written by Patanjali himself, there is nothing in those expressions which would enable us to fix the writer's date. For instance, the connection between the expression "Arunad Yavanah Saketam" and the expedition of Menander against Ayodhya between B.C. 144 and 120, relied upon by Goldstucker is merely imaginary. There is nothing in the expression to show that the allusion contained therein points necessarily to Menander's expedition. We believe that Patanjali is referring to the expedition of Yavanas against Ayodhya during the lifetime of Sagara's father described in Harivamsa. This expedition occurred long before Rama's time, and there is nothing to connect it with Menander. Goldstucker's inference is based upon the assumption that there was no other Yavana expedition against Ayodhya known to Patanjali, and it will be easily seen from Harivamsa (written by Vyasa) that the said assumption is unwarranted. Consequently the whole theory constructed by Goldstucker on this weak foundation falls to the ground. No valid inferences can be drawn from the mere names of kings contained in Mahabhashya, even if they are traced to Patanjali himself, as there would be several kings in the same dynasty bearing the same name. From the foregoing remarks it will be clear that we cannot fix, as Weber has done, B.C. 140 as the maximum limit of antiquity that can be assigned to Patanjali. It is now necessary to see whether any other such limit has been ascertained by Orientalists. As Panini's date still remains undetermined, the limit cannot be fixed with reference to his date. But it is assumed by some Orientalists that Panini must have lived at some time subsequent to Alexander's invasion, from the fact that Panini explains in his Grammar the formation of the word Yavanani. We are very sorry that European Orientalists have taken the pains to construct theories upon this basis without ascertaining the meaning assigned to the word Yavana, and the time when the Hindus first became acquainted with the Greeks. It is unreasonable to assume without proof that this acquaintance commenced at the time of Alexander's invasion. On the other hand, there are very good reasons for believing that the Greeks were known to the Hindus long before this event. Pythagoras visited India, according to the traditions current amongst Indian initiates, and he is alluded to in Indian astrological works under the name of Yavanacharya. Moreover, it is not quite certain that the word Yavana was strictly confined to the Greeks by the ancient Hindu writers. Probably it was originally applied to the Egyptians and the Ethiopians; it was probably extended first to the Alexandrian Greeks, and subsequently to the Greeks, Persians, and Arabians. Besides the Yavana invasion of Ayodhya described in Harivamsa, there was another subsequent expedition to India by Kala Yavana (Black Yavana) during Krishna's lifetime described in the same work. This expedition was probably undertaken by the Ethiopians. Anyhow, there are no reasons whatever, as far as we can see, for asserting that Hindu writers began to use the word Yavana after Alexander's invasion. We can attach no importance whatever to any inferences that may be drawn regarding the dates of Panini and Katyayana (both of them lived before Patanjali) from the statements contained in Katha Sarit Sayara, which is nothing more than a mere collection of fables. It is now seen by Orientalists that no proper conclusions can be drawn regarding the dates of Panini and Katyayana from the statements made by Hiuan Thsang, and we need not therefore say anything here regarding the said statements. Consequently the dates of Panini and Katyayana still remain undetermined by European Orientalists. Goldstucker is probably correct in his conclusion that Panini lived before Buddha, and the Buddhists' accounts agree with the traditions of the initiates in asserting that Katyayana was a contemporary of Buddha. From the fact that Patanjali must have composed his Mahabhashyam after the composition of Panini's Sutras and Katyayana's Vartika, we can only infer that it was written after Buddha's birth. But there are a few considerations which may help us in coming to the conclusion that Patanjali must have lived about the year 500 B.C.; Max Muller fixed the Sutra period between 500 B.C. and 600 B.C. We agree with him in supposing that the period probably ended with B.C. 500, though it is uncertain how far it extended into the depths of Indian antiquity. Patanjali was the author of the Yoga Sutras, and this fact has not been doubted by any Hindu writer up to this time. Mr. Weber thinks, however, that the author of the Yoga Sutras might be a different man from the author of the Mahabhashya, though he does not venture to assign any reason for his supposition. We very much doubt if any European Orientalist can ever find out the connection between the first Anhika of the Mahabhashya and the real secrets of Hatha Yoga contained in the Yoga Sutras. No one but an initiate can understand the full significance of the said Anhika; and the "eternity of the Logos" or Sabda is one of the principal doctrines of the Gymnosophists of India, who were generally Hatha Yogis. In the opinion of Hindu writers and pundits Patanjali was the author of three works, viz., Mahabhashya, Yoga Sutras, and a book on Medicine and Anatomy; and there is not the slightest reason for questioning the correctness of this opinion. We must, therefore, place Patanjali in the Sutra period, and this conclusion is confirmed by the traditions of the Indian initiates. As Sankaracharya was a contemporary of Patanjali (being his Chela) he must have lived about the same time. We have thus shown that there are no reasons for placing Sankara in the eighth or ninth century after Christ, as some of the European Orientalists have done. We have further shown that Sankara was Patanjali's Chela, and that his date should be ascertained with reference to Patanjali's date. We have also shown that neither the year B.C. 140 nor the date of Alexander's invasion can be accepted as the maximum limit of antiquity that can be assigned to him, and we have lastly pointed out a few circumstances which will justify us in expressing an opinion that Patanjali and his Chela Sankara belonged to the Sutra period. We may, perhaps, now venture to place before the public the exact date assigned to Sankaracharya by Tibetan and Indian initiates. According to the historical information in their possession he was born in the year B.C. 510 (fifty-one years and two months after the date of Buddha's Nirvana), and we believe that satisfactory evidence in support of this date can be obtained in India if the inscriptions at Conjeveram, Sringeri, Jaggurnath, Benares, Cashmere, and various other places visited by Sankara, are properly deciphered. Sankara built Conjeveram, which is considered as one of the most ancient towns in Southern India; and it may be possible to ascertain the time of its construction if proper inquiries are made. But even the evidence now brought before the public supports the opinion of the Initiates above indicated. As Goudapada was Sankaracharya's Guru's guru, his date entirely depends on Sankara's date; and there is every reason to suppose that he lived before Buddha. Question VI.--"Historical Difficulty"--Why? It is asked whether there may not be "some confusion" in the letter quoted on p. 62 of "Esoteric Buddhism" regarding "old Greeks and Romans said to have been Atlanteans." The answer is--None whatever. The word "Atlantean" was a generic name. The objection to have it applied to the old Greeks and Romans on the ground that they were Aryans, "their language being intermediate between Sanskrit and modern European dialects," is worthless. With equal reason might a future 6th Race scholar, who had never heard of the (possible) submergence of a portion of European Turkey, object to Turks from the Bosphorus being referred to as a remnant of the Europeans. "The Turks are surely Semites," he might say 12,000 years hence, and "their language is intermediate between Arabic and our modern 6th Race dialects." * -------- * This is not to be construed to mean that 12,000 years hence there will be yet any man of the 6th Race, or that the 5th will be submerged. The figures are given simply for the sake of a better comparison with the present objection in the case of the Greeks and Atlantis. --------- The "historical difficulty" arises from a certain authoritative statement made by Orientalists on philological grounds. Professor Max Muller has brilliantly demonstrated that Sanskrit was the "elder sister"--by no means the mother--of all the modern languages. As to that "mother," it is conjectured by himself and colleagues to be a "now extinct tongue, spoken probably by the nascent Aryan race." When asked what was this language, the Western voice answers: "Who can tell?" When, "during what geological periods did this nascent race flourish?" the same impressive voice replies: "In prehistoric ages, the duration of which no one can now determine." Yet it must have been Sanskrit, however barbarous and unpolished, since "the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans and Kelts" were living within "the same precincts" with that nascent race, and the testimony borne by language has enabled the philologist to trace the "language of the gods" in the speech of every Aryan nation. Meanwhile it is affirmed by these same Orientalists that classical Sanskrit has its origin at the very threshold of the Christian era; while Vedic Sanskrit is allowed an antiquity of hardly 3,000 years (if so much) before that time. Now, Atlantis, on the statement of the "Adepts," sank over 9,000 years before the Christian era.* How then can one maintain that the "old Greeks and Romans" were Atlanteans? How can that be, since both nations are Aryans, and the genesis of their languages is Sanskrit? Moreover, the Western scholars know that the Greek and Latin languages were formed within historical periods, the Greeks and Latins themselves having no existence as nations 11,000 B.C.. Surely they who advance such a proposition do not realize how very unscientific is their statement! ---------- * The position recently taken up by Mr. Gerald Massey in Light that the story of Atlantis is not a geological event but an ancient astronomical myth, is rather imprudent. Mr. Massey, notwithstanding his rare intuitional faculties and great learning, is one of those writers in whom the intensity of research bent into one direction has biased his otherwise clear understanding. Because Hercules is now a constellation it does not follow that there never was a hero of this name. Because the Noachian Universal Deluge is now proved a fiction based upon geological and geographical ignorance, it does not, therefore, appear that there were not many local deluges in prehistoric ages. The ancients connected every terrestrial event with the celestial bodies. They traced the history of their great deified heroes and memorialized it in stellar configurations as often as they personified pure myths, anthropomorphizing objects in Nature. One has to learn the difference between the two modes before attempting to classify them under one nomenclature. An earthquake has just engulfed over 80,000 people (87,903) in Sunda Straits. These were mostly Malays, savages with whom but few had relations, and the dire event will be soon forgotten. Had a portion of Great Britain been thus swept away instead, the whole world would have been in commotion, and yet, a few thousand years hence, even such an event would have passed out of man's memory; and a future Gerald Massey might be found speculating upon the astronomical character and signification of the Isles of Wight, Jersey, or Man, arguing, perhaps, that this latter island had not contained a real living race of men but "belonged to astronomical mythology," was a "Man submerged in celestial waters." If the legend of the lost Atlantis is only "like those of Airyana-Vaejo and Jambu-dvipa," it is terrestrial enough, and therefore "the mythological origin of the Deluge legend" is so far an open question. We claim that it is not "indubitably demonstrated," however clever the theoretical demonstration. --------- Such are the criticisms passed, such the "historical difficulty." The culprits arraigned are fully alive to their perilous situation; nevertheless, they maintain the statement. The only thing which may perhaps here be objected to is, that the names of the two nations are incorrectly used. It may be argued that to refer to the remote ancestors and their descendants equally as "Greeks and Romans," is an anachronism as marked as would be the calling of the ancient Keltic Gauls, or the Insubres, Frenchmen. As a matter of fact this is true. But, besides the very plausible excuse that the names used were embodied in a private letter, written as usual in great haste, and which was hardly worthy of the honour of being quoted verbatim with all its imperfections, there may perhaps exist still weightier objections to calling the said people by any other name. One misnomer is as good as another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance, more "historical." The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic Japhetidae?), the Greek and Roman sub-races mentioned have to be traced much farther back. Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones--a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with the Hellenes, meant certainly more than simply "soil-born," or primitive aborigines; and yet the so-called fable of Deukalion and Pyrrha is surely no more incredible or marvelous than that of Adam and Eve--a fable that hardly a hundred years ago no one would have dared or even thought to question. And in its esoteric significance the Greek tradition is possibly more truly historical than many a so-called historical event during the period of the Olympiades, though both Hesiod and Homer may have failed to record the former in their epics. Nor could the Romans be referred to as the Umbro-Sabbellians, nor even as the Itali. Peradventure, had the historians learnt something more than they have of the Italian "Autochthones"--the Iapygians--one might have given the "old Romans" the latter name. But then there would be again that other difficulty: history knows that the Latin invaders drove before them, and finally cooped up, this mysterious and miserable race among the clefts of the Calabrian rocks, thus showing the absence of any race affinity between the two. Moreover, Western archeologists keep to their own counsel, and will accept of no other but their own conjectures. And since they have failed to make anything out of the undecipherable inscriptions in an unknown tongue and mysterious characters on the Iapygian monuments, and so for years have pronounced them unguessable, he who would presume to meddle where the doctors muddle would be likely to be reminded of the Arab proverb about proffered advice. Thus, it seems hardly possible to designate "the old Greeks and Romans" by their legitimate, true name, so as to at once satisfy the "historians" and keep on the fair side of truth and fact. However, since in the Replies that precede Science had to be repeatedly shocked by most unscientific propositions, and that before this series is closed many a difficulty, philological and archeological as well as historical, will have to be unavoidably created--it may be just as wise to uncover the occult batteries at once and have it over with. Well, then, the "Adepts" deny most emphatically to Western science any knowledge whatever of the growth and development of the Indo-Aryan race which, "at the very dawn of history," they have espied in its "patriarchal simplicity" on the banks of the Oxus. Before our proposition concerning "the old Greeks and Romans" can be repudiated or even controverted, Western Orientalists will have to know more than they do about the antiquity of that race and the Aryan language; and they will have to account for those numberless gaps in history which no hypotheses of theirs seem able to fill up. Notwithstanding their present profound ignorance with regard to the early ancestry of the Indo-European nations, and though no historian has yet ventured to assign even a remotely approximate date to the separation of the Aryan nations and the origins of the Sanskrit language, they hardly show the modesty that might, under these circumstances, be expected from them. Placing as they do that great separation of the races at the first "dawn of traditional history," with the Vedic age as "the background of the whole Indian world" (of which confessedly they know nothing), they will, nevertheless, calmly assign a modern date to any of the Rik-vedic oldest songs, on its "internal evidence;" and in doing this, they show as little hesitation as Mr. Fergusson when ascribing a post-Christian age to the most ancient rockcut temple in India, merely on its "external form." As for their unseemly quarrels, mutual recriminations, and personalities over questions of scholarship, the less said the better. "The evidence of language is irrefragable," as the great Oxford Sanskritist says. To which he is answered--"provided it does not clash with historical facts and ethnology." It may be--no doubt it is, as far as his knowledge goes--"the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historical periods;" but when something of these alleged "prehistorical periods" comes to be known, and when what we think we know of certain supposed prehistoric nations is found diametrically opposed to his "evidence of language," the "Adepts" may be, perhaps, permitted to keep to their own views and opinions, even though they differ with those of the greatest living philologist. The study of language is but a part--though, we admit, a fundamental part--of true philology. To be complete, the latter has, as correctly argued by Bockt, to be almost synonymous with history. We gladly concede the right to the Western philologist, who has to work in the total absence of any historical data, to rely upon comparative grammar, and take the identification of roots lying at the foundation of words of those languages he is familiar with, or may know of, and put it forward as the result of his study, and the only available evidence. But we would like to see the same right conceded by him to the student of other races; even though these be inferior to the European races, in the opinion of the paramount West: for it is barely possible that, proceeding on other lines, and having reduced his knowledge to a system which precludes hypothesis and simple affirmation, the Eastern student has preserved a perfectly authentic record (for him) of those periods which his opponent regards as ante-historical. The bare fact that, while Western men of science are referred to as "scholars" and scholiasts--native Sanskritists and archeologists are often spoken of as "Calcutta" and "Indian sciolists"--affords no proof of their real inferiority, but rather of the wisdom of the Chinese proverb that "self-conceit is rarely companion to politeness." The "Adept" therefore has little, if anything, to do with difficulties presented by Western history. To his knowledge--based on documentary records from which, as said, hypothesis is excluded, and as regards which even psychology is called to play a very secondary part--the history of his and other nations extends immeasurably beyond that hardly discernible point that stands on the far-away horizon of the Western world as a landmark of the commencement of its history. Records made throughout a series of ages, based on astronomical chronology and zodiacal calculations, cannot err. (This new "difficulty"-- palaeographical, t his time--that may be possibly suggested by the mention of the Zodiac in India and Central Asia before the Christian era, is disposed of in a subsequent article.) Hence, the main question at issue is to decide which--the Orientalist or the "Oriental"--is most likely to err. The "English F.T.S." has choice of two sources of information, two groups of teachers. One group is composed of Western historians with their suite of learned Ethnologists, Philologists, Anthropologists, Archeologists and Orientalists in general. The other consists of unknown Asiatics belonging to a race which, notwithstanding Mr. Max Muller's assertion that the same "blood is running in the veins (of the English soldier) and in the veins of the dark Bengalese," is generally regarded by many a cultured Western as "inferior." A handful of men can hardly hope to be listened to, specially when their history, religion, language, origin and sciences, having been seized upon by the conqueror, are now disfigured and mutilated beyond recognition, and who have lived to see the Western scholar claim a monopoly beyond appeal or protest of deciding the correct meaning, chronological date, and historical value of the monumental and palaeographic relics of his motherland. It has little, if ever, entered the mind of the Western public that their scholars have, until very lately, worked in a narrow pathway obstructed with the ruins of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic Past; that they have been cramped on all sides by limitations of "revealed" events coming from God, "with whom a thousand years are but as one day," and who have thus felt bound to cram millenniums into centuries and hundreds into units, giving at the utmost an age of 1,000 to what is 10,000 years old. All this to save the threatened authority of their religion and their own respectability and good name in cultured society. And even that, when free themselves from preconceptions, they have had to protect the honour of the Jewish divine chronology assailed by stubborn facts; and thus have become (often unconsciously) the slaves of an artificial history made to fit into the narrow frame of a dogmatic religion. No proper thought has been given to this purely psychological but very significant trifle. Yet we all know how, rather than admit any relation between Sanskrit and the Gothic, Keltic, Greek, Latin and old Persian, facts have been tampered with, old texts purloined from libraries, and philological discoveries vehemently denied. And we have also heard from our retreats, how Dugald Stewart and his colleagues, upon seeing that the discovery would also involve ethnological affinities, and damage the prestige of those sires of the world races--Shem, Ham and Japhet--denied in the face of fact that "Sanskrit had ever been a living, spoken language," supporting the theory that "it was an invention of the Brahmins, who had constructed their Sanskrit on the model of the Greek and Latin." And again we know, holding the proof of the same, how the majority of Orientalists are prone to go out of their way to prevent any Indian antiquity (whether MSS. or inscribed monument, whether art or science) from being declared pre-Christian. As the origin and history of the Gentile world is made to move in the narrow circuit of a few centuries "B.C.," within that fecund epoch when mother earth, recuperated from her arduous labours of the Stone age, begat, it seems without transition, so many highly civilized nations and false pretenses, so the enchanted circle of Indian archeology lies between the (to them unknown) year of the Samvat era, and the tenth century of the Western chronology. Having to dispose of an "historical difficulty" of such a serious character, the defendants charged with it can but repeat what they have already stated; all depends upon the past history and antiquity allowed to the Indo-Aryan nation. The first step to take is to ascertain how much History herself knows of that almost prehistoric period when the soil of Europe had not been trodden yet by the primitive Aryan tribes. From the latest Encyclopedia down to Professor Max Muller and other Orientalists, we gather what follows; they acknowledge that at some immensely remote period, before the Aryan nations got divided from the parent stock (with the germs of Indo-Germanic languages in them); and before they rushed asunder to scatter over Europe and Asia in search of new homes, there stood a "single barbaric (?) people as physical and political representative of the nascent Aryan race." This people spoke "a now extinct Aryan language," from which by a series of modifications (surely requiring more thousands of years than our difficulty-makers are willing to concede) there arose gradually all the subsequent languages now spoken by the Caucasian races. That is about all Western history knows of its genesis. Like Ravana's brother, Kumbhakarna,--the Hindu Rip van Winkle--it slept for a long series of ages a dreamless, heavy sleep. And when at last it awoke to consciousness, it was but to find the "nascent Aryan race" grown into scores of nations, peoples and races, most of them effete and crippled with age, many irretrievably extinct, while the true origin of the younger ones it was utterly unable to account for. So much for the "youngest brother." As for "the eldest brother, the Hindu," who, Professor Max Muller tells us, "was the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family," and whose history this eminent philologist has now kindly undertaken to impart to him,--he, the Hindu, claims that while his Indo-European relative was soundly sleeping under the protecting shadow of Noah's ark, he kept watch and did not miss seeing one event from his high Himalayan fastnesses; and that he has recorded the history thereof, in a language which, though as incomprehensible as the Iapygian inscriptions to the Indo-European immigrant, is quite clear to the writers. For this crime he now stands condemned as a falsifier of the records of his forefathers. A place has been hitherto purposely left open for India "to be filled up when the pure metal of history should have been extracted from the ore of Brahmanic exaggeration and superstition." Unable, however, to meet this programme, the Orientalist has since persuaded himself that there was nothing in that "ore" but dross. He did more. He applied himself to contrast Brahmanic "superstition" and "exaggeration" with Mosaic revelation and its chronology. The Veda was confronted with Genesis. Its absurd claims to antiquity were forthwith dwarfed to their proper dimensions by the 4,004 years B.C. measure of the world's age; and the Brahmanic "superstition and fables" about the longevity of the Aryan Rishis, were belittled and exposed by the sober historical evidence furnished in "The genealogy and age of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah," whose respective days were 930 and 950 years; without mentioning Methuselah, who died at the premature age of nine hundred and sixty-nine. In view of such experience, the Hindu has a certain right to decline the offers made to correct his annals by Western history and chronology. On the contrary, he would respectfully advise the Western scholar, before he denies point-blank any statement made by the Asiatics with reference to what is prehistoric ages to Europeans, to show that the latter have themselves anything like trustworthy data as regards their own racial history. And that settled, he may have the leisure and capacity to help his ethnic neighbours to prune their genealogical trees. Our Rajputs, among others, have perfectly trustworthy family records of an unbroken lineal descent through 2,000 years "B.C." and more, as proved by Colonel Tod; records which are accepted by the British Government in its official dealings with them. It is not enough to have studied stray fragments of Sanskrit literature--even though their number should amount to 10,000 texts, as boasted of--allowed to fall into foreign hands, to speak so confidently of the "Aryan first settlers in India," and assert that, "left to themselves, in a world of their own, without a past and without a future (!) before them, they had nothing but themselves to ponder upon," and therefore could know absolutely nothing of other nations. To comprehend correctly and make out the inner meaning of most of them, one has to read these texts with the help of the esoteric light, and after having mastered the language of the Brahmanic Secret Code--branded generally as "theological twaddle." Nor is it sufficient--if one would judge correctly of what the archaic Aryans did or did not know; whether or not they cultivated the social and political virtues; cared or not for history--to claim proficiency in both Vedic and classical Sanskrit, as well as in Prakrit and Arya Bhasha. To comprehend the esoteric meaning of ancient Brahmanical literature, one has, as just remarked, to be in possession of the key to the Brahmanical Code. To master the conventional terms used in the Puranas, the Aranyakas and Upanishads is a science in itself, and one far more difficult than even the study of the 3,996 aphoristical rules of Panini, or his algebraical symbols. Very true, most of the Brahmans themselves have now forgotten the correct interpretations of their sacred texts. Yet they know enough of the dual meaning in their scriptures to be justified in feeling amused at the strenuous efforts of the European Orientalist to protect the supremacy of his own national records and the dignity of his science by interpreting the Hindu hieratic text after a peremptory fashion quite unique. Disrespectful though it may seem, we call on the philologist to prove in some more convincing manner than usual, that he is better qualified than even the average Hindu Sanskrit pundit to judge of the antiquity of the "language of the gods;" that he has been really in a position to trace unerringly along the lines of countless generations the course of the "now extinct Aryan tongue" in its many and various transformations in the West, and its primitive evolution into first the Vedic, and then the classical Sanskrit in the East, and that from the moment when the mother-stream began deviating into its new ethnographical beds, he has followed it up. Finally that, while he, the Orientalist, can, owing to speculative interpretations of what he thinks he has learnt from fragments of Sanskrit literature, judge of the nature of all that he knows nothing about--i.e., to speculate upon the past history of a great nation he has lost sight of from its "nascent state," and caught up again but at the period of its last degeneration--the native student never knew, nor can ever know, anything of that history. Until the Orientalist has proved all this, he can be accorded but small justification for assuming that air of authority and supreme contempt which is found in almost every work upon India and its Past. Having no knowledge himself whatever of those incalculable ages that lie between the Aryan Brahman in Central Asia, and the Brahman at the threshold of Buddhism, he has no right to maintain that the initiated Indo-Aryan can never know as much of them as the foreigner. Those periods being an utter blank to him, he is little qualified to declare that the Aryan, having had no political history "of his own...." his only sphere was "religion and philosophy.... in solitude and contemplation." A happy thought suggested, no doubt, by the active life, incessant wars, triumphs, and defeats portrayed in the oldest songs of the Rik-Veda. Nor can he with the smallest show of logic affirm that "India had no place in the political history of the world," or that "there are no synchronisms between the history of the Brahmans and that of other nations before the date of the origin of Buddhism in India;" for he knows no more of the prehistoric history of those "other nations" than of that of the Brahman. All his inferences, conjectures and systematic arrangements of hypotheses begin very little earlier than 200 "B.C.," if even so much, on anything like really historical grounds. He has to prove all this before he can command our attention. Otherwise, however "irrefragable the evidence of language," the presence of Sanskrit roots in all the European languages will be insufficient to prove, either that (a) before the Aryan invaders descended toward the seven rivers they had never left their northern regions; or (b) why the "eldest brother, the Hindu," should have been "the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family." To the philologist such a supposition may seem "quite natural." Yet the Brahman is no less justified in his ever-growing suspicion that there may be at the bottom some occult reason for such a programme. That in the interest of his theory the Orientalist was forced to make "the eldest brother" tarry so suspiciously long on the Oxus, or wherever "the youngest" may have placed him in his "nascent state" after the latter "saw his brothers all depart towards the setting sun." We find reasons to believe that the chief motive for alleging such a procrastination is the necessity to bring the race closer to the Christian era. To show the "brother" inactive and unconcerned, "with nothing but himself to ponder on," lest his antiquity and "fables of empty idolatry," and perhaps his traditions of other people's doings, should interfere with the chronology by which it is determined to try him. The suspicion is strengthened when one finds in the book from which we have been so largely quoting--a work of a purely scientific and philological character--such frequent remarks and even prophecies as: "History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education before, in the fulness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity." Or, again "The ancient religions of the world were but the milk of Nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by the bread of life;" and such broad sentiments expressed as that "there is some truth in Buddhism, as there is in every one of the false religions of the world, but...." * ----------- * Max Muller's "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature." ----------- The atmosphere of Cambridge and Oxford seems decidedly unpropitious to the recognition of either Indian antiquity, or the merit of the philosophies sprung from its soil!* --------- * And how one-sided and biased most of the Western Orientalists are may be seen by reading carefully "The History of Indian Literature," by Albrecht Weber--a Sanskrit scholiast classed with the highest authorities. The incessant harping upon the one special string of Christianity, and the ill-concealed efforts to pass it off as the keynote of all other religions, is painfully pre-eminent in his work. Christian influences are shown to have affected not only the growth of Buddhism and Krishna worship, but even that of the Siva-cult and its legends; it is openly stated that "it is not at all a far-fetched hypothesis that they have reference to scattered Christian missionaries!" The eminent Orientalist evidently forgets that, notwithstanding his efforts, none of the Vedic, Sutra or Buddhist periods can be possibly crammed into this Christian period--their universal tank of all ancient creeds, and of which some Orientalists would fain make a poor-house for all decayed archaic religions and philosophy. Even Tibet, in his opinion, has not escaped "Western influence." Let us hope to the contrary. It can be proved that Buddhist missionaries were as numerous in Palestine, Alexandria, Persia, and even Greece, two centuries before the Christian era, as the Padris are now in Asia. That the Gnostic doctrines (as he is obliged to confess) are permeated with Buddhism. Basilides, Valentinian, Bardesanes, and especially Manes were simply heretical Buddhists, "the formula of abjuration of these doctrines in the case of the latter, specifying expressly Buddha (Bodda) by name." ---------- Leaflets from Esoteric History The foregoing--a long, yet necessary digression--will show that the Asiatic scholar is justified in generally withholding what he may know. That it is not merely on historical facts that hangs the "historical difficulty" at issue; but rather on its degree of interference with time-honoured, long-established conjectures, often raised to the eminence of an unapproachable historical axiom. That no statement coming from our quarters can ever hope to be given consideration so long as it has to be supported on the ruins of reigning hobbies, whether of an alleged historical or religious character. Yet pleasant it is, after the brainless assaults to which occult sciences have hitherto been subjected--assaults in which abuse has been substituted for argument, and flat denial for calm inquiry--to find that there remain in the West some men who will come into the field like philosophers, and soberly and fairly discuss the claims of our hoary doctrines to the respect due to a truth and the dignity demanded for a science. Those alone whose sole desire is to ascertain the truth, not to maintain foregone conclusions, have a right to expect undisguised facts. Reverting to our subject, so far as allowable, we will now, for the sake of that minority, give them. The records of the Occultists make no difference between the "Atlantean" ancestors of the old Greeks and Romans. Partially corroborated and in turn contradicted by licensed or recognized history, their records teach that of the ancient Latini of classic legend called Itali; of that people, in short, which, crossing the Apennines (as their Judo-Aryan brothers--let this be known--had crossed before them the Hindoo-Koosh) entered from the north the peninsula--there survived at a period long before the days of Romulus but the name, and a nascent language. Profane history informs us that the Latins of the "mythical era" got so Hellenized amidst the rich colonies of Magna Grecia that there remained nothing in them of their primitive Latin nationality. It is the Latins proper, it says, those pre-Roman Italians who by settling in Latium had from the first kept themselves free from the Greek influence, who were the ancestors of the Romans. Contradicting exoteric history, the Occult records affirm that if, owing to circumstances too long and complicated to be related here, the settlers of Latium preserved their primitive nationality a little longer than their brothers who had first entered the peninsula with them after leaving the East (which was not their original home), they lost it very soon, for other reasons. Free from the Samnites during the first period, they did not remain free from other invaders. While the Western historian puts together the mutilated, incomplete records of various nations and people, and makes them into a clever mosaic according to the best and most probable plan and rejects entirely traditional fables, the Occultist pays not the slightest attention to the vain self-glorification of alleged conquerors or their lithic inscriptions. Nor does he follow the stray bits of so-called historical information, often concocted by interested parties and found scattered hither and thither in the fragments of classical writers, whose original texts themselves have not seldom been tampered with. The Occultist follows the ethnological affinities and their divergences in the various nationalities, races and sub-races, in a more easy way; and he is guided in this as surely as the student who examines a geographical map. As the latter can easily trace by their differently coloured outlines the boundaries of the many countries and their possessions; their geographical superficies and their separations by seas, rivers and mountains; so the Occultist can by following the (to him) well distinguishable and defined auric shades and gradations of colour in the inner-man unerringly pronounce to which of the several distinct human families, as also to what special group, and even small sub-group of the latter, belongs any particular people, tribe, or man. This will appear hazy and incomprehensible to the many who know nothing of ethnic varieties of nerve-aura, and disbelieve in any "inner-man" theory, scientific but to the few. The whole question hangs upon the reality or unreality of the existence of this inner-man whom clairvoyance has discovered, and whose odyle or nerve-emanations Von Reichenbach proves. If one admits such a presence and realizes intuitionally that being closer related to the one invisible Reality, the inner type must be still more pronounced than the outer physical type, then it will be a matter of little, if any, difficulty to conceive our meaning. For, indeed, if even the respective physical idiosyncrasies and special characteristics of any given person make his nationality usually distinguishable by the physical eye of the ordinary observer--let alone the experienced ethnologist: the Englishman being commonly recognizable at a glance from the Frenchman, the German from the Italian, not to speak of the typical differences between human root-families* in their anthropological division--there seems little difficulty in conceiving that the same, though far more pronounced, difference of type and characteristics should exist between the inner races that inhabit these "fleshly tabernacles." Besides this easily discernible psychological and astral differences, there are the documentary records in their unbroken series of chronological tables and the history of the gradual branching off of races and sub-races from the three geological primeval Races, the work of the Initiates of all the archaic and ancient temples up to date, collected in our "Book of Numbers," and other volumes. --------- * Properly speaking, these ought to be called "Geological Races," so as to be easily distinguished from their subsequent evolutions--the root-races. The Occult doctrine has nothing to do with the Biblical division of Shem, Ham and Japhet, and admires, without accepting it, the latest Huxleyan physiological division of the human races into their quintuple groups of Australioids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthechroics, and the fifth variety of Melanochroics. Yet it says that the triple division of the blundering Jews is closer to the truth, it knows but of three entirely distinct primeval races whose evolution, formation and development went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata; namely, the BLACK, the RED-YELLOW, and the BROWN-WHITE RACES. --------- Hence, and on this double testimony (which the Westerns are quite welcome to reject if so pleased) it is affirmed that, owing to the great amalgamation of various sub-races, such as the Iapygian, Etruscan, Pelasgic, and later--the strong admixture of the Hellenic and Kelto-Gaulic element in the veins of the primitive Itali of Latium--there remained in the tribes gathered by Romulus on the banks of the Tiber about as much Latinism as there is now in the Romanic people of Wallachia. Of course if the historical foundation of the fable of the twins of the Vestal Silvia is entirely rejected, together with that of the foundation of Alba Longa by the son of Aeneas, then it stands to reason that the whole of the statements made must be likewise a modern invention built upon the utterly worthless fables of the "legendary mythical age." For those who now give these statements, however, there is more of actual truth in such fables than there is in the alleged historical Regal period of the earliest Romans. It is to be deplored that the present statement should clash with the authoritative conclusion of Mommsen and others. Yet, stating but that which to the "Adepts" is fact, it must be understood at once that all (but the fanciful chronological date for the foundation of Rome-April, 753 "B.C.") that is given in old traditions in relation to the Paemerium, and the triple alliance of the Ramnians, Luceres and Tities, of the so-called Romuleian legend, is indeed far nearer truth than what external history accepts as facts during the Punic and Macedonian wars up to, through, and down the Roman Empire to its fall. The founders of Rome were decidedly a mongrel people, made up of various scraps and remnants of the many primitive tribes; only a few really Latin families, the descendants of the distinct sub-race that came along with the Umbro-Sabellians from the East remaining. And, while the latter preserved their distinct colour down to the Middle Ages through the Sabine element, left unmixed in its mountainous regions, the blood of the true Roman was Hellenic blood from its beginning. The famous Latin league is no fable, but history. The succession of kings descended from the Trojan Aeneas is a fact; and the idea that Romulus is to be regarded as simply the symbolical representative of a people, as Aeolus, Dorius, and Ion were once, instead of a living man, is as unwarranted as it is arbitrary. It could only have been entertained by a class of historiographers bent upon condoning their sin in supporting the dogma that Shem, Ham and Japhet were the historical once living ancestors of mankind, by making a burnt-offering of every really historical but non-Jewish tradition, legend, or record which might presume to a place on the same level with these three privileged archaic mariners, instead of humbly groveling at their feet as "absurd myths" and old wives' tales and superstitions. It will thus appear that the objectionable statements on pp. 56 and 62 of "Esoteric Buddhism," which are alleged to create an "historical difficulty," were not made by Mr. Sinnett's correspondent to bolster a western theory, but in loyalty to historical facts. Whether they can or cannot be accepted in those particular localities where criticism seems based upon mere conjecture (though honoured with the name of scientific hypothesis), is something which concerns the present writers as little as any casual traveler's unfavourable comments upon the time-scarred visage of the Sphinx can affect the designer of that sublime symbol. The sentences, "the Greeks and Romans were small sub-races of our own Caucasian stock" (p. 6), and they were "the remnants of the Atlanteans (the modern belong to the fifth race)" (p. 62), show the real meaning on their face. By the old Greeks, "remnants of the Atlanteans" the eponymous ancestors (as they are called by Europeans) of the Aeolians, Dorians and Ionians, are meant. By the connection together of the old Greeks and Romans without distinction, was meant that the primitive Latins were swallowed by Magna Graecia. And by "the modern" belonging "to the fifth race"--both these small branchlets from whose veins had been strained out the last drop of the Atlantean blood--it was implied that the Mongoloid 4th race blood had already been eliminated. Occultists make a distinction between the races intermediate between any two root-races: the Westerns do not. The "old Romans" were Hellenes in a new ethnological disguise; and the still older Greeks the real blood ancestors of the future Romans. In direct relation to this, attention is drawn to the following fact--one of the many in close historical bearing upon the "mythical" age to which Atlantis belongs. It is a fable and may be charged to the account of historical difficulties. It is well calculated, however, to throw all the old ethnological and genealogical divisions into confusion. Asking the reader to bear in mind that Atlantis, like modern Europe, comprised many nations and many dialects (issues from the three primeval root-languages of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Races), we may return to Poseidonis, its last surviving remnant of 12,000 years ago. As the chief element in the languages of the 5th race is the Aryan-Sanskrit of the "Brown-white" geological stock or race, so the predominating element in Atlantis was a language which has now survived but in the dialects of some American Red-Indian tribes, and in the Chinese speech of the inland Chinamen, the mountainous tribes of Kivang-ze--a language which was an admixture of the agglutinate and the monosyllabic, as it would be called by modern philologists. It was, in short, the language of the "Red-yellow" second or middle geological stock (we maintain the term "geological"). A strong percentage of the Mongoloid or 4th Root-race was, of course, to be found in the Aryans of the 5th. But this did not prevent in the least the presence at the same time of unalloyed, pure Aryan races in it. A number of small islands scattered around Poseidonis had been vacated, in consequence of earthquakes, long before the final catastrophe, which has alone remained in the memory of men-- thanks to some written records. Tradition says that one of the small tribes (the Aeolians) who had become islanders after emigrating from far northern countries, had to leave their home again for fear of a deluge. If, in spite of the Orientalists and the conjecture of M.F. Lenormant-- who invented a name for a people whose shadowy outline he dimly perceived in the faraway Past as preceding the Babylonians--we say that this Aryan race that came from Central Asia, the cradle of the 5th race Humanity, belonged to the "Akkadian" tribes, there will be a new historico-ethnological difficulty created. Yet it is maintained that these "Akkads" were no more a "Turanian" race than any of the modern British people are the mythical ten tribes of Israel, so conspicuously present in the Bible, and absent from history. With such remarkable pacta conventa between modern exact (?) and ancient Occult sciences, we may proceed with the fable. Belonging virtually, through their original connection with the Aryan, Central Asian stock, to the 5th race, the old Aeolians yet were Atlanteans, not only in virtue of their long residence in the now submerged continent, covering some thousands of years, but by the free intermingling of blood, by intermarriage with them. Perhaps in this connection Mr. Huxley's disposition to account for his Melanochroi (the Greeks being included under this classification or type)--as themselves "the result of crossing between the Xanthochroi and the Australioids," among whom he places the Southern India lower classes and the Egyptians to some extent--is not far off from fact. Anyhow the Aeolians of Atlantis were Aryans on the whole, as much as the Basques-- Dr. Pritchard's Allophylians--are now southern Europeans, although originally belonging to the South Indian Dravidian stock (their progenitors having never been the aborigines of Europe prior to the first Aryan emigration, as supposed). Frightened by the frequent earthquakes and the visible approach of the cataclysm, this tribe is said to have filled a flotilla of arks, to have sailed from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and, sailing along the coasts, after several years of travel to have landed on the shores of the Aegean Sea in the land of Pyrrha (now Thessaly), to which they gave the name of Aeolia. Thence they proceeded on business with the gods to Mount Olympus. It may be stated here, at the risk of creating a "geographical difficulty," that in that mythical age Greece, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, and many other islands of the Mediterranean, were simply the far-away possessions, or colonies, of Atlantis. Hence, the "fable" proceeds to state that all along the coasts of Spain, France, and Italy the Aeolians often halted, and the memory of their "magical feats" still survives among the descendants of the old Massilians, of the tribes of the later Carthago-Nova, and the seaports of Etruria and Syracuse. And here again it would not be a bad idea, perchance, even at this late hour, for the archeologists to trace, with the permission of the anthropological societies, the origin of the various autochthones through their folk-lore and fables, as they may prove both more suggestive and reliable than their "undecipherable" monuments. History catches a misty glimpse of these particular autochthones thousands of years only after they had been settled in old Greece--namely, at the moment when the Epireans cross the Pindus bent on expelling the black magicians from their home to Boeotia. But history never listened to the popular legends which speak of the "accursed sorcerers" who departed, leaving as an inheritance behind them more than one secret of their infernal arts, the fame of which crossing the ages has now passed into history--or, classical Greek and Roman fable, if so preferred. To this day a popular tradition narrates how the ancient forefathers of the Thessalonians, so renowned for their magicians, had come from behind the Pillars, asking for help and refuge from the great Zeus, and imploring the father of the gods to save them from the deluge. But the "Father" expelled them from the Olympus, allowing their tribe to settle only at the foot of the mountain, in the valleys, and by the shores of the Aegean Sea. Such is the oldest fable of the ancient Thessalonians. And now, what was the language spoken by the Atlantean Aeolians? History cannot answer us. Nevertheless, the reader has only to be reminded of some of the accepted and a few of the as yet unknown facts, to cause the light to enter any intuitional brain. It is now proved that man was universally conceived in antiquity as born of the earth. Such is now the profane explanation of the term autochthones. In nearly every vulgarized popular fable, from the Sanskrit Arya "born of the earth," or Lord of the Soil in one sense; the Erechtheus of the archaic Greeks, worshiped in the earliest days of the Akropolis and shown by Homer as "he whom the earth bore" ( Il. ii. 548); down to Adam fashioned of "red earth," the genetical story has a deep occult meaning, and an indirect connection with the origin of man and of the subsequent races. Thus, the fables of Helen, the son of Pyrrha the red--the oldest name of Thessaly; and of Mannus, the reputed ancestor of the Germans, himself the son of Tuisco, "the red son of the earth," have not only a direct bearing upon our Atlantis fable, but they explain moreover the division of mankind into geological groups as made by the Occultists. It is only this, their division, that is able to explain to Western teachers the apparently strange, if not absurd, coincidence of the Semitic Adam--a divinely revealed personage--being connected with red earth, in company with the Aryan Pyrrha, Tuisco, &c.--the mythical heroes of "foolish" fables. Nor will that division made by the Eastern Occultists, who call the 5th race people "the Brown-white," and the 4th race the "Red-yellow," Root-races--connecting them with geological strata--appear at all fantastic to those who understood verse iii. 34-9 of the Veda and its occult meaning, and another verse in which the Dasyus are called "Yellow." Hatvi Dasyun pra aryam varanam avat is said of Indra who, by killing the Dasyus, protected the colour of the Aryans; and again, Indra "unveiled the light for the Aryas and the Dasyus was left on the left hand" (ii. III 18). Let the student of Occultism bear in mind that the Greek Noah, Deukalion, the husband of Pyrrha, was the reputed son of Prometheus who robbed Heaven of its fire (i.e., of secret Wisdom "of the right hand," or occult knowledge); that Prometheus is the brother of Atlas; that he is also the son of Asia and of the Titan Iapetus--the antetype from which the Jews borrowed their Japhet for the exigencies of their own popular legend to mask its kabalistic, Chaldean meaning; and that he is also the antetype of Deukalion. Prometheus is the creator of man out of earth and water,* who after stealing fire from Olympus--a mountain in Greece--is chained on a mount in the far-off Caucasus. From Olympus to Mount Kazbek there is a considerable distance. The Occultists say that while the 4th race was generated and developed on the Atlantean continent--our Antipodes in a certain sense--the 5th was generated and developed in Asia. (The ancient Greek geographer Strabo, for one, calls by the name of Ariana, the land of the Aryas, the whole country between the Indian Ocean in the south, the Hindu Kush and Parapamisis in the north, the Indus on the east, and the Caspian Gates, Karamania and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, on the west.) The fable of Prometheus relates to the extinction of the civilized portions of the 4th race, whom Zeus, in order to create a new race, would destroy entirely, and Prometheus (who had the sacred fire of knowledge) saved partially "for future seed." But the origin of the fable antecedes the destruction of Poseidonis by more than seventy thousand years, however incredible it may seem. The seven great continents of the world, spoken of in the Vishnu Purana (B. II., cap. 2) include Atlantis, though, of course, under another name. Ila and Ira are synonymous Sanskrit terms (see Amarakosha), and both mean earth or native soil; and Ilavrita is a portion of Ila, the central point of India (Jambudvipa), the latter being itself the centre of the seven great continents before the submersion of the great continent of Atlantis, of which Poseidonis was but an insignificant remnant. And now, while every Brahmin will understand the meaning, we may help the Europeans with a few more explanations. -------- * Behold Moses saying that it requires earth and water to make a living man. -------- If, in that generally tabooed work, "Isis Unveiled," the "English F.T.S." turns to page 589, vol. I., he may find therein narrated another old Eastern legend. An island .... (where now the Gobi desert lies) was inhabited by the last remnants of the race that preceded ours: a handful of "Adepts"--the "Sons of God," now referred to as the Brahman Pitris; called by another yet synonymous name in the Chaldean Kabala. "Isis Unveiled" may appear very puzzling and contradictory to those who know nothing of Occult Sciences. To the Occultist it is correct, and while perhaps left purposely sinning (for it was the first cautious attempt to let into the West a faint streak of Eastern esoteric light), it reveals more facts than were ever given before its appearance. Let any one read these pages and he may comprehend. The "six such races" in Manu refer to the sub-races of the fourth race (p. 590). In addition to this the reader must turn to the paper on "The Septenary Principle in Esotericism" (p. 187 ante), study the list of the "Manus" of our fourth Round (p. 254), and between this and "Isis" light may, perchance, be focused. On pages 590-6 of the work mentioned above, he will find that Atlantis is mentioned in the "Secret Books of the East" (as yet virgin of Western spoliating hand) under another name in the sacred hieratic or sacerdotal language. And then it will be shown to him that Atlantis was not merely the name of one island but that of a whole continent, of whose isles and islets many have to this day survived. The remotest ancestors of some of the inhabitants of the now miserable fisherman's hovel "Aclo" (once Atlan), near the gulf of Uraha, were allied at one time as closely with the old Greeks and Romans as they were with the "true inland China-man," mentioned on p. 57 Of "Esoteric Buddhism." Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India; and strange to him who does not follow the mysterious working of the human mind and its unconscious approximations to hidden truths--even the aborigines of the new continent, the Red-skinned tribes, the "Mongoloids" of Mr. Huxley, were named Indians. Names now attributed to chance: elastic word that! Strange coincidence, indeed, to him who does not know--science refusing yet to sanction the wild hypothesis--that there was a time when the Indian peninsula was at one end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the prehistoric ages was not only within the region at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, but there was even in the days of history, and within its memory, an upper, a lower, and a western India: and still earlier it was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the "Brahmans of Upper India" stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached--hardly wetting his feet--the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveler, furnished with a canoe and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America. On pp. 592-3 of "Isis," vol. I., the Thevetatas--the evil, mischievous gods that have survived in the Etruscan Pantheon--are mentioned, along with the "sons of God" or Brahman Pitris. The Involute, the hidden or shrouded gods, the Consentes, Complices, and Novensiles, are all disguised relics of the Atlanteans; while the Etruscan arts of soothsaying their Disciplina revealed by Tages comes direct and in undisguised form from the Atlantean king Thevetat, the "invisible" Dragon, whose name survives to this day among the Siamese and Burmese, as also, in the Jataka allegorical stories of the Buddhists as the opposing power under the name of Devadat. And Tages was the son of Thevetat, before he became the grandson of the Etruscan Jupiter-Tinia. Have the Western Orientalists tried to find out the connection between all these Dragons and Serpents; between the "powers of Evil" in the cycles of epic legends, the Persian and the Indian, the Greek and the Jewish; between the contests of Indra and the giant; the Aryan Nagas and the Iranian Aji Dahaka; the Guatemalian Dragon and the Serpent of Genesis--&c. &c. &c.? Professor Max Muller discredits the connection. So be it. But the fourth race of men, "men" whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once, the hidden as the unrevealed, is mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, the sacred books of the Guatemalians; and the Babylonian Xisuthrus, the far later Jewish Noah, the Hindu Vaivaswata, and the Greek Deukalion, are all identical with the great Father of the Thlinkithians, of Popol-Vuh who, like the rest of these allegorical (not mythical) Patriarchs, escaped in his turn and in his days, in a large boat at the time of the last great Deluge--the submersion of Atlantis. To have been an Indo-Aryan, Vaivaswata had not, of necessity, to meet with his Saviour (Vishnu, under the form of a fish) within the precincts of the present India, or even anywhere on the Asian continent; nor is it necessary to concede that he was the seventh great Manu himself (see catalogue of the Manus, in the paper on "The Septenary Principle in Esotericism" cited above), but simply that the Hindu Noah belonged to the clan of Vaivaswata and typifies the fifth race. Now the last of the Atlantean islands perished some 11,000 years ago; and the fifth race headed by the Aryans began its evolution, to the certain knowledge of the "Adepts" nearer one million than 900,000 years ago. But the historian and the anthropologist with their utmost stretch of liberality are unable to give more than from twenty to one hundred thousand years for all our human evolution. Hence we put it to them as a fair question: at what point during their own conjectural lakh of years do they fix the root-germ of the ancestral line of the "old Greeks and Romans?" Who were they? What is known or even "conjectured" about their territorial habitat after the division of the Aryan nations? And where were the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races? It is not enough for purposes of refutation of other peoples' statements to say that the latter lived separate from the former, and then come to a full stop--a fresh hiatus in the ethnological history of mankind. Since Asia is sometimes called the Cradle of Humanity, and it is an ascertained fact that Central Asia was likewise the cradle of the Semitic and Turanian races (for thus it is taught in Genesis), and we find the Turans agreeably to the theory evolved by the Assyriologists preceding the Babylonian Semitists, where, at what spot of the globe, did these Semito-Turanian nations break away from the parent stock, and what has become of the latter? It cannot be the small Jewish tribe of Patriarchs; and unless it can be shown that the garden of Eden was also on the Oxus or the Euphrates, fenced off from the soil inhabited by the children of Cain, philologists who undertake to fill in the gaps in Universal History with their made-up conjectures, may be regarded as ignorant of this detail as those they would enlighten. Logically, if the ancestors of these various groups had been at that remote period massed together, then the self-same roots of a parent common stock would have been equally traceable in their perfected languages as they are in those of the Judo-Europeans. And so, since whichever way one turns, one is met with the same troubled sea of speculation, margined by the treacherous quicksands of hypothesis, and every horizon bounded by inferential landmarks inscribed with imaginary dates. Again, the "Adepts" ask why should any one be awed into accepting as final criterion that which passes for science of high authority in Europe? For all this is known to the Asiatic scholar--in every case save the purely mathematical and physical sciences--as little better than a secret league for mutual support, and, perhaps, admiration. He bows with profound respect before the Royal Societies of Physicists, Chemists, and, to a degree, even of Naturalists. He refuses to pay the slightest attention to the merely speculative and conjectural so-called "sciences" of the modern Physiologist, Ethnologist, Philologist, &c., and the mob of self-styling Oedipuses to whom it is not given to unriddle the Sphynx of Nature, and who therefore throttle her. With an eye to the above, as also with a certain prevision of the future, the defendants in the cases under examination believe that the "historical difficulty" with reference to the non-historical statement, necessitated more than a simple reaffirmation of the fact. They knew that with no better claims to a hearing than may be accorded by the confidence of a few, and in view of the decided antagonism of the many, it would never do for them to say "we maintain" while Western professors maintained to the contrary. For a body of, so to say, unlicensed preachers and students of unauthorized and unrecognized sciences to offer to fight an August body of universally recognized oracles, would be an unprecedented piece of impertinence. Hence their respective claims had to be examined on however small a scale to begin with (in this as in all other cases) on other than psychological grounds. The "Adepts" in Occult Arts had better keep silence when confronted with the "A.C.S.'s"--Adepts in Conjectural Sciences--unless they could show, partially at least, how weak is the authority of the latter and on what foundations of shifting sands their scientific dicta are often built. They may thus make it a thinkable conjecture that the former may be right after all. Absolute silence, moreover, as at present advised, would have been fatal. Besides risking to be construed into inability to answer, it might have given rise to new complaints among the faithful few, and lead to fresh charges of selfishness against the writers. Therefore have the "Adepts" agreed to smooth in part at least a few of the most glaring difficulties and showing a highway to avoid them in future by studying the non-historical but actual, instead of the historical but mythical, portions of Universal History. And this they have achieved, they believe (at any rate with a few of their querists), by simply showing, or rather reminding them, that since no historical fact can stand as such against the "assumption" of the "Adepts"-- historians being confessedly ignorant of pre-Roman and Greek origins beyond the ghostly shadows of the Etruscans and Pelasgians--no real historical difficulty can be possibly involved in their statement. From objectors outside the Society, the writers neither demand nor do they expect mercy. The "Adept" has no favours to ask at the hands of conjectural science, nor does he exact from any member of the "London Lodge" blind faith: it being his cardinal maxim that faith should only follow inquiry. The "Adept" is more than content to be allowed to remain silent, keeping what he may know to himself, unless worthy seekers wish to share it. He has so done for ages, and can do so for a little longer. Moreover, he would rather not "arrest attention" or "command respect" at present. Thus he leaves his audience to first verify his statements in every case by the brilliant though rather wavering light of modern science: after which his facts may be either accepted or rejected, at the option of the willing student. In short, the "Adept"--if one indeed--has to remain utterly unconcerned with, and unmoved by, the issue. He imparts that which it is lawful for him to give out, and deals but with facts. The philological and archeological "difficulties" next demand attention. Philological and Archeological "Difficulties" Two questions are blended into one. Having shown the reasons why the Asiatic student is prompted to decline the guidance of Western History, it remains to explain his contumacious obstinacy in the same direction with regard to philology and archeology. While expressing the sincerest admiration for the clever modern methods of reading the past histories of nations now mostly extinct, and following the progress and evolution of their respective languages, now dead, the student of Eastern occultism, and even the profane Hindu scholar acquainted with his national literature, can hardly be made to share the confidence felt by Western philologists in these conglutinative methods, when practically applied to his own country and Sanskrit literature. Three facts, at least, out of many are well calculated to undermine his faith in these Western methods:-- 1. Of some dozens of eminent Orientalists, no two agree, even in their verbatim translation of Sanskrit texts. Nor is there more harmony shown in their interpretation of the possible meaning of doubtful passages. 2. Though Numismatics is a less conjectural branch of science, and when starting from well-established basic dates, so to say, an exact one (since it can hardly fail to yield correct chronological data, in our case, namely, Indian antiquities); archeologists have hitherto failed to obtain any such position. On their own confession, they are hardly justified in accepting the Samvat and Salivahana eras as their guiding lights, the real initial points of both being beyond the power of the European Orientalists to verify; yet all the same, the respective dates "of 57 B.C. and 78 A.D." are accepted implicitly, and fanciful ages thereupon ascribed to archeological remains. 3. The greatest authorities upon Indian archeology and architecture-- General Cunningham and Mr. Fergusson--represent in their conclusions the two opposite poles. The province of archeology is to provide trustworthy canons of criticism, and not, it should seem, to perplex or puzzle. The Western critic is invited to point to one single relic of the past in India, whether written record or inscribed or uninscribed monument, the age of which is not disputed. No sooner has one archeologist determined a date--say the first century--than another tries to pull it forward to the 10th or perhaps the 14th century of the Christian era. While General Cunningham ascribes the construction of the present Buddha Gaya temple to the 1st century after Christ--the opinion of Mr. Fergusson is that its external form belongs to the 14th century; and so the unfortunate outsider is as wise as ever. Noticing this discrepancy in a "Report on the Archeological Survey of India" (vol. viii. p. 60), the conscientious and capable Buddha-Gaya Chief Engineer, Mr. J.D. Beglar, observes that "notwithstanding his (Fergusson's) high authority, this opinion must be unhesitatingly set aside," and forthwith assigns the building under notice to the 6th century. While the conjectures of one archeologist are termed by another "hopelessly wrong," the identifications of Buddhist relics by this other are in their turn denounced as "quite untenable." And so in the case of every relic of whatever age. When the "recognized" authorities agree--among themselves at least--then will it be time to show them collectively in the wrong. Until then, since their respective conjectures can lay no claim to the character of history, the "Adepts" have neither the leisure nor the disposition to leave weightier business to combat empty speculations, in number as many as there are pretended authorities. Let the blind lead the blind, if they will not accept the light.* -------- * However, it will be shown elsewhere that General Cunningham's latest conclusions about the date of Buddha's death are not all supported by the inscriptions newly discovered.--T. Subba Row. --------- As in the "historical," so in this new "archeological difficulty," namely, the apparent anachronism as to the date of our Lord's birth, the point at issue is again concerned with the "old Greeks and Romans." Less ancient than our Atlantean friends, they seem more dangerous inasmuch as they have become the direct allies of philologists in our dispute over Buddhist annals. We are notified by Prof. Max Muller, by sympathy the most fair of Sanskritists as well as the most learned--and with whom, for a wonder, most of his rivals are found siding in this particular question--that "everything in Indian chronology depends on the date of Chandragupta,"--the Greek Sandracottus. "Either of these dates (in the Chinese and Ceylonese chronology) is impossible, because it does not agree with the chronology of Greece." ("Hist. of the Sans. Lit.," p. 275.) It is then by the clear light of this new Alexandrian Pharos shed, upon a few synchronisms casually furnished by the Greek and Roman classical writers, that the "extraordinary" statements of the "Adepts" have now to be cautiously examined. For Western Orientalists the historical existence of Buddhism begins with Asoka, though, even with the help of Greek spectacles, they are unable to see beyond Chandragupta. Therefore, "before that time Buddhist chronology is traditional and full of absurdities." Furthermore, nothing is said in the Brahmanas of the Bauddhas--ergo, there were none before "Sandracottus," nor have the Buddhists or Brahmans any right to a history of their own, save the one evoluted by the Western mind. As though the Muse of History had turned her back while events were gliding by, the "historian" confesses his inability to close the immense lacunae between the Indo-Aryan supposed immigration en masse across the Hindoo Kush, and the reign of Asoka. Having nothing more solid, he uses contradictory inferences and speculations. But the Asiatic occultists, whose forefathers had her tablets in their keeping, and even some learned native Pundits--believe they can. The claim, however, is pronounced unworthy of attention. Of the late Smriti (traditional history) which, for those who know how to interpret its allegories, is full of unimpeachable historical records, an Ariadne's thread through the tortuous labyrinth of the Past--has come to be unanimously regarded as a tissue of exaggerations, monstrous fables, "clumsy forgeries of the first centuries A.D." It is now openly declared as worthless not only for exact chronological but even for general historical purposes. Thus by dint of arbitrary condemnations, based on absurd interpretations (too often the direct outcome of sectarian prejudice), the Orientalist has raised himself to the eminence of a philological mantic. His learned vagaries are fast superseding, even in the minds of many a Europeanized Hindu, the important historical facts that lie concealed under the exoteric phraseology of the Puranas and other Smritic literature. At the outset, therefore, the Eastern Initiate declares the evidence of those Orientalists who, abusing their unmerited authority, play ducks and drakes with his most sacred relics, ruled out of court; and before giving his facts he would suggest to the learned European Sanskritist and archeologist that, in the matter of chronology, the difference in the sum of their series of conjectural historical events, proves them to be mistaken from A to Z. They know that one single wrong figure in an arithmetical progression will always throw the whole calculation into inextricable confusion: the multiplication yielding, generally, in such a case, instead of the correct sum something entirely unexpected. A fair proof of this may, perhaps, be found in something already alluded to-- namely, the adoption of the dates of certain Hindu eras as the basis of their chronological assumptions. In assigning a date to text or monument they have, of course, to be guided by one of the pre-Christian Indian eras, whether inferentially, or otherwise. And yet--in one case, at least--they complain repeatedly that they are utterly ignorant as to the correct starting-point of the most important of these. The positive date of Vikramaditya, for instance, whose reign forms the starting point of the Samvat era, is in reality unknown to them. With some, Vikramaditya flourished "B.C." 56; with others, 86; with others again, in the 6th century of the Christian era; while Mr. Fergusson will not allow the Samvat era any beginning before the "10th century A.D." In short, and in the words of Dr. Weber,* they "have absolutely no authentic evidence to show whether the era of Vikramaditya dates from the year of his birth, from some achievement, or from the year of his death, or whether, in fine, it may not have been simply introduced by him for astronomical reasons." There were several Vikramadityas and Vikramas in Indian history, for it is not a name, but an honorary title, as the Orientalists have now come to learn. How then can any chronological deduction from such a shifting premise be anything but untrustworthy, especially when, as in the instance of the Samvat, the basic date is made to travel along, at the personal fancy of Orientalists, between the 1st and the 10th century? ----------- * "The History of Indian Literature," Trubner's Series, 1882, p. 202. ----------- Thus it appears to be pretty well proved that in ascribing chronological dates to Indian antiquities, Anglo-Indian as well as European archeologists are often guilty of the most ridiculous anachronisms. That, in fine, they have been hitherto furnishing History with an arithmetical mean, while ignorant, in nearly every case, of its first term! Nevertheless, the Asiatic student is invited to verify and correct his dates by the flickering light of this chronological will-o-the-wisp. Nay, nay. Surely "An English F.T.S." would never expect us in matters demanding the minutest exactness to trust to such Western beacons! And he will, perhaps, permit us to hold to our own views, since we know that our dates are neither conjectural nor liable to modifications. Where even such veteran archeologists as General Cunningham do not seem above suspicion, and are openly denounced by their colleagues, palaeography seems to hardly deserve the name of exact science. This busy antiquarian has been repeatedly denounced by Prof. Weber and others for his indiscriminate acceptance of that Samvat era. Nor have the other Orientalists been more lenient; especially those who, perchance under the inspiration of early sympathies for biblical chronology, prefer in matters connected with Indian dates to give head to their own emotional but unscientific intuitions. Some would have us believe that the Samvat era "is not demonstrable for times anteceding the Christian era at all." Kern makes efforts to prove that the Indian astronomers began to employ this era "only after the year of grace 1000." Prof. Weber, referring sarcastically to General Cunningham, observes that "others, on the contrary, have no hesitation in at once referring, wherever possible, every Samvat or Samvatsare-dated inscription to the Samvat era." Thus, e.g., Cunningham (in his "Arch. Survey of India," iii. 31, 39) directly assigns an inscription dated Samvat 5 to the year "B.C. 52," &c., and winds up the statement with the following plaint: "For the present, therefore, unfortunately, where there is nothing else (but that unknown era) to guide us, it must generally remain an open question, which era we have to do with in a particular inscription, and what date consequently the inscription bears." * -------- * Op. cit., p. 203. -------- The confession is significant. It is pleasant to find such a ring of sincerity in a European Orientalist, though it does seem quite ominous for Indian archeology. The initiated Brahmans know the positive dates of their eras and remain therefore unconcerned. What the "Adepts" have once said, they maintain; and no new discoveries or modified conjectures of accepted authorities can exert any pressure upon their data. Even if Western archeologists or numismatists took it into their heads to change the date of our Lord and Glorified Deliverer from the 7th century "B.C." to the 7th century "A.D.," we would but the more admire such a remarkable gift for knocking about dates and eras, as though they were so many lawn-tennis balls. Meanwhile, to all sincere and inquiring Theosophists, we will say plainly, it is useless for any one to speculate about the date of our Lord Sanggyas's birth, while rejecting a priori all the Brahmanical, Ceylonese, Chinese, and Tibetan dates. The pretext that these do not agree with the chronology of a handful of Greeks who visited the country 300 years after the event in question, is too fallacious and bold. Greece was never concerned with Buddhism, and besides the fact that the classics furnish their few synchronistic dates simply upon the hearsay of their respective authors--a few Greeks, who themselves lived centuries before the writers quoted--their chronology is itself too defective, and their historical records, when it was a question of national triumphs, too bombastic and often too diametrically opposed to fact, to inspire with confidence any one less prejudiced than the average European Orientalist. To seek to establish the true dates in Indian history by connecting its events with the mythical "invasion," while confessing that "one would look in vain in the literature of the Brahmans or Buddhists for any allusion to Alexander's conquest, and although it is impossible to identify any of the historical events related by Alexander's companions with the historical tradition of India," amounts to something more than a mere exhibition of incompetence in this direction: were not Prof. Max Muller the party concerned--we might say that it appears almost like predetermined dishonesty. These are harsh words to say, and calculated no doubt to shock many a European mind trained to look up to what is termed "scientific authority" with a feeling akin to that of the savage for his family fetich. They are well deserved, nevertheless, as a few examples will show. To such intellects as Prof. Weber's--whom we take as the leader of the German Orientalists of the type of Christophiles--certainly the word "obtuseness" cannot be applied. Upon seeing how chronology is deliberately and maliciously perverted in favour of "Greek influence," Christian interests and his own predetermined theories--another, and even a stronger term should be applied. What expression is too severe to signify one's feelings upon reading such an unwitting confession of disingenuous scholarship as Weber repeatedly makes ("Hist. Ind. Lit.") when urging the necessity of admitting that a passage "has been touched up by later interpellation," or forcing fanciful chronological places for texts admittedly very ancient--"as otherwise the dates would be brought down too far or too near!" And this is the keynote of his entire policy: fiat hypothesis, ruat caelum! On the other hand Prof. Max Muller, enthusiastic Indophile as he seems, crams centuries into his chronological thimble without the smallest apparent compunction.... These two Orientalists are instances, because they are accepted beacons of philology and Indian paleography. Our national monuments are dated and our ancestral history perverted to suit their opinions; the pernicious evil has ensued, that as a result History is now recording for the misguidance of posterity the false annals and distorted facts which, upon their evidence, will be accepted without appeal as the outcome of the fairest and ablest critical analysis. While Prof. Max Muller will hear of no other than a Greek criterion for Indian chronology, Prof. Weber (op. cit.) finds Greek influence--his universal solvent--in the development of India's religion, philosophy, literature, astronomy, medicine, architecture, &c. To support this fallacy the most tortuous sophistry, the most absurd etymological deductions are resorted to. If one fact more than another has been set at rest by comparative mythology, it is that their fundamental religious ideas, and most of their gods, were derived by the Greeks from religions flourishing in the north-west of India, the cradle of the main Hellenic stock. This is now entirely disregarded, because a disturbing element in the harmony of the critical spheres. And though nothing is more reasonable than the inference that the Grecian astronomical terms were inherited equally from the parent stock, Prof. Weber would have us believe that "it was Greek influence that just infused a real life into Indian astronomy" (p. 251). In fine, the hoary ancestors of the Hindus borrowed their astronomical terminology and learnt the art of star gazing and even their zodiac from the Hellenic infant! This proof engenders another: the relative antiquity of the astronomical texts shall be henceforth determined upon the presence or absence in them of asterisms and zodiacal signs, the former being undisguisedly Greek in their names, the latter are "designated by their Sanskrit names which are translated from the Greek" (p. 255). Thus "Manu's law being unacquainted with the planets," is considered as more ancient than Yajnavalkya's Code, which "inculcates their worship," and so on. But there is still another and a better test found out by the Sanskritists for determining with "infallible accuracy" the age of the texts, apart from asterisms and zodiacal signs any casual mention in them of the name "Yavana," taken in every instance to designate the "Greeks." This, apart "from an internal chronology based on the character of the works themselves, and on the quotations, &c., therein contained, is the only one possible," we are told. As a result the absurd statement that "the Indian astronomers regularly speak of the Yavanas as their teachers" (p. 252). Ergo, their teachers were Greeks. For with Weber and others "Yavana" and "Greek" are convertible terms. But it so happens that Yavanacharya was the Indian title of a single Greek--Pythagoras; as Sankaracharya was the title of a single Hindu philosopher; and the ancient Aryan astronomical writers cited his opinions to criticize and compare them with the teachings of their own astronomical science, long before him perfected and derived from their ancestors. The honorific title of Acharya (master) was applied to him as to every other learned astronomer or mystic; and it certainly did not mean that Pythagoras or any other Greek "Master" was necessarily the master of the Brahmans. The word "Yavana" was a generic term employed ages before the "Greeks of Alexander" projected "their influence" upon Jambudvipa, to designate people of a younger race, the word meaning Yuvan "young," or younger. They knew of Yavanas of the north, west, south and east; and the Greek strangers received this appellation as the Persians, Indo-Scythians and others had before them. An exact parallel is afforded in our present day. To the Tibetans every foreigner whatsoever is known as a Peling; the Chinese designate Europeans as "red-haired devils;" and the Mussalmans call every one outside of Islam a Kuffir. The Webers of the future, following the example now set them, may perhaps, after 10,000 years, affirm, upon the authority of scraps of Moslem literature then extant, that the Bible was written, and the English, French, Russians and Germans who possessed and translated or "invented" it, lived in Kaffiristan shortly before their era under "Moslem influence." Because the Yuga Purana of the Gargi Sanhita speaks of an expedition of the Yavanas "as far as Pataliputra," therefore, either the Macedonians or the Seleuciae had conquered all India! But our Western critic is ignorant, of course, of the fact that Ayodhya or Saketa of Rama was for two millenniums repelling inroads of various Mongolian and other Turanian tribes, besides the Indo-Scythians, from beyond Nepaul and the Himalayas. Prof. Weber seems finally himself frightened at the Yavana spectre he has raised, for he queries:--"Whether by the Yavanas it is really the Greeks who are meant or possibly merely their Indo-Scythian or other successors, to whom the name was afterwards transferred." This wholesome doubt ought to have modified his dogmatic tone in many other such cases. But, drive out prejudice with a pitch fork it will ever return. The eminent scholar, though staggered by his own glimpse of the truth, returns to the charge with new vigour. We are startled by the fresh discovery that Asuramaya:* the earliest astronomer, mentioned repeatedly in the Indian epics, "is identical with 'Ptolemaios' of the Greeks." The reason for it given is, that "this latter name, as we see from the inscriptions of Piyadasi, became in Indian 'Turamaya,' out of which the name 'Asuramaya' might very easily grow; and since, by the later tradition, this 'Maya' is distinctly assigned to Romaka-pura in the West." Had the "Piyadasi inscription" been found on the site of ancient Babylonia, one might suspect the word "Turamaya" as derived from "Turanomaya," or rather mania. Since, however, the Piyadasi inscriptions belong distinctly to India, and the title was borne but by two kings--Chandragupta and Dharmasoka--what has "'Ptolemaios' of the Greeks" to do with "Turamaya" or the latter with "Asuramaya," except, indeed, to use it as a fresh pretext to drag the Indian astronomer under the stupefying "Greek influence" of the Upas Tree of Western Philology? Then we learn that, because "Panini once mentions the Yavanas, i.e., .... Greeks, and explains the formation of the word 'Yavanani,' to which, according to the Varttika, the word lipi, 'writing,' must be supplied," therefore the word signifies "the writing of the Yavanas" of the Greeks and none other. Would the German philologists (who have so long and so fruitlessly attempted to explain this word) be very much surprised if told that they are yet as far as possible from the truth? That--Yavanani does not mean "Greek writing" at all, but any foreign writing whatsoever? That the absence of the word "writing" in the old texts, except in connection with the names of foreigners, does not in the least imply that none but Greek writing was known to them, or that they had none of their own, being ignorant of the art of reading and writing until the days of Panini? (theory of Prof. Max Muller). For Devanagari is as old as the Vedas, and held so sacred that the Brahmans, first under penalty of death, and later on of eternal ostracism, were not even allowed to mention it to profane ears, much less to make known the existence of their secret temple libraries. So that by the word Yavanani, "to which, according to the Varttika, the word lipi, 'writing,' must he supplied," the writing of foreigners in general, whether Phoenician, Roman, or Greek, is always meant. As to the preposterous hypothesis of Prof. Max Muller that writing "was not used for literary purposes in India" before Panini's time (again upon Greek authority) that matter has been disposed of elsewhere. --------- * Dr. Weber is not probably aware of the fact that this distinguished astronomer's name was simply Maya; the prefix "Asura" was often added to it by ancient Hindu writers to show that he was a Rakshasa. In the opinion of the Brahmans he was an "Atlantean" and one of the greatest astronomers and occultists of the lost Atlantis. --------- Equally unknown are those certain other and most important facts, fable though they seem. First, that the Aryan "Great War," the Mahabharata, and the Trojan War of Homer--both mythical as to personal biographies and fabulous supernumeraries, yet perfectly historical in the main-- belong to the same cycle of events. For the occurrences of many centuries, among them the separation of sundry peoples and races, erroneously traced to Central Asia alone, were in these immortal epics compressed within the scope of single dramas made to occupy but a few years. Secondly, that in this immense antiquity the forefathers of the Aryan Greeks and the Aryan Brahmans were as closely united and intermixed as are now the Aryans and the so-called Dravidians. Thirdly, that before the days of the historical Rama, from whom in unbroken genealogical descent the Oodeypore sovereigns trace their lineage, Rajpootana was as full of direct post-Atlantean "Greeks," as the post-Trojan, subjacent Cumaea and other settlements of pre-Magna Graecia were of the fast Hellenizing sires of the modern Rajpoot. One acquainted with the real meaning of the ancient epics cannot refrain from asking himself whether these intuitional Orientalists prefer being called deceivers or deceived, and in charity give them the benefit of the doubt.* --------- * Further on, Prof. Weber indulges in the following piece of chronological sleight of hand. In his arduous endeavour "to determine accurately" the place in history of "the Romantic Legend of Sakya Buddha" (translation by Beale), he thinks "the special points of relation here found to Christian legends are very striking. The question which party was the borrower Deals properly leaves undetermined. Yet in all likelihood (!!) we have here simply a similar case to that of the appropriation of Christian legend by this worshipers of Krishna" (p. 300). Now it is this that every Hindu and Buddhist has the right to brand as "dishonesty," whether conscious or unconscious. Legends originate earlier than history and die out upon being sifted. Neither of the fabulous events in connection with Buddha's birth, taken exoterically, necessitated a great genius to narrate them, nor was the intellectual capacity of the Hindus ever proved so inferior to that of the Jewish and Greek mob that they should borrow from them even fables inspired by religion. How their fables, evolved between the second and third centuries after Buddha's death, when the fever of proselytism and the adoration of his memory were at their height, could be borrowed and then appropriated from the Christian legends written during the first century of the Western era, can only be explained by a German Orientalist. Mr. T.W. Rhys Davids (Jataka Book) shows the contrary to have been true. It may be remarked in this connection that, while the first "miracles" of both Krishna and Christ are said to have happened at a Mathura, the latter city exists to this day in India--the antiquity of its name being fully proved--while the Mathura, or Matures in Egypt, of the "Gospel of Infancy," where Jesus is alleged to have produced his first miracle, was sought to be identified, centuries ago, by the stump of an old tree in thee desert, and is represented by an empty spot! ---------- What can be thought of Prof. Weber's endeavour when, "to determine more accurately the position of Ramayana (called by him the 'artificial epic') in literary history," he ends with an assumption that "it rests upon an acquaintance with the Trojan cycle of legend .... the conclusion there arrived at is that the date of its composition is to be placed at the commencement of the Christian era in an epoch when the operation of the Greek influence upon India had already set in!" (p. 194.) The case is hopeless. If the "internal chronology" and external fitness of things, we may add presented in the triple Indian epic, did not open the eyes of the hypercritical professors to the many historical facts enshrined in their striking allegories; if the significant mention of "black Yavanas," and "white Yavanas," indicating totally different peoples, could so completely escape their notice;* and the enumeration of a host of tribes, nations, races, clans, under their separate Sanskrit designations in the Mahbharata, had not stimulated them to try to trace their ethnic evolution and identify them with their now living European descendants, there is little to hope from their scholarship except a mosaic of learned guesswork. The latter scientific mode of critical analysis may yet end some day in a consensus of opinion that Buddhism is due wholesale to the "Life of Barlaam and Josaphat," written by St. John of Damascus; or that our religion was plagiarized from that famous Roman Catholic legend of the eighth century in which our Lord Gautama is made to figure as a Christian Saint, better still, that the Vedas were written at Athens under the auspices of St. George, the tutelary successor of Theseus. --------- * See Twelfth Book of Mahabharata, Krishnas fight with Kalayavana. --------- For fear that anything might be lacking to prove the complete obsession of Jambudvipa by the demon of "Greek influence," Dr. Weber vindictively casts a last insult into the face of India by remarking that if "European Western steeples owe their origin to an imitation of the Buddhist topes* .... on the other hand in the most ancient Hindu edifices the presence of Greek influence is unmistakable" (p. 274). Well may Dr. Rajendralala Mitra "hold out particularly against the idea of any Greek influence whatever on the development of Indian architecture." If his ancestral literature must be attributed to "Greek influence," the temples, at least, might have been spared. One can understand how the Egyptian Hall in London reflects the influence of the ruined temples on the Nile; but it is a more difficult feat, even for a German professor, to prove the archaic structure of old Aryavarta a foreshadowing of the genius of the late lamented Sir Christopher Wren! The outcome of this paleographic spoliation is that there is not a tittle left for India to call her own. Even medicine is due to the same Hellenic influence. We are told--this once by Roth--that "only a comparison of the principles of Indian with those of Greek medicine can enable us to judge of the origin, age and value of the former;" .... and "a propos of Charaka's injunctions as to the duties of the physician to his patient," adds Dr. Weber, "he cites some remarkably coincident expressions from the Oath of the Asklepiads." It is then settled. India is Hellenized from head to foot, and even had no physic until the Greek doctors came. ---------- * Of Hindu Lingams, rather. ---------- Sakya Muni's Place in History No Orientalist, save perhaps, the same wise, not to say deep, Prof. Weber, opposes more vehemently than Prof. Max Muller Hindu and Buddhist chronology. Evidently if an Indophile he is not a Buddhophile, and General Cunningham, however independent otherwise in his archeological researches, agrees with him more than would seem strictly prudent in view of possible future discoveries.* We have then to refute in our turn this great Oxford professor's speculations. --------- * Notwithstanding Prof. M. Muller's regrettable efforts to invalidate every Buddhist evidence, he seems to have ill-succeeded in proving his case, if we can judge from the openly expressed opinion of his own German confreres. In the portion headed "Tradition as to Buddha's Age" (pp. 283-288) in his "Hist. of Ind. Lit.," Prof. Weber very aptly remarks, "Nothing like positive certainty, therefore, is for the present attainable. Nor have the subsequent discussions of this topic by Max Muller (1859) ('Hist. A.S.L.' p. 264 ff), by Westergaard (1860), 'Ueber Buddha's Todesjahr,' and by 'Kern Over de Jaartelling der Zuidel Buddhisten' so far yielded any definite results." Nor are they likely to. --------- To the evidence furnished by the Puranas and Mahavansa, which he also finds hopelessly entangled and contradictory (though the perfect accuracy of that Sinhalese history is most warmly acknowledged by Sir Emerson Tennant, the historian), he opposes the Greek classics and their chronology. With him, it is always "Alexander's invasion" and "Conquest," and "the ambassador of Seleucus Nicator-Megasthenes," while even the faintest record of such "conquest" is conspicuously absent from Brahmanic record; and although in an inscription of Piyadasi are mentioned the names of Antiochus, Ptolemy, Magus, Antigonus, and even of the great Alexander himself, as vassals of the king Piyadasi, the Macedonian is yet called the "Conqueror of India." In other words, while any casual mention of Indian affairs by a Greek writer of no great note must be accepted unchallenged, no record of the Indians, literary or monumental, is entitled to the smallest consideration. Until rubbed against the touch-stone of Hellenic infallibility it must be set down, in the words of Professor Weber, as "of course mere empty boasting." Oh, rare Western sense of justice! * ---------- * No Philaryan would pretend for a moment on the strength of the Piyadasi inscriptions that Alexander of Macedonia, or either of the other sovereigns mentioned, was claimed as an actual "vassal" of Chandragupta. They did not even pay tribute, but only a kind of quit-rent annually for lands ceded in the north: as the grant-tablets could show. But the inscription, however misinterpreted, shows most clearly that Alexander was never the conqueror of India. --------- Occult records show differently. They say--challenging proof to the contrary--that Alexander never penetrated into India farther than Taxila; which is not even quite the modern Attock. The murmuring of the Macedonian's troops began at the same place, and not as given out, on the banks of the Hyphasis. For having never gone to the Hydaspes or Jhelum, he could not have been on the Sutlej. Nor did Alexander ever found satrapies or plant any Greek colonies in the Punjab. The only colonies he left behind him that the Brahmans ever knew of, amounted to a few dozens of disabled soldiers, scattered hither and thither on the frontiers; who with their native raped wives settled around the deserts of Karmania and Drangaria--the then natural boundaries of India. And unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians. The boasted "invasion of India" was confined to the regions between Karmania and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south and north: countries which were all India for the Greek of those days. His building a fleet on the Hydaspes is a fiction; and his "victorious march through the fighting armies of India," another. However, it is not with the "world conqueror" that we have now to deal, but rather with the supposed accuracy and even casual veracity of his captains and countrymen, whose hazy reminiscences on the testimony of the classical writers have now been raised to unimpeachable evidence in everything that may affect the chronology of early Buddhism and India. Foremost among the evidence of classical writers, that of Flavius Arrianus is brought forward against the Buddhist and Chinese chronologies. No one should impeach the personal testimony of this conscientious author had he been himself an eye-witness instead of Megasthenes. But when a man comes to know that he wrote his accounts upon the now lost works of Aristobulus and Ptolemy; and that the latter described their data from texts prepared by authors who had never set their eyes upon one line written by either Megasthenes or Nearchus himself; and that knowing so much one is informed by Western historians that among the works of Arrian, Book VII. of the "Anabasis of Alexander," is "the chief authority on the subject of the Indian invasion--a book unfortunately with a gap in its twelfth chapter"--one may well conceive upon what a broken reed Western authority leans for its Indian chronology. Arrian lived over 600 years after Buddha's death; Strabo, 500 (55 "B.C."); Diodorus Siculus--quite a trustworthy compiler!--about the first century; Plutarch over 700 anno Buddhae, and Quintus Curtius over 1,000 years! And when, to crown this army of witnesses against the Buddhist annals, the reader is informed by our Olympian critics that the works of the last-named author--than whom no more blundering (geographically, chronologically, and historically) writer ever lived--form along with the Greek history of Arrian the most valuable source of information respecting the military career of Alexander the Great--then the only wonder is that the great conqueror was not made by his biographers to have--Leonidas-like--defended the Thermopylean passes in the Hindu Kush against the invasion of the first Vedic Brahmins "from the Oxus." Withal the Buddhist dates are either rejected or only accepted pro tempore. Well may the Hindu resent the preference shown to the testimony of Greeks--of whom some, at least, are better remembered in Indian history as the importers into Jambudvipa of every Greek and Roman vice known and unknown to their day--against his own national records and history. "Greek influence" was felt, indeed, in India, in this, and only in this, one particular. Greek damsels mentioned as an article of great traffic for India--Persian and Greek Yavanis--were the fore-mothers of the modern nautch-girls, who had till then remained pure virgins of the inner temples. Alliances with the Autiochuses and the Seleucus Nicators bore no better fruit than the rotten apple of Sodom. Pataliputra, as prophesied by Gautama Buddha, found its fate in the waters of the Ganges, having been twice before nearly destroyed, again like Sodom, by the fire of heaven. Reverting to the main subject, the "contradictions" between the Ceylonese and Chino-Tibetan chronologies actually prove nothing. If the Chinese annalists of Saul in accepting the prophecy of our Lord that "a thousand years after He had reached Nirvana, His doctrines would reach the north" fell into the mistake of applying it to China, whereas Tibet was meant, the error was corrected after the eleventh century of the Tzina era in most of the temple chronologies. Besides which, it may now refer to other events relating to Buddhism, of which Europe knows nothing, China or Tzina dates its present name only from the year 296 of the Buddhist era* (vulgar chronology having assumed it from the first Hoang of the Tzin dynasty): therefore the Tathagata could not have indicated it by this name in his well-known prophecy. If misunderstood even by several of the Buddhist commentators, it is yet preserved in its true sense by his own immediate Arhats. The Glorified One meant the country that stretches far off from the Lake Mansorowara; far beyond that region of the Himavat, where dwelt from time immemorial the great "teachers of the Snowy Range." These were the great Sraman-acharyas who preceded Him, and were His teachers, their humble successors trying to this day to perpetuate their and His doctrines. The prophecy came out true to the very day, and it is corroborated both by the mathematical and historical chronology of Tibet--quite as accurate as that of the Chinese. Arhat Kasyapa, of the dynasty of Moryas, founded by one of the Chandraguptas near Ptaliputra, left the convent of Panch-Kukkutarama, in consequence of a vision of our Lord, for missionary purpose in the year 683 of the Tzin era (436 Western era) and had reached the great Lake of Bod-Yul in the same year. It is at that period that expired the millennium prophesied. -------- * The reference to Chinahunah (Chinese and Huns) in the Vishma Parva of the Mahabharata is evidently a later interpolation, as it does not occur in the old MSS. existing in Southern India. -------- The Arhat carrying with him the fifth statue of Sakya Muni out of the seven gold statues made after his bodily death by order of the first Council, planted it in the soil on that very spot where seven years later was built the first GUNPA (monastery), where the earliest Buddhist lamas dwelt. And though the conversion of the whole country did not take place before the beginning of the seventh century (Western era), the good law had, nevertheless, reached the North at the time prophesied, and no earlier. For, the first of the golden statues had been plundered from Bhikshu Sali Suka by the Hiong-un robbers and melted, during the days of Dharmasoka, who had sent missionaries beyond Nepaul. The second had a like fate, at Ghar-zha, even before it had reached the boundaries of Bod-Yul. The third was rescued from a barbarous tribe of Bhons by a Chinese military chief who had pursued them into the deserts of Schamo about 423 Buddhist era (120 "B.C.") The fourth was sunk in the third century of the Christian era, together with the ship that carried it from Magadha toward the hills of Ghangs-chhen-dzo-nga (Chitagong). The fifth arriving in the nick of time reached its destination with Arhat Kasyapa. So did the last two.* --------- * No doubt, since the history of these seven statues is not in the hands of the Orientalists, it will be treated as a "groundless fable." Nevertheless such is their origin and history. They date from the first Synod, that of Rajagriha, held in the season of war following the death of Buddha, i.e., one year after his death. Were this Rajagriha Council held 100 years after, as maintained by some, it could not have been presided over by Mahakasyapa, the friend and brother Arhat of Sakyamuni, as he would have been 200 years old. The second Council or Synod, that of Vaisali, was held 120, not 100 or 110 years as some would have it, after the Nirvana, for the latter took place at a time a little over 20 years before the physical death of Tathagata. It was held at the great Saptapana cave (Mahavansa's Sattapanni), near the Mount Baibhar (the Webhara of the Pali Manuscripts), that was in Rajagriha, the old capital of Magadha. Memoirs exist, containing the record of his daily life, made by the nephew of king Ajatasatru, a favourite Bikshu of the Mahacharya. These texts have ever been in the possession of the superiors of the first Lamasery built by Arhat Kasyapa in Bod-Yul, most of whose Chohans were the descendants of the dynasty of the Moryas, there being up to this day three of the members of this once royal family living in India. The old text in question is a document written in Anudruta Magadha characters. (We deny that these or any other characters--whether Devanagari, Pali, or Dravidian--ever used in India, are variations of, or derivatives from, the Phoenician.) To revert to the texts it is therein stated that the Sattapanni cave, then called "Sarasvati" and "Bamboo-cave," got its latter name in this wise. When our Lord first sat in it for Dhyana, it was a large six-chambered natural cave, 50 to 60 feet wide by 33 deep. One day, while teaching the mendicants outside, our Lord compared man to a Saptaparna (seven-leaved) plant, showing them how after the loss of its first leaf every other could be easily detached, but the seventh leaf--directly connected with the stem. "Mendicants," he said, "there are seven Buddhas in every Buddha, and there are six Bikshus and but one Buddha in each mendicant. What are the seven? The seven branches of complete knowledge. What are the six? The six organs of sense. What are the five? The five elements of illusive being. And the ONE which is also ten? He is a true Buddha who develops in him the ten forms of holiness and subjects them all to the one--'the silent voice' (meaning Avolokiteswara). After that, causing the rock to be moved at His command, the Tathagata made it divide itself into a seventh additional chamber, remarking that a rock too was septenary, and had seven stages of development. From that time it was called the Sattapanni or the Saptaparna cave. After the first Synod was held, seven gold statues of the Bhagavat were cast by order of the king, and each of them was placed in one of the seven compartments." These in after times, when the good law had to make room to more congenial because more sensual creeds, were taken in charge by various Viharas and then disposed of as explained. Thus when Mr. Turnour states on the authority of the sacred traditions of Southern Buddhists that the cave received its name from the Sattapanni plant, he states what is correct. In the "Archeological Survey of India," we find that Gen. Cunningham identifies this cave with one not far away from it and in the same Baihbar range, but which is most decidedly not our Saptaparna cave. At the same time the Chief Engineer of Buddha Gaya, Mr. Beglar, describing the Chetu cave, mentioned by Fa-hian, thinks it is the Saptaparna cave, and he is right. For that, as well as the Pippal and the other caves mentioned in our texts, are too sacred in their associations--both having been used for centuries by generations of Bhikkhus, unto the very time of their leaving India--to have their sites so easily forgotten. --------- On the other hand, the Southern Buddhists, headed by the Ceylonese, open their annals with the following event:-- They claim according to their native chronology that Vijaya, the son of Sinhabahu, the sovereign of Lala, a small kingdom or Raj on the Gandaki river in Magadha, was exiled by his father for acts of turbulence and immorality. Sent adrift on the ocean with his companions after having their heads shaved, Buddhist-Bhikshu fashion, as a sign of penitence, he was carried to the shores of Lanka. Once landed, he and his companions conquered and easily took possession of an island inhabited by uncivilized tribes, generically called the Yakshas. This--at whatever epoch and year it may have happened--is an historical fact, and the Ceylonese records, independent of Buddhist chronology, give it out as having taken place 382 years before Dushtagamani (i.e., in 543 before the Christian era). Now, the Buddhist Sacred Annals record certain words of our Lord pronounced by Him shortly before His death. In Mahavansa He is made to have addressed them to Sakra, in the midst of a great assembly of Devatas (Dhyan Chohans), and while already "in the exalted unchangeable Nirvana, seated on the throne on which Nirvana is achieved." In our texts Tathagata addresses them to his assembled Arhats and Bhikkhuts a few days before his final liberation:--"One Vijaya, the son of Sinhabahu, king of the land of Lala, together with 700 attendants, has just landed on Lanka. Lord of Dhyan Buddhas (Devas)! my doctrine will be established on Lanka. Protect him and Lanka!" This is the sentence pronounced which, as proved later, was a prophecy. The now familiar phenomenon of clairvoyant prevision, amply furnishing a natural explanation of the prophetic utterance without any unscientific theory of miracle, the laugh of certain Orientalists seems uncalled for. Such parallels of poetico-religious embellishments as found in Mahavansa exist in the written records of every religion--as much in Christianity as anywhere else. An unbiased mind would first endeavour to reach the correct and very superficially hidden meaning before throwing ridicule and contemptuous discredit upon them. Moreover, the Tibetans possess a more sober record of this prophecy in the Notes, already alluded to, reverentially taken down by King Ajatasatru's nephew. They are, as said above, in the possession of the Lamas of the convent built by Arhat Kasyapa--the Moryas and their descendants being of a more direct descent than the Rajput Gautamas, the Chiefs of Nagara--the village identified with Kapilavastu--are the best entitled of all to their possession. And we know they are historical to a word. For the Esoteric Buddhist they yet vibrate in space; and these prophetic words, together with the true picture of the Sugata who pronounced them, are present in the aura of every atom of His relics. This, we hasten to say, is no proof but for the psychologist. But there is other and historical evidence: the cumulative testimony of our religious chronicles. The philologist has not seen these; but this is no proof of their non-existence. The mistake of the Southern Buddhists lies in dating the Nirvana of Sanggyas Pan-chhen from the actual day of his death, whereas, as above stated, He had reached it over twenty years previous to his disincarnation. Chronologically, the Southerners are right, both in dating His death in 543 "B.C.," and one of the great Councils at 100 years after the latter event. But the Tibetan Chohans, who possess all the documents relating to the last twenty-four years of His external and internal life--of which no philologist knows anything--can show that there is no real discrepancy between the Tibetan and the Ceylonese chronologies as stated by the Western Orientalists.* For the profane, the Exalted One was born in the sixty-eighth year of the Burmese Eeatzana era, established by Eeatzana (Anjana), King of Dewaha; for the initiated--in the forty-eighth year of that era, on a Friday of the waxing moon, of May. And it was in 563 before the Christian chronology that Tathagata reached his full Nirvana, dying, as correctly stated by Mahavana--in 543, on the very day when Vijaya landed with his companions in Ceylon--as prophesied by Loka-ratha, our Buddha. --------- * Bishop Bigandet, after examining all the Burmese authorities accessible to him, frankly confesses that "the history of Buddha offers an almost complete blank as to what regards his doings and preachings during a period of nearly twenty-three years." (Vol. I. p. 260.) --------- Professor Max Muller seems to greatly scoff at this prophecy. In his chapter ("Hist. S. L.") upon Buddhism (the "false" religion), the eminent scholar speaks as though he resented such an unprecedented claim. "We are asked to believe"--he writes--"that the Ceylonese historians placed the founder of the Vijyan dynasty of Ceylon in the year 543 in accordance with their sacred chronology!" (i.e., Buddha's prophecy), "while we (the philologists) are not told, however, through what channel the Ceylonese could have received their information as to the exact date of Buddha's death." Two points may be noticed in these sarcastic phrases: (a) the implication of a false prophecy by our Lord; and (b) a dishonest tampering with chronological records, reminding one of those of Eusebius, the famous Bishop of Caesarea, who stands accused in history of "perverting every Egyptian chronological table for the sake of synchronisms." With reference to charge one, he may be asked why our Sakyasinha's prophecies should not be as much entitled to his respect as those of his Saviour would be to ours--were we to ever write the true history of the "Galilean" Arhat. With regard to charge two, the distinguished philologist is reminded of the glass house he and all Christian chronologists are themselves living in. Their inability to vindicate the adoption of December 25 as the actual day of the Nativity, and hence to determine the age and the year of their Avatar's death-- even before their own people--is far greater than is ours to demonstrate the year of Buddha to other nations. Their utter failure to establish on any other but traditional evidence the, to them, historically unproved, if probable, fact of his existence at all--ought to engender a fairer spirit. When Christian historians can, upon undeniable historical authority, justify biblical and ecclesiastical chronology, then, perchance, they may be better equipped than at present for the congenial work of rending heathen chronologies into shreds. The "channel" the Ceylonese received their information through, was two Bikshus who had left Magadha to follow their disgraced brethren into exile. The capacity of Siddhartha Buddha's Arhats for transmitting intelligence by psychic currents may, perhaps, be conceded without any great stretch of imagination to have been equal to, if not greater than, that of the prophet Elijah, who is credited with the power of having known from any distance all that happened in the king's bed chamber. No Orientalist has the right to reject the testimony of other people's Scriptures, while professing belief in the far more contradictory and entangled evidence of his own upon the self-same theory of proof. If Professor Muller is a sceptic at heart, then let him fearlessly declare himself; only a sceptic who impartially acts the iconoclast has the right to assume such a tone of contempt towards any non-Christian religion. And for the instruction of the impartial inquirer only, shall it be thought worth while to collate the evidence afforded by historical--not psychological--data. Meanwhile, by analyzing some objections and exposing the dangerous logic of our critic, we may give the theosophists a few more facts connected with the subject under discussion. Now that we have seen Professor Max Muller's opinions in general about this, so to say, the Prologue to the Buddhist Drama with Vijaya as the hero--what has he to say as to the details of its plot? What weapon does he use to weaken this foundation-stone of a chronology upon which are built and on which depend all other Buddhist dates? What is the fulcrum for the critical lever he uses against the Asiatic records? Three of his main points may be stated seriatim with answers appended. He begins by premising that-- 1st.--"If the starting-point of the Northern Buddhist chronology turns out to be merely hypothetical, based as it is on a prophecy of Buddha, it will be difficult to avoid the same conclusion with regard to the date assigned to Buddha's death by the Buddhists of Ceylon and of Burmah" (p. 266). "The Mahavansa begins with relating three miraculous visits which Buddha paid to Ceylon." Vijaya, the name of the founder of the first dynasty (in Ceylon), means conquest, "and, therefore, such a person most likely never existed" (p. 268). This he believes invalidates the whole Buddhist chronology. To which the following pendant may be offered:-- William I., King of England, is commonly called the Conqueror; he was, moreover, the illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, surnamed le Diable. An opera, we hear, was invented on this subject, and full of miraculous events, called "Robert the Devil," showing its traditional character. Therefore shall we be also justified in saying that Edward the Confessor, Saxons and all, up to the time of the union of the houses of York and Lancaster under Henry VII.--the new historical period in English history--are all "fabulous tradition" and "such a person as William the Conqueror most likely never existed?" 2nd.--In the Chinese chronology--continues the dissecting critic --"the list of the thirty-three Buddhist patriarchs .... is of a doubtful character. For Western history the exact Ceylonese chronology begins with 161 B.C." Extending beyond that date there exists but "a traditional native chronology. Therefore .... what goes before .... is but fabulous tradition." The chronology of the Apostles and their existence has never been proved historically. The history of the Papacy is confessedly "obscure." Ennodius of Pavia (fifth century) was the first one to address the Roman Bishop (Symmochus), who comes fifty-first in the Apostolic succession, as "Pope." Thus, if we were to write the history of Christianity, and indulge in remarks upon its chronology, we might say that since there were no antecedent Popes, and since the Apostolic line began with Symmochus (498 A.D.), all Christian records beginning with the Nativity and up to the sixth century are therefore "fabulous traditions," and all Christian chronology is "purely hypothetical." 3rd.--Two discrepant dates in Buddhist chronology are scornfully pointed out by the Oxford Professor. If the landing of Vijaya, in Lanka--he says--on the same day that Buddha reached Nirvana (died) is in fulfilment of Buddha's prophecy, then "if Buddha was a true prophet, the Ceylonese argue quite rightly that he must have died in the year of the conquest, or 543 B.C." (p. 270). On the other hand, the Chinese have a Buddhist chronology of their own; and it does not agree with the Ceylonese. "The lifetime of Buddha from 1029 to 950 rests on his own prophecy that a millennium would elapse from his death to the conversion of China. If, therefore, Buddha was a true prophet, he must have lived about 1000 B.C." (p. 266). But the date does not agree with the Ceylonese chronology--ergo, Buddha was a false prophet. As to that other "the first and most important link" in the Ceylonese as well as in the Chinese chronology, "it is extremely weak." .... In the Ceylonese "a miraculous genealogy had to be provided for Vijaya," and, "a prophecy was therefore invented" (p. 269). On these same lines of argument it may be argued that: Since no genealogy of Jesus, "exact or inexact," is found in any of the world's records save those entitled the Gospels of SS. Mathew (I--1-17), and Luke (iii. 23--38); and, since these radically disagree--although this personage is the most conspicuous in Western history, and the nicest accuracy might have been expected in his case; therefore, agreeably with Professor Max Muller's sarcastic logic, if Jesus "was a true prophet," he must have descended from David through Joseph (Matthew's Gospel); and "if he was a true prophet," again, then the Christians "argue quite rightly that he must have" descended from David through Mary (Luke's Gospel). Furthermore, since the two genealogies are obviously discrepant and prophecies were, in this instance, truly "invented" by the post-apostolic theologians [or, if preferred, old prophecies of Isaiah and other Old Testament prophets, irrelevant to Jesus, were adapted to suit his case--as recent English commentators (in Holy Orders), the Bible revisers, now concede]; and since, moreover-- always following the Professor's argument, in the cases of Buddhist and Brahmanical chronologies--Biblical chronology and genealogy are found to be "traditional and full of absurdities .... every attempt to bring them into harmony having proved a failure." (p. 266): have we or have we not a certain right to retort, that if Gautama Buddha is shown on these lines a false prophet, then Jesus must be likewise "a false prophet?" And if Jesus was a true prophet despite existing confusion of authorities, why on the same lines may not Buddha have been one? Discredit the Buddhist prophecies and the Christian ones must go along with them. The utterances of the ancient pythoness now but provoke the scientific smile: but no tripod ever mounted by the prophetess of old was so shaky as the chronological trinity of points upon which this Orientalist stands to deliver his oracles. Moreover, his arguments are double-edged, as shown. If the citadel of Buddhism can be undermined by Professor Max Muller's critical engineering, then pari passu that of Christianity must crumble in the same ruins. Or have the Christians alone the monopoly of absurd religious "inventions" and the right of being jealous of any infringement of their patent rights? To conclude, we say, that the year of Buddha's death is correctly stated by Mr. Sinnett, "Esoteric Buddhism" having to give its chronological dates according to esoteric reckoning. And this reckoning would alone, if explained, make away with every objection urged, from Professor Max Muller's "Sanskrit Literature" down to the latest "evidence"--the proofs in the "Reports of the Archeological Survey of India." The Ceylonese era, as given in Mahavansa, is correct in everything, withholding but the above given fact of Nirvana, the great mystery of Samma-Sambuddha and Abhidina remaining to this day unknown to the outsider; and though certainly known to Bikshu Mahanama--King Dhatusena's uncle--it could not be explained in a work like the Mahavansa. Moreover, the Singhalese chronology agrees in every particular with the Burmese chronology. Independent of the religious era dating from Buddha's death, called "Nirvanic Era," there existed, as now shown by Bishop Bigandet ("Life of Guadama"), two historical eras. One lasted 1362 years, its last year corresponding with 1156 of the Christian era: the other, broken in two small eras, the last, succeeding immediately the other, exists to the present day. The beginning of the first, which lasted 562 years, coincides with the year 79 A.D. and the Indian Saka era. Consequently, the learned Bishop, who surely can never be suspected of partiality to Buddhism, accepts the year 543 of Buddha's Nirvana. So do Mr. Tumour, Professor Lassen, and others. The alleged discrepancies between the fourteen various dates of Nirvana collected by Csoma Corosi, do not relate to the Nyr-Nyang in the least. They are calculations concerning the Nirvana of the precursors, the Boddhisatwas and previous incarnations of Sanggyas that the Hungarian found in various works and wrongly applied to the last Buddha. Europeans must not forget that this enthusiast acted under protest of the Lamas during the time of his stay with them: and that, moreover, he had learned more about the doctrines of the heretical Dugpas than of the orthodox Gelugpas. The statement of this "great authority (!) on Tibetan Buddhism," as he is called, to the effect that Gautama had three wives whom he names--and then contradicts himself by showing ("Tibetan Grammar," p. 162, see note) that the first two wives "are one and the same," shows how little he can be regarded as an "authority." He had not even learned that "Gopa, Yasodhara and Utpala Varna" are the three names for three mystical powers. So with the "discrepancies" of the dates. Out of the sixty-four mentioned by him but two relate to Sakya Muni--namely, the years 576 and 546--and these two err in their transcription; for when corrected they must stand 564 and 543. As for the rest they concern the seven ku-sum, or triple form of the Nirvanic state and their respective duration, and relate to doctrines of which Orientalists know absolutely nothing. Consequently from the Northern Buddhists, who, as confessed by Professor Weber, "alone possess these (Buddhist) Scriptures complete," and have "preserved more authentic information regarding the circumstances of their redaction"--the Orientalists have up to this time learned next to nothing. The Tibetans say that Tathagata became a full Buddha--i.e., reached absolute Nirvana--in 2544 of the Kali era (according to Souramana), and thus lived indeed but eighty years, as no Nirvanee of the seventh degree can be reckoned among the living (i.e., existing) men. It is no better than loose conjecture to argue that it would have entered as little into the thoughts of the Brahmans to note the day of Buddha's birth "as the Romans or even the Jews (would have) thought of preserving the date of the birth of Jesus before he had become the founder of a religion." (Max Muller's "Hist. S. L.") For, while the Jews had been from the first rejecting the claim of Messiah-ship set up by the Chelas of the Jewish prophet and were not expecting their Messiah at that time, the Brahmans (the initiates, at any rate) knew of the coming of him whom they regarded as an incarnation of Divine wisdom, and therefore were well aware of the astrological date of his birth. If, in after times, in their impotent rage they destroyed every accessible vestige of the birth, life and death of Him, who in his boundless mercy to all creatures had revealed their carefully concealed mysteries and doctrines in order to check the ecclesiastical torrent of ever-growing superstitions, yet there had been a time when he was met by them as an Avatar. And, though they destroyed, others preserved. The thousand and one speculations and the torturing of exoteric texts by Archeologist or Paleographer will ill repay the time lost in their study. The Indian annals specify King Ajatasatru as a contemporary of Buddha, and another Ajatasatru helped to prepare the council 100 years after his death. These princes were sovereigns of Magadha and have naught to do with Ajatasatru of the Brihad-Aranyaka and the Kaushitaki-Upanishad, who was a sovereign of the Kasis; though Bhadrasena, "the son of Ajatasatru" cursed by Aruni, may have more to do with his namesake the "heir of Chandragupta" than is generally known, Professor Max Miller objects to two Asokas. He rejects Kalasoka and accepts but Dharmasoka--in accordance with "Greek" and in utter conflict with Buddhist chronology. He knows not--or perhaps prefers to ignore--that besides the two Asokas there were several personages named Chandragupta and Chandramasa. Plutarch is set aside as conflicting with the more welcome theory, and the evidence of Justin alone is accepted. There was Kalasoka, called by some Chandramasa and by others Chandragupta, whose son Nanda was succeeded by his cousin the Chandragupta of Seleucus, and under whom the Council of Vaisali took place "supported by King Nanda" as correctly stated by Taranatha. (None of them were Sudras, and this is a pure invention of the Brahmans.) Then there was the last of the Chandraguptas who assumed the name of Vikrama; he commenced the new era called the Vikramaditya or Samvat and began the new dynasty at Pataliputra, 318 (B.C.)--according to some European "authorities;" after him his son Bindusara or Bhadrasena--also Chandragupta, who was followed by Dharmasoka Chandragupta. And there were two Piyadasis--the "Sandracottus" Chandragupta and Asoka. And if controverted, the Orientalists will have to account for this strange inconsistency. If Asoka was the only "Piyadasi" and the builder of the monuments, and maker of the rock-inscriptions of this name; and if his inauguration occurred as conjectured by Professor Max Muller about 259 B.C., in other words, if he reigned sixty or seventy years later than any of the Greek kings named on the Piyadasian monuments, what had he to do with their vassalage or non-vassalage, or how was he concerned with them at all? Their dealings had been with his grandfather some seventy years earlier--if he became a Buddhist only after ten years occupancy of the throne. And finally, three well-known Bhadrasenas can be proved, whose names spelt loosely and phonetically, according to each writer's dialect and nationality, now yield a variety of names, from Bindusara, Bimbisara, and Vindusara, down to Bhadrasena and Bhadrasara, as he is called in the Vayu Purana. These are all synonymous. However easy, at first sight, it may seem to be to brush out of history a real personage, it becomes more difficult to prove the non-existence of Kalasoka by calling him "false," while the second Asoka is termed "the real," in the face of the evidence of the Puranas, written by the bitterest enemies of the Buddhists, the Brahmans of the period. The Vayu and Matsya Puranas mention both in their lists of their reigning sovereigns of the Nanda and the Morya dynasties. And, though they connect Chandragupta with a Sudra Nanda, they do not deny existence to Kalasoka, for the sake of invalidating Buddhist chronology. However falsified the now extant texts of both the Vaya and Matsya Puranas, even accepted as they at present stand "in their true meaning," which Professor Max Muller (notwithstanding his confidence) fails to seize, they are not "at variance with Buddhist chronology before Chandragupta." Not, at any rate, when the real Chandragupta instead of the false Sandrocottus of the Greeks is recognized and introduced. Quite independently of the Buddhist version, there exists the historical fact recorded in the Brahmanical as well as in the Burmese and Tibetan versions, that in the year 63 of Buddha, Susinago of Benares was chosen king by the people of Pataliputra, who made away with Ajatasatru's dynasty. Susinago removed the capital of Magadha from Rajagriha to Vaisali, while his successor Kalasoka removed it in his turn to Pataliputra. It was during the reign of the latter that the prophecy of Buddha concerning Patalibat or Pataliputra--a small village during His time--was realized. (See Mahaparinibbana Sutta). It will be easy enough, when the time comes, to answer all denying Orientalists and face them with proof and document in hand. They speak of the extravagant, wild exaggerations of the Buddhists and Brahmans. The latter answer: "The wildest theorists of all are they who, to evade a self-evident fact, assume moral, anti-national impossibilities, entirely opposed to the most conspicuous traits of the Brahmanical Indian character--namely, borrowing from, or imitating in anything, other nations. From their comments on Rig Veda, down to the annals of Ceylon, from Panini to Matouan-lin, every page of their learned scholia appears, to one acquainted with the subject, like a monstrous jumble of unwarranted and insane speculations. Therefore, notwithstanding Greek chronology and Chandragupta--whose date is represented as 'the sheet-anchor of Indian chronology' that 'nothing will ever shake'--it is to be feared that as regards India, the chronological ship of the Sanskritists has already broken from her moorings and gone adrift with all her precious freight of conjectures and hypotheses. She is drifting into danger. We are at the end of a cycle--geological and other--and at the beginning of another. Cataclysm is to follow cataclysm. The pent-up forces are bursting out in many quarters; and not only will men be swallowed up or slain by thousands, 'new' land appear and 'old' subside, volcanic eruptions and tidal waves appal; but secrets of an unsuspected past will be uncovered to the dismay of Western theorists and the humiliation of an imperious science. This drifting ship, if watched, may be seen to ground upon the upheaved vestiges of ancient civilizations, and fall to pieces. We are not emulous of the prophet's honours: but still, let this stand as a prophecy." Inscriptions Discovered by General A. Cunningham We have carefully examined the new inscription discovered by General A. Cunningham on the strength of which the date assigned to Buddha's death by Buddhist writers has been declared to be incorrect; and we are of opinion that the said inscription confirms the truth of the Buddhist traditions instead of proving them to be erroneous. The above-mentioned archeologist writes as follows regarding the inscription under consideration in the first volume of his reports:--"The most interesting inscription (at Gaya) is a long and perfect one dated in the era of the Nirvana or death of Buddha. I read the date as follows:--Bhagavati Parinirvritte Samvat 1819 Karttike badi I Budhi--that is, 'in the year 1819 of the Emancipation of Bhagavata on Wednesday, the first day of the waning moon of Kartik.' If the era here used is the same as that of the Buddhists of Ceylon and Burmah, which began in 543 B.C., the date of this inscription will be 1819--543 = A.D. 1276. The style of the letters is in keeping with this date, but is quite incompatible with that derivable from the Chinese date of the era. The Chinese place the death of Buddha upwards of 1000 years before Christ, so that according to them the date of this inscription would be about A.D. 800, a period much too early for the style of character used in the inscription. But as the day of the week is here fortunately added, the date can be verified by calculation. According to my calculation, the date of the inscription corresponds with Wednesday, the 17th of September, AD. 1342. This would place the Nirvana of Buddha in 477 B.C., which is the very year that was first proposed by myself as the most probable date of that event. This corrected date has since been adopted by Professor Max Muller." The reasons assigned by some Orientalists for considering this so-called "corrected date" as the real date of Buddha's death have already been noticed and criticized in the preceding paper; and now we have only to consider whether the inscription in question disproves the old date. Major-General Cunningham evidently seems to take it for granted, as far as his present calculation is concerned, that the number of days in a year is counted in the Magadha country and by Buddhist writers in general on the same basis on which the number of days in a current English year is counted; and this wrong assumption has vitiated his calculation and led him to a wrong conclusion. Three different methods of calculation were in use in India at the time when Buddha lived, and they are still in use in different parts of the country. These methods are known as Souramanam, Chandrarmanam and Barhaspatyamanam. According to the Hindu works on astronomy a Souramanam year consists of 365 days 15 ghadias and 31 vighadias; a Chandramanam year has 360 days, and a year on the basis of Barhaspatyamanam has 361 days and 11 ghadias nearly. Such being the case, General Cunningham ought to have taken the trouble of ascertaining before he made his calculation the particular manam (measure) employed by the writers of Magadha and Ceylon in giving the date of Buddha's death and the manam used in calculating the years of the Buddhist era mentioned in the inscription above quoted. Instead of placing himself in the position of the writer of the said inscription and making the required calculation from that standpoint, he made the calculation on the same basis of which an English gentleman of the nineteenth century would calculate time according to his own calendar. If the calculation were correctly made, it would have shown him that the inscription in question is perfectly consistent with the statement that Buddha died in the year 543 B.C. according to Barhaspatyamanam (the only manam used in Magadha and by Pali writers in general). The correctness of this assertion will be clearly seen on examining the following calculation. 543 years according to Barhaspatyamanam are equivalent to 536 years and 8 months (nearly) according to Souramanam. Similarly, 1819 years according to the former manam are equivalent to 1798 years (nearly) according to the latter manarn. As the Christian era commenced on the 3102nd year of Kaliyuga (according to Souramanam), Buddha died in the year 2565 of Kaliyuga and the inscription was written in the year 4362 of Kaliyuga (according to Souramanam). And now the question is whether according to the Hindu almanack, the first day of the waning moon of Kartik coincided with a Wednesday. According to Suryasiddhanta the number of days from the beginning of Kaliyuga up to midnight on the 15th day of increasing moon of Aswina is 1,593,072, the number of Adhikamasansas (extra months) during the interval being 1608 and the number of Kshayathithis 25,323. If we divide this number by 7 the remainder would be 5. As Kaliyuga commenced with Friday, the period of time above defined closed with Tuesday, as according to Suryasiddhanta a weekday is counted from midnight to midnight. It is to be noticed that in places where Barhaspatyamanam is in use Krishnapaksham (or the fortnight of waning moon) commences first and is followed by Suklapaksham (period of waxing moon). Consequently, the next day after the 15th day of the waxing moon of Aswina will be the 1st day of the waning moon of Kartika to those who are guided by the Barhaspatyamanam calendar. And therefore the latter date, which is the date mentioned in the inscription, was Wednesday in the year 4362 of Kaliyuga. The geocentric longitude of the sun at the time of his meridian passage on the said date being 174 deg. 20' 16" and the moon's longitude being 70 deg 51' 42" (according to Suryasiddhanta) it can be easily seen that at Gaya there was Padyamitithi (first day of waning moon) for nearly 7 ghadias and 50 vighadias from the time of sunrise. It is clear from the foregoing calculation that "Kartik I Badi" coincided with Wednesday in the year 4362 of Kaliyuga or the year 1261 of the Christian era, and that from the standpoint of the person who wrote the inscription the said year was the 1819th year of the Buddhist era. And consequently this new inscription confirms the correctness of the date assigned to Buddha's death by Buddhist writers. It would have been better if Major-General Cunningham had carefully examined the basis of his calculation before proclaiming to the world at large that the Buddhist accounts were untrustworthy. Discrimination of Spirit and Not Spirit (Translated from the original Sanskrit of Sankara Acharya.) by Mohini M. Chatterji [An apology is scarcely needed for undertaking a translation of Sankara Acharya's celebrated Synopsis of Vedantism entitled "Atmanatma Vivekah." This little treatise, within a small compass, fully sets forth the scope and purpose of the Vedanta philosophy. It has been a matter of no little wonder, considering the authorship of this pamphlet and its own intrinsic merits, that a translation of it has not already been executed by some competent scholar. The present translation, though pretending to no scholarship, is dutifully literal, excepting, however, the omission of a few lines relating to the etymology of the words Sarira and Deha, and one or two other things which, though interesting in themselves, have no direct bearing on the main subject of treatment. --T.R.] Nothing is Spirit which can be the object of consciousness. To one possessed of right discrimination, the Spirit is the subject of knowledge. This right discrimination of Spirit and Not-spirit is set forth in millions of treatises. This discrimination of Spirit and Not-spirit is given below: Q. Whence comes pain to the Spirit? A. By reason of its taking a body. It is said in the Sruti: * "Not in this (state of existence) is there cessation of pleasure and pain of a living thing possessed of a body." Q. By what is produced this taking of a body? A. By Karma.** Q. Why does it become so by Karma? A. By desire and the rest (i.e., the passions). Q. By what are desire and the rest produced? A. By egotism. Q. By what again is egotism produced? A. By want of right discrimination. Q. By what is this want of right discrimination produced? A. By ignorance. Q. Is ignorance produced by anything? A. No, by nothing. Ignorance is without beginning and ineffable by reason of its being the intermingling of the real (sat) and the unreal (asat.)*** It is a something embodying the three qualities**** and is said to be opposed to Wisdom, inasmuch as it produces the concept "I am ignorant." The Sruti says, "(Ignorance) is the power of the Deity and is enshrouded by its own qualities." ***** ---------- * Chandogya Upanishad. ** This word it is impossible to translate. It means the doing of a thing for the attainment of an object of worldly desire. *** This word, as used in Vedantic works, is generally misunderstood. It does not mean the negation of everything; it means "that which does not exhibit the truth," the "illusory." **** Satva (goodness), Rajas (foulness), and Tamas (darkness) are the three qualities; pleasure, pain and indifference considered as objective principles. ***** Chandogya Upanishad. -------- The origin of pain can thus be traced to ignorance and it will not cease until ignorance is entirely dispelled, which will be only when the identity of the Self with Brahma (the Universal Spirit) is fully realized.* Anticipating the contention that the eternal acts (i.e., those enjoined by the Vedas) are proper, and would therefore lead to the destruction of ignorance, it is said that ignorance cannot be dispelled by Karma (religious exercises). -------- * This portion has been condensed from the original. -------- Q. Why is it so? A. By reason of the absence of logical opposition between ignorance and act. Therefore it is clear that Ignorance can only be removed by Wisdom. Q. How can this Wisdom be acquired? A. By discussion--by discussing the nature of Spirit and Non-Spirit. Q. Who are worthy of engaging in such discussion? A. Those who have acquired the four qualifications. Q. What are the four qualifications? A. (1) True discrimination of permanent and impermanent things. (2) Indifference to the enjoyment of the fruits of one's actions both here and hereafter. (3) Possession of Sama and the other five qualities. (4) An intense desire of becoming liberated (from conditional existence). (1.) Q. What is the right discrimination of permanent and impermanent things? A. Certainty as to the Material Universe being false and illusive, and Brahman being the only reality. (2.) Indifference to the enjoyment of the fruits of one's actions in this world is to have the same amount of disinclination for the enjoyment of worldly objects of desire (such as garland of flowers, sandal-wood paste, women and the like) beyond those absolutely necessary for the preservation of life, as one has for vomited food, &c. The same amount of disinclination to enjoyment in the society of Rambha, Urvasi, and other celestial nymphs in the higher spheres of life beginning with Svarga loka and ending with Brahma loka.* -------- * These include the whole range of Rupa loka (the world of forms) in Buddhistic esoteric philosophy. -------- (3) Q. What are the six qualities beginning with Sama? A. Sama, dama, uparati, titiksha, samadhana and sraddha. Sama is the repression of the inward sense called Manas--i.e., not allowing it to engage in any other thing but Sravana (listening to what the sages say about the Spirit), Manana (reflecting on it), Nididhyasana (meditating on the same). Dama is the repression of the external senses. Q. What are the external senses? A. The five organs of perception and the five bodily organs for the performance of external acts. Restraining these from all other things but sravana and the rest, is dama. Uparati is the abstaining on principle from engaging in any of the acts and ceremonies enjoined by the shastras. Otherwise, it is the state of the mind which is always engaged in Sravana and the rest, without ever diverging from them. Titiksha (literally the desire to leave) is the bearing with indifference all opposites (such as pleasure and pain, heat and cold, &c.) Otherwise, it is the showing of forbearance to a person one is capable of punishing. Whenever a mind, engaged in Sravana and the rest, wanders to any worldly object of desire, and, finding it worthless, returns to the performance of the three exercises--such returning is called samadhana. Sraddha is an intensely strong faith in the utterances of one's guru and of the Vedanta philosophy. (4.) An intense desire for liberation is called mumukshatva. Those who possess these four qualifications, are worthy of engaging in discussions as to the nature of Spirit and Not-Spirit, and, like Brahmacharins, they have no other duty (but such discussion). It is not, however, at all improper for householders to engage in such discussions; but, on the contrary, such a course is highly meritorious. For it is said--Whoever, with due reverence, engages in the discussion of subjects treated of in Vedanta philosophy and does proper service to his guru, reaps happy fruits. Discussion as to the nature of Spirit and Not-Spirit is therefore a duty. Q. What is Spirit? A. It is that principle which enters into the composition of man and is not included in the three bodies, and which is distinct from the five sheaths (Koshas), being sat (existence),* chit (consciousness),** and ananda (bliss),*** and witness of the three states. -------- * This stands for Purusha. ** This stands for Prakriti, cosmic matter, irrespective of the state we perceive it to be in. *** Bliss is Maya or Sakti, it is the creative energy producing changes of state in Prakriti. Says the Sruti (Taittiriya Upanishad): "Verily from Bliss are all these bhutas (elements) born, and being born by it they live, and they return and enter into Bliss." -------- Q. What are the three bodies? A. The gross (sthula), the subtile (sukshma), and the causal (karana). Q. What is the gross body? A. That which is the effect of the Mahabhutas (primordial subtile elements) differentiated into the five gross ones (Panchikrita),* is born of Karma and subject to the six changes beginning with birth.** It is said:-- What is produced by the (subtile) elements differentiated into the five gross ones, is acquired by Karma, and is the measure of pleasure and pain, is called the body (sarira) par excellence. Q. What is the subtile body? A. It is the effect of the elements not differentiated into five and having seventeen characteristic marks (lingas). Q. What are the seventeen? A. The five channels of knowledge (Jnanendriyas), the five organs of action, the five vital airs, beginning with prana, and manas and buddhi. ------- * The five subtile elements thus produce the gross ones--each of the five is divided into eight parts, four of those parts and one part of each of the others enter into combination, and the result is the gross element corresponding with the subtile element, whose parts predominate in the composition. ** These six changes are--birth, death, existence in time, growth, decay, and undergoing change of substance (parinam) as milk is changed into whey. -------- Q. What are the Jnandendriyas? A. [Spiritual] Ear, skin, eye, tongue and nose. Q. What is the ear? A. That channel of knowledge which transcends the [physical] ear, is limited by the auricular orifice, on which the akas depends, and which is capable of taking cognisance of sound. Q. The skin? A. That which transcends the skin, on which the skin depends, and which extends from head to foot, and has the power of perceiving heat and cold. Q. The eye? A. That which transcends the ocular orb, on which the orb depends, which is situated to the front of the black iris and has the power of cognising forms. Q. The tongue? A. That which transcends the tongue, and can perceive taste. Q. The nose? A. That which transcends the nose, and has the power of smelling. Q. What are the organs of action? A. The organ of speech (vach), hands, feet, &c. Q. What is vach? A. That which transcends speech, in which speech resides, and which is located in eight different centres* and has the power of speech. -------- * The secret commentaries say seven; for it does not separate the lips into the "upper" and "nether" lips. And, it adds to the seven centres the seven passages in the head connected with, and affected by, vach-- namely, the mouth, the two eyes, the two nostrils and the two ears. "The left ear, eye and nostril being the messengers of the right side of the head; the right ear, eye and nostril, those of the left side." Now this is purely scientific. The latest discoveries and conclusions of modern physiology have shown that the power or the faculty of human speech is located in the third frontal cavity of the left hemisphere of the brain. On the other hand, it is a well known fact that the nerve tissues inter-cross each other (decussate) in the brain in such a way that the motions of our left extremities are governed by the right hemisphere, while the motions of our right limbs are subject to the left hemisphere of the brain. --------- Q. What are the eight centres? A. Breast, throat, head, upper and nether lips, palate ligature (fraenum), binding the tongue to the lower jaw and tongue. Q. What is the organ of the hands? A. That which transcends the hands, on which the palms depend, and which has the power of giving and taking.... (The other organs are similarly described.) Q. What is the antahkarana? * A. Manas, buddhi, chitta and ahankara form it. The seat of the manas is the root of the throat, of buddhi the face, of chitta the umbilicus, and of ahankara the breast. The functions of these four components of antahkarana are respectively doubt, certainty, retention and egotism. Q. How are the five vital airs,** beginning with prana, named? -------- * A flood of light will be thrown on the text by the note of a learned occultist, who says:--"Antahkarana is the path of communication between soul and body, entirely disconnected with the former, existing with, belonging to, and dying with the body." This path is well traced in the text. ** These vitals airs and sub-airs are forces which harmonize the interior man with his surroundings, by adjusting the relations of the body to external objects. They are the five allotropic modifications of life. ------- A. Prana, apana, vyana, udana and samana. Their locations are said to be:--of prana the breast, of apana the fundamentum, of samana the umbilicus, of udana the throat, and vyana is spread all over the body. Functions of these are:--prana goes out, apana descends, udana ascends, samana reduces the food eaten into an undistinguishable state, and vyana circulates all over the body. Of these five vital airs there are five sub-airs--namely, naga, kurma, krikara, devadatta and dhananjaya. Functions of these are:--eructations produced by naga, kurma opens the eye, dhananjaya assimilates food, devadatta causes yawning, and krikara produces appetite--this is said by those versed in Yoga. The presiding powers (or macrocosmic analogues) of the five channels of knowledge and the others are dik (akas) and the rest. Dik, vata (air), arka (sun), pracheta (water), Aswini, bahni (fire), Indra, Upendra, Mrityu (death), Chandra (moon), Brahma, Rudra, and Kshetrajnesvara,* which is the great Creator and cause of everything. These are the presiding powers of ear, and the others in the order in which they occur. All these taken together form the linga sarira.** It is also said in the Shastras:-- The five vital airs, manas, buddhi, and the ten organs form the subtile body, which arises from the subtile elements, undifferentiated into the five gross ones, and which is the means of the perception of pleasure and pain. Q. What is the Karana sarira? --------- * The principle of intellect (Buddhi) in the macrocosm. For further explanation of this term, see Sankara's commentaries on the Brahma Sutras. ** Linga means that which conveys meaning, characteristic mark. -------- A. It is ignorance [of different monads] (avidya), which is the cause of the other two bodies, and which is without beginning [in the present manvantara],* ineffable, reflection [of Brahma] and productive of the concept of non-identity between self and Brahma. It is also said:-- "Without a beginning, ineffable avidya is called the upadhi (vehicle)-- karana (cause). Know the Spirit to be truly different from the three upadhis--i.e., bodies." Q. What is Not-Spirit? A. It is the three bodies [described above], which are impermanent, inanimate (jada), essentially painful and subject to congregation and segregation. -------- * It must not be supposed that avidya is here confounded with prakriti. What is meant by avidya being without beginning, is that it forms no link in the Karmic chain leading to succession of births and deaths, it is evolved by a law embodied in prakriti itself. Avidya is ignorance or matter as related to distinct monads, whereas the ignorance mentioned before is cosmic ignorance, or maya-Avidya begins and ends with this manvantara. Maya is eternal. The Vedanta philosophy of the school of Sankara regards the universe as consisting of one substance, Brahman (the one ego, the highest abstraction of subjectivity from our standpoint), having an infinity of attributes, or modes of manifestation from which it is only logically separable. These attributes or modes in their collectivity form Prakriti (the abstract objectivity). It is evident that Brahman per se does not admit of any description other than "I am that I am." Whereas Prakriti is composed of an infinite number of differentiations of itself. In the universe, therefore, the only principle which is indifferentiable is this "I am that I am" and the manifold modes of manifestation can only exist in reference to it. The eternal ignorance consists in this, that as there is but one substantive, but numberless adjectives, each adjective is capable of designating the All. Viewed in time the most permanent object or mood of the great knower at any moment represents the knower, and in a sense binds it with limitations. In fact, time itself is one of these infinite moods, and so is space. The only progress in Nature is the realization of moods unrealized before. -------- Q. What is impermanent? A. That which does not exist in one and the same state in the three divisions of time [namely, present, past and future.] Q. What is inanimate (jada)? A. That which cannot distinguish between the objects of its own cognition and the objects of the cognition of others.... Q. What are the three states (mentioned above as those of which the Spirit is witness)? A. Wakefulness (jagrata), dreaming (svapna), and the state of dreamless slumber (sushupti). Q. What is the state of wakefulness? A. That in which objects are known through the avenue of [physical] senses. Q. Of dreaming? A. That in which objects are perceived by reason of desires resulting from impressions produced during wakefulness. Q. What is the state of dreamless slumber? A. That in which there is an utter absence of the perception of objects. The indwelling of the notion of "I" in the gross body during wakefulness is visva (world of objects),* in subtile body during dreaming is taijas (magnetic fire), and in the causal body during dreamless slumber is prajna (One Life). Q. What are the five sheaths? A. Annamaya, Pranamaya, Manomaya, Vjjnanamaya, and Anandamaya. Annamaya is related to anna** (food), Pranamaya of prana (life), Manomaya of manas, Vijnanamaya of vijnana (finite perception), Anandamaya of ananda (illusive bliss). ------- * That is to say, by mistaking the gross body for self, the consciousness of external objects is produced. ** This word also means the earth in Sanskrit. ------- Q. What is the Annamaya sheath? A. The gross body. Q. Why? A. The food eaten by father and mother is transformed into semen and blood, the combination of which is transformed into the shape of a body. It wraps up like a sheath and hence so called. It is the transformation of food and wraps up the spirit like a sheath--it shows the spirit which is infinite as finite, which is without the six changes, beginning with birth as subject to those changes, which is without the three kinds of pain* as liable to them. It conceals the spirit as the sheath conceals the sword, the husk the grain, or the womb the fetus. Q. What is the next sheath? A. The combination of the five organs of action, and the five vital airs form the Pranamaya sheath. By the manifestation of prana, the spirit which is speechless appears as the speaker, which is never the giver as the giver, which never moves as in motion, which is devoid of hunger and thirst as hungry and thirsty. Q. What is the third sheath? A. It is the five (subtile) organs of sense (jnanendriya) and manas. -------- * The three kinds of pain are:-- Adhibhautika, i.e., from external objects, e.g., from thieves, wild animals, &c. Adhidaivika, i.e., from elements, e.g., thunder, &c. Adhyatmika, i.e., from within one's self, e.g., head-ache, &c. See Sankhya Karika, Gaudapada's commentary on the opening Sloka. ------- By the manifestation of this sheath (vikara) the spirit which is devoid of doubt appears as doubting, devoid of grief and delusion as grieved and deluded, devoid of sight as seeing. Q. What is the Vijnanamaya sheath? A. [The essence of] the five organs of sense form this sheath in combination with buddhi. Q. Why is this sheath called the jiva (personal ego), which by reason of its thinking itself the actor, enjoyer, &c., goes to the other loka and comes back to this?* A. It wraps up and shows the spirit which never acts as the actor, which never cognises as conscious, which has no concept of certainty as being certain, which is never evil or inanimate as being both. Q. What is the Anandamaya sheath? A. It is the antahkarana, wherein ignorance predominates, and which produces gratification, enjoyment, &c. It wraps up and shows the spirit, which is void of desire, enjoyment and fruition, as having them, which has no conditioned happiness as being possessed thereof. Q. Why is the spirit said to be different from the three bodies? A. That which is truth cannot be untruth, knowledge ignorance, bliss misery, or vice versa. Q. Why is it called the witness of the three states? A. Being the master of the three states, it is the knowledge of the three states, as existing in the present, past and future.** ------- * That is to say, flits from birth to birth. ** It is the stable basis upon which the three states arise and disappear. ------- Q. How is the spirit different from the five sheaths? A. This is being illustrated by an example:--"This is my cow," "this is my calf," "this is my son or daughter," "this is my wife," "this is my anandamaya sheath," and so on*--the spirit can never be connected with these concepts; it is different from and witness of them all. For it is said in the Upanishad--[The spirit is] "naught of sound, of touch, of form, or colour, of taste, or of smell; it is everlasting, having no beginning or end, superior [in order of subjectivity] to Prakriti (differentiated matter); whoever correctly understands it as such attains mukti (liberation)." The spirit has also been called (above) sat, chit, and ananda. Q. What is meant by its being sat (presence)? A. Existing unchanged in the three divisions of time and uninfluenced by anything else. Q. What by being chit (consciousness)? A. Manifesting itself without depending upon anything else, and containing the germ of everything in itself. Q. What by being ananda (bliss)? A. The ne plus ultra of bliss. Whoever knows without doubt and apprehension of its being otherwise, the self as being one with Brahma or spirit, which is eternal, non-dual and unconditioned, attains moksha (liberation from conditioned existence.) -------- * The "heresy of individuality," or attavada of the Buddhists. -------- Was Writing Known Before Panini? I am entrusted with the task of putting together some facts which would support the view that the art of writing was known in India before the time of our grammarian--the Siva-taught Panini. Professor Max Muller has maintained the contrary opinion ever since 1856, and has the approbation of other illustrious Western scholars. Stated briefly, their position is that the entire absence of any mention of "writing, reading, paper, or pen" in the Vedas, or during the whole of the Brahmana period, and the almost, if not quite, as complete silence as to them throughout the Sutra period, "lead us to suppose that even then [the Sutra period], though the art of writing began to be known, the whole literature of India was preserved by oral tradition only." ("Hist. Sans. Lit.," p. 501.) To support this theory, he expands the mnemonic faculty of our respected ancestors to such a phenomenal degree that, like the bull's hide of Queen Dido, it is made to embrace the whole ground needed for the proposed city of refuge, to which discomfited savants may flee when hard pressed. Considering that Professor Weber--a gentleman who, we observe, likes to distil the essence of Aryan aeons down into an attar of no greater volume than the capacity of the Biblical period--admits that Europe now possesses 10,000 of our Sanscrit texts; and considering that we have, or have had, many other tens of thousands which the parsimony of Karma has hitherto withheld from the museums and libraries of Europe, what a memory must have been theirs! Under correction, I venture to assume that Panini, who was ranked among the Rishis, was the greatest known grammarian in India, than whom there is no higher in history, whether ancient or modern; further, that contemporary scholars agree that the Sanskrit is the most perfect of languages. Therefore, when Prof. Muller affirms that "there is not a single word in Panini's terminology which presupposes the existence of writing" (op. cit. 507), we become a little shaken in our loyal deference to Western opinion. For it is very hard to conceive how one so pre-eminently great as Panini should have been incapable of inventing characters to preserve his grammatical system--supposing that none had previously existed--if his genius was equal to the invention of classical Sanskrit. The mention of the word Grantha, the equivalent for a written or bound book in the later literature of India--though applied by Panini (in B. I. 3, 75) to the Veda; (in B. iv. 3, 87) to any work; (in B. iv. 3, 116) to the work of any individual author; and (in B. iv. 3, 79) to any work that is studied, do not stagger Prof. Muller at all. Grantha he takes to mean simply a composition, and this may be handed down to posterity by oral communication. Hence, we must believe that Panini was illiterate; but yet composed the most elaborate and scientific system of grammar ever known; recorded its 3,996 rules only upon the molecular quicksands of his "cerebral cineritious matter," and handed them over to his disciples by atmospheric vibration, i.e., oral teaching! Of course, nothing could be clearer; it commends itself to the simplest intellect as a thing most probable! And in the presence of such a perfect hypothesis, it seems a pity that its author should (op. cit. 523) confess that "it is possible" that he "may have overlooked some words in the Brahmanas and Sutras, which would prove the existence of written books previous to Panini." That looks like the military strategy of our old warriors, who delivered their attack boldly, but nevertheless tried to keep their rear open for retreat if compelled. The precaution was necessary: written books did exist many centuries before the age in which this radiant sun of Aryan thought rose to shine upon his age. They existed, but the Orientalist may search in vain for the proof amid the exoteric words in our earlier literature. As the Egyptian hierophants had their private code of hieratic symbols, and even the founder of Christianity spoke to the vulgar in parables whose mystical meaning was known only to the chosen few, so the Brahmans had from the first (and still have) a mystical terminology couched behind ordinary expressions, arranged in certain sequences and mutual relations, which none but the initiate would observe. That few living Brahmans possess this key but proves that, as in other archaic religious and philosophical systems, the soul of Hinduism has fled (to its primal imparters--the initiates), and only the decrepit body remains with a spiritually degenerate posterity.* ------- * Not only are the Upanishads a secret doctrine, but in dozens of other works as, for instance, in the Aitareya Aranyaka, it is plainly expressed that they contain secret doctrines, that are not to be imparted to any one but a Dwija (twice-born, initiated) Brahman. -------- I fully perceive the difficulty of satisfying European philologists of a fact which, upon my own statement, they are debarred from verifying. We know that from the present mental condition of our Brahmans. But I hope to be able to group together a few admitted circumstances which will aid, at least, to show the Western theory untenable, if not to make a base upon which to rest our claim for the antiquity of Sanskrit writing. Three good reasons may be adduced in support of the claim--though they will be regarded as circumstantial evidence by our opponents. I.--It can be shown that writing was known in Phoenicia from the date of the acquaintance of Western history with her first settlements; and this may be dated, according to European figures, 2760 B.C., the age of the Tyrian settlement. II.--Our opponents confess to ignorance of the source whence the Phoenicians themselves got their alphabet. III.--It can be proved that before the final division and classification of languages, there existed two languages in every nation: (a) the profane or popular language of the masses; (b) the sacerdotal or secret language of the initiates of the temples and mysteries--the latter being one and universal. Or, in other, words, every great people had, like the Egyptians, its Demotic and its Hieratic writing and language, which had resulted first in a pictorial writing or the hieroglyphics, and later on in a phonetic alphabet. Now it requires a stretch of prejudice, indeed, to assert upon no evidence whatever that the Brahman Aryans--mystics and metaphysicians above everything--were the only ones who had never had any knowledge of either the sacerdotal language or the characters in which it was recorded. To contradict this gratuitous assumption, we can furnish a whole array of proofs. It can be demonstrated that the Aryans no more borrowed their writing from the Hellenes, or from the Phoenicians, than they were indebted to the influence of the former for all their arts and sciences. (Even if we accept Mr. Cunningham's "Indo-Grecian Period," for it lasted only from 250-57 B.C., as he states it.) The direct progenitor of the Vedic Sanskrit was the sacerdotal language (which has a distinct name among the initiates). The Vach--its alter ego or the "mystic self," the sacerdotal speech of the initiated Brahman--became in time the mystery language of the inner temple, studied by the initiates of Egypt and Chaldea; of the Phoenicians and the Etruscans; of the Pelasgi and Palanquans; in short, of the whole globe. The appellation DEVANAGARI is the synonym of, and identical with, the Hermetic and Hieratic NETER-KHARI (divine speech) of the Egyptians. As the discussion divides naturally into two parts as to treatment-- though a general synthesis must be the final result--we will proceed to examine the first part--namely, the charge that the Sanskrit alphabet is derived from the Phoenicians. When a Western philologer asserts that writing did not exist before a certain period, we assume that he has some approximate certitude as to its real invention. But so far is this from the truth, that admittedly no one knows whence the Phoenicians learned the characters, now alleged (by Gesenius first) to be the source from which modern alphabets were directly derived. De Rouge's investigations make it extremely probable that "they were borrowed, or rather adapted from certain archaic hieroglyphics of Egypt:" a theory which the Prisse Papyrus, "the oldest in existence," strongly supports by its "striking similarities with the Phoenician characters." But the same authority traces it back one step farther. He says that the ascription (by the myth-makers) of the art of writing to Thoth, or to Kadmos, "only denotes their belief in its being brought from the East (Kedem), or being perhaps primeval." There is not even a certainty whether, primevally or archaically, "there were several original alphabetical systems, or whether one is to be assumed as having given rise to the various modes of writing in use." So, if conjecture has the field, it is no great disloyalty to declare one's rebellion against the eminent Western gentlemen who are learnedly guessing at the origin of things. Some affirm that the Phoenicians derived their so-called Kadmean or Phoenician writing-characters from the Pelasgians, held also to have been the inventors, or at least the improvers, of the so-called Kadmean characters. But, at the same time, this is not proven, they confess, and they only know that the latter were in possession of the art of writing "before the dawn of history." Let us see what is known of both Phoenicians and Pelasgians. If we inquire who were the Phoenicians, we learn as follows:--From having been regarded as Hamites on Bible testimony, they suddenly became Semites--on geographical and philological evidence(?). Their origin begins, it is said, on the shores of the Erythrian Sea; and that sea extended from the eastern shores of Egypt to the western shores of India. The Phoenicians were the most maritime nation in the world. That they knew perfectly the art of writing no one would deny. The historical period of Sidon begins 1500 B.C. And it is well ascertained that in 1250 Sanchoniathon had already compiled from annals and State documents, which filled the archives of every Phoenician city, the full records of their religion. Sanchoniathon wrote in the Phoenician language, and was mis-translated later on into Greek by Philo of Byblus, and annihilated bodily--as to his works--except one small fragment preserved by Eusebius, the literary Siva, the Destroyer of nearly all heathen documents that fell in his way. To see the direct bearing of the alleged superior knowledge of the Phoenicians upon the alleged ignorance of the Aryan Brahmans, one has but to turn to "European Universal History," meagre though its details and possible knowledge, yet I suppose no one would contradict the historical facts given. Some fragments of Dius, the Phoenician who wrote the history of Tyre, are preserved in Josephus; and Tyre's activity begins 1100 B.C., in the earlier part of the third period of Phoenician history, so called. And in that period, as we are told, they had already reached the height of their power; their ships covered all seas, their commerce embraced the whole earth, and their colonies flourished far and near. Even on Biblical testimony they are known to have come to the Indies by the Red Sea, while trading on Solomon's account about a millennium before the Western era. These data no man of science can deny. Leaving entirely aside the thousand-and-one documentary proofs that could be given on the evidence of our most ancient texts on Occult Sciences, of inscribed tablets, &c., those historical events that are accepted by the Western world are alone here given. Turning to the Mahabharata, the date of which--on the sole authority of the fancy lore drawn from the inner consciousness of German scholars, who perceive in the great epic poem proofs of its modern fabrication in the words "Yavana" and others--has been changed from 3300 years to the first centuries after Christ (!!), we find: (1) ample evidence that the ancient Hindus had navigated (before the establishment of the caste system) the open seas to the regions of the Arctic Ocean and held communication with Europe; and (2) that the Pandus had acquired universal dominion and taught the sacrificial mysteries to other races (see Mahabharata, book xiv,). With such proofs of international communication, and more than proved relations between the Indian Aryans and the Phoenicians, Egyptians and other literate people, it is rather startling to be told that our forefathers of the Brahmanic period knew nothing of writing. Admitting, for the argument only, that the Phoenician were the sole custodians of the glorious art of writing, and that as merchants they traded with India, what commodity, I ask, could they have offered to a people led by the Brahmans so precious and marketable as this art of arts, by whose help the priceless lore of the Rishis might be preserved against the accidents of imperfect oral transmission? And even if the Aryans learned from Phoenicians how to write--to every educated Hindu an absurdity--they must have possessed the art 2,000 or at least 1,000 years earlier than the period supposed by Western critics. Negative proof, perhaps? Granted: yet no more so than their own, and most suggestive. And now we may turn to the Pelasgians. Notwithstanding the rebuke of Niebuhr, who, speaking of the historian in general, shows him as hating "the spurious philology, out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise," the origin of the Pelasgians is conjectured to have been from--(a) swarthy Asiatics (Pellasici) or from some (b) mariners--from the Greek Pelagos, the sea; or again to be sought for in the (c) Biblical Peleg! The only divinity of their Pantheon well known to Western history is Orpheus, also the "swarthy," the "dark-skinned;" represented for the Pelasgians by Xoanon, their "Divine Image." Now if the Pelasgians were Asiatics, they must have been Turanians, Semites or Aryans. That they could not have been either of the two first, and must have been the last named, is shown on Herodotus' testimony, who declared them the forefathers of the Greeks-- though they spoke, as he says, "a most barbarous language." Further, unerring philology shows that the vast number of roots common both to Greek and Latin, are easily explained by the assumption of a common Pelasgic linguistic and ethnical stock in both nationalities. But then how about the Sanskrit roots traced in the Greek and Latin languages? The same roots must have been present in the Pelasgian tongues? We who place the origin of the Pelasgian far beyond the Biblical ditch of historic chronology, have reasons to believe that the "barbarous language" mentioned by Herodotus was simply "the primitive and now extinct Aryan tongue" that preceded the Vedic Sanskrit. Who could they be, these Pelasgians? They are described generally on the meagre data in hand as a highly intellectual, receptive, active and simple people, chiefly occupied with agriculture; warlike when necessary, though preferring peace. We are told that they built canals, subterranean water-works, dams, and walls of astounding strength and most excellent construction. And their religion and worship originally consisted in a mystic service of those natural powers--the sun, wind, water, and air (our Surya, Maruts, Varuna, and Vayu), whose influence is visible in the growth of the fruits of the earth; moreover, some of their tribes were ruled by priests, while others stood under the patriarchal rule of the head of the clan or family. All this reminds one of the nomads, the Brahmanic Aryas of old under the sway of their Rishis, to whom were subject every distinct family or clan. While the Pelasgians were acquainted with the art of writing, and had thus "a vast element of culture in their possession before the dawn of history," we are told (by the same philologists) that our ancestors knew of no writing until the dawn of Christianity! Thus the Pelasgianic language, that "most barbarous language" spoken by this mysterious people, what was it but Aryan; or rather, which of the Aryan languages could it have been? Certainly it must have been a language with the same and even stronger Sanskrit roots in it than the Greek. Let us bear in mind that the Aeolic was neither the language of Aeschylus, nor the Attic, nor even the old speech of Homer. As the Oscan of the "barbarous" Sabines was not quite the Italian of Dante nor even the Latin of Virgil. Or has the Indo-Aryan to come to the sad conclusion that the average Western Orientalist will rather incur the blame of ignorance when detected than admit the antiquity of the Vedic Sanskrit and the immense period which separated this comparatively rough and unpolished language, compared with the classical Sanskrit, and the palmy days of the "extinct Aryan tongue?" The Latium Antiquum of Pliny and the Aeolic of the Autochthones of Greece present the closest kinship, we are told. They had a common ancestor--the Pelasgian. What, then, was the parent tongue of the latter unless it was the language "spoken at one time by all the nations of Europe--before their separation?" In the absence of all proofs, it is unreasonable that the Rik-Brahmanas, the Mahabharata and every Nirukti should be treated as flippantly as they now are. It is admitted that, however inferior to the classical Sanskrit of Panini, the language of the oldest portions of Rig Veda, notwithstanding the antiquity of its grammatical forms, is the same as that of the latest texts. Every one sees--cannot fail to see and to know--that for a language so old and so perfect as the Sanskrit to have survived alone, among all languages, it must have had its cycles of perfection and its cycles of degeneration. And, if one had any intuition, he might have seen that what they call a "dead language" being an anomaly, a useless thing in Nature, it would not have survived, even as a "dead" tongue, had it not its special purpose in the reign of immutable cyclic laws; and that Sanskrit, which came to be nearly lost to the world, is now slowly spreading in Europe, and will one day have the extension it had thousands upon thousands of years back--that of a universal language. The same as to the Greek and the Latin: there will be a time when the Greek of Aeschylus (and more perfect still in its future form) will be spoken by all in Southern Europe, while Sanskrit will be resting in its periodical pralaya; and the Attic will be followed later by the Latin of Virgil. Something ought to have whispered to us that there was also a time--before the original Aryan settlers among the Dravidian and other aborigines, admitted within the fold of Brahmanical initiation, marred the purity of the sacred Sanskrita Bhasha--when Sanskrit was spoken in all its unalloyed subsequent purity, and therefore must have had more than once its rise and fall. The reason for it is simply this: classical Sanskrit was only restored, if in some things perfected, by Panini. Panini, Katyayana or Patanjali did not create it; it has existed throughout cycles, and will pass through other cycles still. Professor Max Miller is willing to admit that a tribe of Semitic nomads--fourteen centuries before the year 1 of the Westerns--knew well the art of writing, and had their historically and scientifically proven "book of the covenant and the tables 'with the writing of God upon them.'" Yet the same authority tells us that the Aryans could neither read nor write until the very close of the Brahmanic period. "No trace of writing can be discovered (by the philologists) in the Brahmanical literature before the days of Panini." Very well, and now what was the period during which this Siva-taught sage is allowed to have flourished? One Orientalist (Bohtlingk) refers us to 350 B.C., while less lenient ones, like Professor Weber, land the grammarian right in the middle of the second century of the Christian era! Only, after fixing Panini's period with such a remarkable agreement of chronology (other calculations ranging variously between 400 B.C. and 460 A.D.), the Orientalists place themselves inextricably between the horns of a dilemma. For whether Panini flourished 350 B.C. or 180 A.D., he could not have been illiterate; for firstly, in the Lalita Vistara, a canonical book recognized by the Sanskritists, attributed by Max Muller to the third Buddhist council (and translated into Tibetan), our Lord Buddha is shown as studying, besides Devanagari, sixty-three other alphabets specified in it as being used in various parts of India; and secondly, though Megasthenes and Nearchus do say that in their time the laws of Manu were not (popularly) reduced to writing (Strabo, xv. 66 and 73) yet Nearchus describes the Indian art of making paper from cotton. He adds that the Indians wrote letters on cotton twisted together (Strabo, xv. 53 and 67). This would be late in the Sutra period, no doubt, according to Professor Miller's reasoning. Can the learned gentleman cite any record within that comparatively recent period showing the name of the inventor of that cotton-paper, and the date of his discovery? Surely so important a fact as that, a novelty so transcendently memorable, would not have passed without remark. One would seem compelled, in the absence of any such chronicle, to accept the alternative theory--known to us Aryan students as a fact--that writing and writing materials were, as above remarked, known to the Brahmans in an antiquity inconceivably remote--many centuries before the epoch made illustrious by Panini. Attention has been asked above to the interesting fact that the god Orpheus, of "Thracia" (?) is called the "dark-skinned." Has it escaped notice that he is "supposed to be the Vedic Ribhu or Abrhu, an epithet both of Indra and the Sun."* And if he was "the inventor of letters," and is "placed anterior to both Homer and Hesiod," then what follows? That Indra taught writing to the Thracian Pelasgians under the guise of Orpheus,** but left his own spokesmen and vehicles, the Brahmans, illiterate until "the dawn of Christianity?" Or, that the gentlemen of the West are better at intuitional chronology than conspicuous for impartial research? ------- * "Chamber's Encyclopedia," vii. 127. ** According to Herodotus the Mysteries were actually brought from India by Orpheus. ------- Orpheus was--in Greece--the son of Apollo or Helios, the sun-god, according to corrected mythology, and from him received the phorminx or lyre of seven strings, i.e.--according to occult phraseology--the sevenfold mystery of the Initiation. Now Indra is the ruler of the bright firmament, the disperser of clouds, "the restorer of the sun to the sky." He is identified with Arjuna in the Samhita Satapatha Brahmana (although Prof. Weber denies the existence of any such person as Arjuna, yet there was indeed one), and Arjuna was the Chief of the Pandavas;* and though Pandu the white passes for his father, he is yet considered the son of Indra. As throughout India all ancient cyclopean structures are even now attributed to the Pandavas, so all similar structures in the West were anciently ascribed to the Pelasgians. Moreover, as shown well by Pococke--laughed at because too intuitional and too fair though, perchance less, philologically learned--the Pandavas were in Greece, where many traces of them can be shown. ------- * Another proof of the fact that the Pandavas were, though Aryans, not Brahmans, and belonged to an Indian tribe that preceded the Brahmans, and were later on Brahmanized, and then out-casted and called Mlechhas, Yavanas (i.e., foreign to the Brahmans), is afforded in the following: Pandu has two wives; and "it is not Kunti, his lawful wife, but Madri, his most beloved wife," who is burnt with the old King when dead, as well remarked by Prof Max Muller, who seems astonished at it without comprehending the true reason. As stated by Herodotus (v. 5), it was a custom amongst the Thracians to allow the most beloved of a man's wives to be sacrificed upon his tomb; and Herodotus (iv. 17) asserts a similar fact of the Scythians, and Pausanias (iv. 2) of the Greeks. ("Hist. Sans. Lit." p. 48). The Pandavas and the Kauravas are called esoterically cousins in the Epic poem because they were two distinct yet Aryan tribes, and represent two peoples, not simply two families. -------- In the Mahabharata, Arjuna is taught the occult philosophy by Krishna (personification of the universal Divine Principle); and the less mythological view of Orpheus presents him to us as "a divine bard or priest in the service of Zagreus .... founder of the Mysteries .... the inventor of everything, in fact, that was supposed to have contributed to the civilization and initiation into a more humane worship of the deity." Are not these striking parallels; and is it not significant that, in the cases of both Arjuna and Orpheus, the sublimer aspects of religion should have been imparted along with the occult methods of attaining it by masters of the mysteries? Real Devanagari--non-phonetic characters--meant formerly the outward symbols, so to say, the signs used in the intercommunication between gods and initiated mortals. Hence their great sacredness and the silence maintained throughout the Vedic and the Brahmanical periods about any object concerned with, or referring to, reading and writing. It was the language of the gods. If our Western critics can only understand what the Ancient Hindu writers meant by Rhutaliai, so often mentioned in their mystical writings, they will be in a position to ascertain the source from which the Hindus first derived their knowledge of writing. A secret language, common to all schools of occult science once prevailed throughout the world. Hence Orpheus learnt "letters" in the course of his initiation. He is identified with Indra; according to Herodotus he brought the art of writing from India; his complexion swarthier than that of the Thracians points to his Indo-Aryan nationality--supposing him to have been "a bard and priest," and not a god; the Pelasgians are said to have been born in Thracia; they are believed (in the West) to have first possessed the art of writing, and taught the Phoenicians; from the latter all modern alphabets proceed. I submit, then, with all these coincidences and sequences, whether the balance of proof is on the side of the theory that the Aryans transmitted the art of writing to the people of the West; or on the side which maintains that they, with their caste of scholarly Brahmans, their noble sacerdotal tongue, dating from high antiquity, their redundant and splendid literature, their acquaintance with the most wonderful and recondite potentialities of the human spirit, were illiterate until the era of Panini, the grammarian and last of the Rishis. When the famous theorists of the Western colleges can show us a river running from its mouth back to its source in the feeble mountain spring, then may we be asked to believe in their theory of Aryan illiteracy. The history of human intellectual development shows that humanity always passes through the stage of ideography or pictography before attaining that of cursive writing. It therefore remains with the Western critics who oppose the antiquity of Aryan Scriptures to show us the pictographic proofs which support their position. As these are notoriously absent, it appears they would have us believe that our ancestors passed immediately from illiteracy to the Devanagari characters of Panini's time. Let the Orientalists bear in mind the conclusions drawn from a careful study of the Mahabharata by Muir in his "Sanskrit Texts" (vol. I. pp. 390,480 and 482). It may be conclusively proven on the authority of the Mahabharata that the Yavanas (of whom India, as alleged, knew nothing before the days of Alexander!) belong to those tribes of Kshatriyas who, in consequence of their non-communication with, and in some cases rejection by, the Brahmins, had become from twice-born, "Vrishalas,"-- i.e., outcasts (Mahabharata Anusasanaparvam, vv. 2103 F.): "Sakah Yavana-Kambojas tastah kshattriya jatayah Vrishalatvam parigatah Brahmananam adarsana. Dravidas cha Kalindas cha Pulindas chapy Usinarah Kalisarpa Mahishakas tastah kshattriya jatayah," &c. &c. The same reference may be found in verses 2158-9. The Mahabharata shows the Yavanas descended from Turvasu--once upon a time Kshatriya, subsequently degraded into Vrishala. Harivamsa shows when and how the Yavanas were excommunicated. It may be inferred from the account therein contained of the expedition against Ayodhya by the Yavanas, and the subsequent proceedings of Sagara, that the Yavanas were, previous to the date of the expedition, Kshatriyas subject to the government of the powerful monarchs who reigned at Ayodhya. But on account of their having rebelled against their sovereign, and attacked his capital, they were excommunicated by Sagara who successfully drove them out of Ayodhya, at the suggestion of Vasishtha who was the chief minister and guru of Sagara's father. The only trouble in connecting the Pelasgians with, and tracing their origin to, the Kshatriyas of Rajputana, is created by the Orientalist who constructs a fanciful chronology, based on no proof, and showing only unfamiliarity with the world's real history, and with Indian history even within historical periods. The value of that chronology--which places virtually the "primitive Indo-Germanic-period" before the ancient Vedic period (!)--may, in conclusion, be illustrated by an example. Rough as may be the calculations offered, it is impossible to go deeper into any subject of this class within the narrow limits prescribed, and without recourse to data not generally accessible. In the words of Prof. Max Muller:--"The Code of Manu is almost the only work in Sanskrit literature which, as yet, has not been assailed by those who doubt the antiquity of everything Indian. No historian has disputed its claim to that early date which had from the first been assigned to it by Sir William Jones" ("Hist. Sans, Lit." p. 61). And now, pray, what is this extremely "early date?" "From 880 to 1200 B.C.," we are told. We will then, for the present purpose, accept this authoritative conclusion. Several facts, easily verifiable, have to be first of all noticed:--(1) Manu in his many enumerations of Indian races, kingdoms and places, never once mentions Bengal; the Aryan Brahmans had not yet reached, in the days when his Code was compiled, the banks of the Ganges nor the plains of Bengal. It was Arjuna who went first to Banga (Bengal) with his sacrificial horse. [Yavanas are mentioned in Rajdharma Anasasanika Parva as part of the tribes peopling it.] (2) In the Ayun a list of the Hindu kings of Bengal is given. Though the date of the first king who reigned over Banga cannot be ascertained, owing to the great gaps between the various dynasties; it is yet known that Bengal ceased to be an independent Hindu kingdom from 1203 after Christ. Now if, disregarding these gaps, which are wide and many, we make up the sum of only those chronological periods of the reign of the several dynasties that are preserved by history, we find the following:-- 24 Kshatriya families of kings reigned for a period of 2,418 years 9 Kaista kings " " " " 250 " 11 Of the Adisur families " " " 714 " 10 Of the Bhopal family " " " 689 " 10 Of the Pala dynasty (from 855 to 1040 A.D.) " " 185 " 10 The Vaidya Rajahs reigned for a period of " " 137 " -------- Years . . . . 4,393 " If we deduct from this sum 1,203, we have 3,190 years B.C. of successive reigns. If it can be shown on the unimpeachable evidence of the Sanskrit texts that some of the reigns happened simultaneously, and the line cannot therefore be shown as successive (as was already tried), well and good. Against an arbitrary chronology set up with a predetermined purpose and theory in view, there will remain but little to be said. But if this attempt at reconciliation of figures and the surrounding circumstances are maintained simply upon "critical, internal evidence," then, in the presence of these 3,190 years of an unbroken line of powerful and mighty Hindu kings, the Orientalists will have to show a very good reason why the authors of the Code of Manu seem entirely ignorant even of the existence of Bengal--if its date has to be accepted as not earlier than 1280 B.C.! A scientific rule which is good enough to apply to the case of Panini ought to be valid in other chronological speculations. Or, perhaps, this is one of those poor rules which will not "work both ways?" --A Chela THEOSOPHICAL What is Theosophy? According to lexicographers, the term theosophia is composed of two Greek words--theos "god," and sophas "wise." So far, correct. But the explanations that follow are far from giving a clear idea of Theosophy. Webster defines it most originally as "a supposed intercourse with God and superior spirits, and consequent attainment of superhuman knowledge by physical processes, as by the theurgic operations of some ancient Platonists, or by the chemical processes of the German fire-philosophers." This, to say the least, is a poor and flippant explanation. To attribute such ideas to men like Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, shows either intentional misrepresentation, or ignorance of the philosophy and motives of the greatest geniuses of the later Alexandrian School. To impute to those, whom their contemporaries as well as posterity styled "theodidaktoi," god-taught, a purpose to develop their psychological, spiritual perceptions by "physical processes," is to describe them as materialists. As to the concluding fling at the fire-philosophers, it rebounds from them upon some of the most eminent leaders of modern science; those in whose mouths the Rev. James Martineau places the following boast: "Matter is all we want; give us atoms alone, and we will explain the universe." Vaughan offers a far better, more philosophical definition. "A Theosophist," he says, "is one who gives you a theory of God or the works of God, which has not revelation, but inspiration of his own for its basis." In this view every great thinker and philosopher, especially every founder of a new religion, school of philosophy, or sect, is necessarily a Theosophist. Hence, Theosophy and Theosophists have existed ever since the first glimmering of nascent thought made man seek instinctively for the means of expressing his own independent opinions. There were Theosophists before the Christian era, notwithstanding that the Christian writers ascribe the development of the Eclectic Theosophical system to the early part of the third century of their era. Diogenes Laertius traces Theosophy to an epoch antedating the dynasty of the Ptolemies; and names as its founder an Egyptian Hierophant called Pot-Amun, the name being Coptic, and signifying a priest consecrated to Amun, the god of Wisdom. But history shows its revival by Ammonius Saccas, the founder of the Neo-Platonic School. He and his disciples called themselves "Philaletheians"--lovers of the truth; while others termed them the "Analogists," on account of their method of interpreting all sacred legends, symbolical myths, and mysteries, by a rule of analogy or correspondence so that events which had occurred in the external world were regarded as expressing operations and experiences of the human soul. It was the aim and purpose of Ammonius to reconcile all sects, peoples, and nations under one common faith--a belief in one Supreme, Eternal, Unknown, and Unnamed Power, governing the universe by immutable and eternal laws. His object was to prove a primitive system of Theosophy, which, at the beginning, was essentially alike in all countries: to induce all men to lay aside their strifes and quarrels, and unite in purpose and thought as the children of one common mother; to purify the ancient religions, by degrees corrupted and obscured, from all dross of human element, by uniting and expounding them upon pure philosophical principles. Hence, the Buddhistic, Vedantic and Magian, or Zoroastrian systems were taught in the Eclectic Theosophical School along with all the philosophies of Greece. Hence also, that pre-eminently Buddhistic and Indian feature among the ancient Theosophists of Alexandria, of due reverence for parents and aged persons, a fraternal affection for the whole human race, and a compassionate feeling for even the dumb animals. While seeking to establish a system of moral discipline which enforced upon people the duty to live according to the laws of their respective countries, to exalt their minds by the research and contemplation of the one Absolute Truth; his chief object, in order, as he believed, to achieve all others, was to extract from the various religious teachings, as from a many-chorded instrument, one full and harmonious melody, which would find response in every truth-loving heart. Theosophy is, then, the archaic Wisdom-Religion, the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization. This "Wisdom" all the old writings show us as an emanation of the Divine Principle; and the clear comprehension of it is typified in such names as the Indian Buddh, the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of Greece; in the appellations, also, of some goddesses--Metis, Neitha, Athena, the Gnostic Sophia; and, finally, the Vedas, from the word "to know." Under this designation, all the ancient philosophers of the East and West, the Hierophants of old Egypt, the Rishis of Aryavart, the Theodidaktoi of Greece, included all knowledge of things occult and essentially divine. The Mercavah of the Hebrew Rabbis, the secular and popular series, were thus designated as only the vehicle, the outward shell, which contained the higher esoteric knowledges. The Magi of Zoroaster received instruction and were initiated in the caves and secret lodges of Bactria; the Egyptian and Grecian hierophants had their apporiheta, or secret discourses, during which the Mysta became an Epopta--a Seer. The central idea of the Eclectic Theosophy was that of a single Supreme Essence, Unknown and Unknowable; for "how could one know the knower?" as inquires Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Their system was characterized by three distinct features, the theory of the above-named Essence: the doctrine of the human soul; an emanation from the latter, hence of the same nature; and its theurgy. It is this last science which has led the Neo-Platonists to be so misrepresented in our era of materialistic science. Theurgy being essentially the art of applying the divine powers of man to the subordination of the blind forces of Nature, its votaries were first decisively termed magicians--a corruption of the word "Magh," signifying a wise or learned man. Sceptics of a century ago would have been as wide of the mark if they had laughed at the idea of a phonograph or telegraph. The ridiculed and the "infidels" of one generation generally become the wise men and saints of the next. As regards the Divine Essence and the nature of the soul and spirit, modern Theosophy believes now as ancient Theosophy did. The popular Dev of the Aryan nations was identical with the Iao of the Chaldeans, and even with the Jupiter of the less learned and philosophical among the Romans; and it was just as identical with the Jahve of the Samaritans, the Tiu or "Tiusco" of the Northmen, the Duw of the Britons, and the Zeus of the Thracians. As to the Absolute Essence, the One and All, whether we accept the Greek Pythagorean, the Chaldean Kabalistic, or the Aryan philosophy in regard to it, it will all lead to one and the same result. The Primeval Monad of the Pythagorean system, which retires into darkness and is itself Darkness (for human intellect), was made the basis of all things; and we can find the idea in all its integrity in the philosophical systems of Leibnitz and Spinoza. Therefore, whether a Theosophist agrees with the Kabala which, speaking of En-Soph, propounds the query; "Who, then, can comprehend It, since It is formless, and non-existent?" or, remembering that magnificent hymn from the Rig Veda (Hymn 129, Book x.), inquires: "Who knows from whence this great creation sprang? Whether his will created or was mute. He knows it--or perchance even He knows not." Or, again, he accepts the Vedantic conception of Brahma, who, in the Upanishads, is represented as "without life, without mind, pure," unconscious, for Brahma is "Absolute Consciousness." Or, even finally, siding with the Svabhavikas of Nepaul, maintains that nothing exists but "Svabhavat" (substance or nature) which exists by itself without any creator--he is the true follower of pure and absolute Theosophy. That Theosophy which prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up the labours of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the One Substance--the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom--incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed by any ancient or modern religious philosophy, with the exception of Judaism, including Christianity and Mohammedanism. Every Theosophist, then, holding to a theory of the Deity "which has not revelation but an inspiration of his own for its basis," may accept any of the above definitions or belong to any of these religions, and yet remain strictly within the boundaries of Theosophy. For the latter is belief in the Deity as the ALL, the source of all existence, the infinite that cannot be either comprehended or known, the universe alone revealing It, or, as some prefer it, Him, thus giving a sex to that, to anthropomorphize which is blasphemy. True Theosophy shrinks from brutal materialization; it prefers believing that, from eternity retired within itself, the Spirit of the Deity neither wills nor creates; but from the infinite effulgence everywhere going forth from the Great Centre, that which produces all visible and invisible things is but a ray containing in itself the generative and conceptive power, which, in its turn, produces that which the Greeks called Macrocosm, the Kabalists Tikkun or Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, and the Aryans Purusha, the manifested Brahm, or the Divine Male. Theosophy believes also in the Anastasis, or continued existence, and in transmigration (evolution) or a series of changes of the personal ego, which can be defended and explained on strict philosophical principles by making a distinction between Paramatma (transcendental, supreme spirit) and Jivatma (individual spirit) of the Vedantins. To fully define Theosophy, we must consider it under all its aspects. The interior world has not been hidden from all by impenetrable darkness. By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia, or God-knowledge, which carries the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled, in every age and every country, to perceive things in the interior or invisible world. Hence, the "Samadhi," or Dhyan Yog Samadhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the "Daimonlonphoti," or spiritual illumination of the Neo-Platonists; the "sidereal confabulation of soul," of the Rosicrucians or Fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists, are identical in nature, though various as to manifestation. The search after man's diviner "self," so often and so erroneously interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic; and belief in its possibility seems to have been coeval with the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name. Thus Plato and Plotinus call "Noetic work" that which the Yogi and the Shrotriya term Vidya. "By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty--that is, to the Vision of God. This is the epopteia," said the Greeks. "To unite one's soul to the Universal Soul," says Porphyry, "requires but a perfectly pure mind. Through self contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight." And Swami Dayanund Saraswati, who has read neither Porphyry nor other Greek authors, but who is a thorough Vedic scholar, says in his "Veda Bhashya" (opasna prakaru ank. 9)--"To obtain Diksha (highest initiation) and Yog, one has to practise according to the rules..... The soul in the human body can perform the greatest wonders by knowing the Universal Spirit (or God) and acquainting itself with the properties and qualities (occult) of all the things in the universe. A human being (a Dikshit or initiate) can thus acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great distances." Finally, Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly great naturalist, says, with brave candour: "It is spirit that alone feels, and perceives, and thinks, that acquires knowledge, and reasons and aspires..... There not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted that the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of sense, or can, perhaps, wholly or partially quit the body for a time and return to it again; the spirit communicates with spirit easier than with matter." We can now see how, after thousands of years have intervened between the age of the Gymnosophists* and our own highly civilized era, notwithstanding, or, perhaps, just because of such an enlightenment which pours its radiant light upon the psychological as well as upon the physical realms of Nature, over twenty millions of people today believe, under different form, in those same spiritual powers that were believed in by the Yogis and the Pythagoreans, nearly 3,000 years ago. -------- * The reality of the Yog-power was affirmed by many Greek and Roman writers, who call the Yogis Indian Gymnosophists--by Strabo, Lucan, Plutarch, Cicero (Tusculum), Pliny (vii. 2), &c. -------- Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving all the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power of acting independently of his body, through the Atman, "self," or "soul;" and the old Greeks went in search of Atmu, the Hidden one, or the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian mysteries; so the spiritualists of today believe in the capacity of the spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those they loved on earth. And all these, Aryan Yogis, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists, affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied spirit--the real self--are not separated from either the Universal Soul or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their qualities, as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no limitation. And that when this difference is once removed--according to the Greeks and Aryans by abstract contemplation, producing the temporary liberation of the imprisoned soul, and according to spiritualists, through mediumship--such a union between embodied and disembodied spirits becomes possible. Thus was it that Patanjali's Yogis, and, following in their steps, Plotinus, Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists, maintained that in their hours of ecstasy, they had been united to, or rather become as one with, God several times during the course of their lives. This idea, erroneous as it may seem in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical. In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that which is simply ecstatic illumination, under the head of sensuous perception. In the case of the Yogis, who maintained their ability to see Iswara "face to face," this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern logic of the followers of Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy. As to the similar assumption made for their Greek followers, for a long array of Christian ecstatics, and, finally, for the last two claimants to "God-seeing" within these last hundred years--Jacob Bohme and Swedenborg--this pretension would and should have been philosophically and logically questioned, if a few of our great men of science, who are spiritualists, had had more interest in the philosophy than in the mere phenomenalism of spiritualism. The Alexandrian Theosophists were divided into neophytes, initiates and masters, or hierophants; and their rules were copied from the ancient Mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to Herodotus, brought them from India. Ammonius obligated his disciples by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines, except to those who were proved thoroughly worthy and initiated, and who had learned to regard the gods, the angels, and the demons of other peoples, according to the esoteric hyponia, or under-meaning. "The gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude, suppose them to be," says Epicurus. "He is not an atheist who denies the existence of the gods, whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on these gods the opinions of the multitude." In his turn, Aristotle declares that of the "Divine Essence pervading the whole world of Nature, what are styled the gods are simply the first principles." Plotinus, the pupil of the "God-taught" Ammonius, tells us that the secret gnosis or the knowledge of Theosophy, has three degrees-opinion, science, and illumination. "The means or instrument of the first is sense, or perception; of the second, dialectics; of the third, intuition. To the last, reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object known." Theosophy is the exact science of psychology, so to say; it stands in relation to natural, uncultivated mediumship, as the knowledge of a Tyndall stands to that of a school-boy in physics. It develops in man a direct beholding; that which Schelling denominates "a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual;" so that under the influence and knowledge of hyponia man thinks divine thoughts, views all things as they really are, and, finally, "becomes recipient of the Soul of the World," to use one of the finest expressions of Emerson. "I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect," he says in his superb "Essay on the Oversoul." Besides this psychological, or soul state, Theosophy cultivated every branch of sciences and arts. It was thoroughly familiar with what is now commonly known as mesmerism. Practical theurgy or "ceremonial magic," so often resorted to in their exorcisms by the Roman Catholic clergy, was discarded by the Theosophists. It is but Jamblichus alone who, transcending the other Eclectics, added to Theosophy the doctrine of Theurgy. When ignorant of the true meaning of the esoteric divine symbols of Nature, man is apt to miscalculate the powers of his soul, and, instead of communing spiritually and mentally with the higher celestial beings, the good spirits (the gods of the theurgists of the Platonic school), he will unconsciously call forth the evil, dark powers which lurk around humanity, the undying, grim creations of human crimes and vices, and thus fall from theurgia (white magic) into goetia (or black magic, sorcery). Yet, neither white nor black magic are what popular superstition understands by the terms. The possibility of "raising spirits," according to the key of Solomon, is the height of superstition and ignorance. Purity of deed and thought can alone raise us to an intercourse "with the gods" and attain for us the goal we desire. Alchemy, believed by so many to have been a spiritual philosophy as well as a physical science, belonged to the teachings of the Theosophical School. It is a noticeable fact that neither Zoroaster, Buddha, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Socrates, nor Ammonius Saccas, committed anything to writing. The reason for it is obvious. Theosophy is a double-edged weapon and unfit for the ignorant or the selfish. Like every ancient philosophy it has its votaries among the moderns; but, until late in our own days, its disciples were few in numbers, and of the most various sects and opinions. "Entirely speculative, and founding no schools, they have still exercised a silent influence upon philosophy; and no doubt, when the time arrives, many ideas thus silently propounded may yet give new directions to human thought," remarks Mr. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, himself a mystic and a Theosophist, in his large and valuable work, "The Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia" (articles "Theosophical Society of New York," and "Theosophy," p. 731).* Since the days of the fire-philosophers, they had never formed themselves into societies, for, tracked like wild beasts by the Christian clergy, to be known as a Theosophist often amounted, hardly a century ago, to a death-warrant. ---------- * "The Royal Masonic Cycloptedia of History, Rites, Symbolism, and Biography." Edited by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie IX. (Cryptonymus) Hon. Member of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge, No. 2, Scotland. New York J. W. Bouton, 706, Broadway. 1877. -------- The statistics show that, during a period of 150 years, no less than 90,000 men and women were burned in Europe for alleged witchcraft. In Great Britain only, from A.D. 1640 to 1660, but twenty years, 3,000 persons were put to death for compact with the "Devil." It was but late in the present century--in 1875--that some progressed mystics and spiritualists, unsatisfied with the theories and explanations of Spiritualism started by its votaries, and finding that they were far from covering the whole ground of the wide range of phenomena, formed at New York, America, an association which is now widely known as the Theosophical Society. (--H.P. Blavatsky) How a "Chela" Found his "Guru" [Being Extracts from a private letter to Damodar K. Mavalankar, Joint Recording Secretary of the Theosophical Society.] ....When we met last at Bombay I told you what had happened to me at Tinnevelly. My health having been disturbed by official work and worry, I applied for leave on medical certificate and it was duly granted. One day in September last, while I was reading in my room, I was ordered by the audible voice of my blessed Guru, M---Maharsi, to leave all and proceed immediately to Bombay, whence I was to go in search of Madame Blavatsky wherever I could find her and follow her wherever she went. Without losing a moment, I closed up all my affairs and left the station. For the tones of that voice are to me the divinest sound in Nature, its commands imperative. I traveled in my ascetic robes. Arrived at Bombay, I found Madame Blavatsky gone, and learned through you that she had left a few days before; that she was very ill; and that, beyond the fact that she had left the place very suddenly with a Chela, you knew nothing of her whereabouts. And now, I must tell you what happened to me after I had left you. Really not knowing whither I had best go, I took a through ticket to Calcutta; but, on reaching Allahabad, I heard the same well-known voice directing me to go to Berhampore. At Azimgunge, in the train, I met, most providentially I may say, with some Bengali gentlemen (I did not then know they were also Theosophists, since I had never seen any of them), who were also in search of Madame Blavatsky. Some had traced her to Dinapore, but lost her track and went back to Berhampore. They knew, they said, she was going to Tibet and wanted to throw themselves at the feet of the Mahatmas to permit them to accompany her. At last, as I was told, they received from her a note, permitting them to come if they so desired it, but saying that she herself was prohibited from going to Tibet just now. She was to remain, she said, in the vicinity of Darjiling and would see the Mahatma on the Sikkhim Territory, where they would not be allowed to follow her .... Brother Nobin K. Bannerji, the President of the Adhi Bhoutic Bhratru Theosophical Society, would not tell me where Madame Blavatsky was, or perhaps did not then know himself. Yet he and others had risked all in the hope of seeing the Mahatmas. On the 23rd, at last he brought me from Calcutta to Chandernagore, where I found Madame Blavatsky, ready to start by train in five minutes. A tall, dark-looking hairy Chela (not Chunder Cusho), but a Tibetan I suppose by his dress, whom I met after I had crossed the river Hugli with her in a boat, told me that I had come too late, that Madame Blavatsky had already seen the Mahatmas and that he had brought her back. He would not listen to my supplications to take me with him, saying he had no other orders than what he had already executed--namely, to take her about twenty-five miles beyond a certain place he named to me, and that he was now going to see her safe to the station and return. The Bengali brother Theosophists had also traced and followed her, arriving at the station half an hour later. They crossed the river from Chandernagore to a small railway station on the opposite side. When the train arrived, she got into the carriage, upon entering which I found the Chela! And, before even her own things could be placed in the van, the train, against all regulations and before the bell was rung, started off, leaving the Bengali gentlemen and her servant behind, only one of them and the wife and daughter of another--all Theosophists and candidates for Chelaship--having had time to get in. I myself had barely the time to jump into the last carriage. All her things, with the exception of her box containing Theosophical correspondence, were left behind with her servant. Yet, even the persons that went by the same train with her did not reach Darjiling. Babu Nobin Banerjee, with the servant, arrived five days later; and those who had time to take their seats, were left five or six stations behind, owing to another unforeseen accident (?), reaching Darjiling also a few days later. It required no great stretch of imagination to conclude that Madame Blavatsky was, perhaps, being again taken to the Mahatmas, who, for some good reasons best known to them, did not want us to be following and watching her. Two of the Mahatmas, I had learned for a certainty, were in the neighbourhood of British territory; and one of them was seen and recognized, by a person I need not name here, as a high Chutukla of Tibet. The first days of her arrival Madame Blavatsky was living at the house of a Bengali gentleman, a Theosophist, refusing to see any one, and preparing, as I thought, to go again somewhere on the borders of Tibet. To all our importunities we could get only this answer from her: that we had no business to stick to and follow her, that she did not want us, and that she had no right to disturb the Mahatmas with all sorts of questions that concerned only the questioners, for they knew their own business best. In despair, I determined, come what might, to cross the frontier, which is about a dozen miles from here, and find the Mahatmas or--DIE. I never stopped to think that what I was going to undertake would be regarded as the rash act of a lunatic. I had no permission, no "pass" from the Sikkhim Rajah, and was yet decided to penetrate into the heart of a semi-independent State where, if anything happened, the Anglo-Indian officials would not--if even they could--protect me, since I should have crossed over without their permission. But I never even gave that a thought, but was bent upon one engrossing idea--to find and see my Guru. Without breathing a word of my intentions to any one, one morning, namely, October 5, I set out in search of the Mahatma. I had an umbrella and a pilgrim's staff for sole weapons, with a few rupees in my purse. I wore the yellow garb and cap. Whenever I was tired on the road, my costume easily procured for me for a small sum a pony to ride. The same afternoon I reached the banks of the Rungit River, which forms the boundary between British and Sikkhimese territories. I tried to cross it by the aerial suspension bridge constructed of canes, but it swayed to and fro to such an extent that I, who have never known in my life what hardship was, could not stand it. I crossed the river by the ferry-boat, and this even not without much danger and difficulty. That whole afternoon I traveled on foot, penetrating further and further into the heart of Sikkhim, along a narrow footpath. I cannot now say how many miles I traveled before dusk, but I am sure it was not less than twenty or twenty-five miles. Throughout, I saw nothing but impenetrable jungles and forests on all sides of me, relieved at very long intervals by solitary huts belonging to the mountain population. At dusk I began to search around me for a place to rest in at night. I met on the road, in the afternoon, a leopard and a wild cat; and I am astonished now to think how I should have felt no fear then nor tried to run away. Throughout, some secret influence supported me. Fear or anxiety never once entered my mind. Perhaps in my heart there was room for no other feeling but an intense anxiety to find my Guru. When it was just getting dark, I espied a solitary hut a few yards from the roadside. To it I directed my steps in the hope of finding a lodging. The rude door was locked. The cabin was untenanted at the time. I examined it on all sides and found an aperture on the western side. It was small indeed, but sufficient for me to jump through. It had a small shutter and a wooden bolt. By a strange coincidence of circumstances the hillman had forgotten to fasten it on the inside when he locked the door. Of course, after what has subsequently transpired, I now, through the eye of faith, see the protecting hand of my Guru everywhere around me. Upon getting inside I found the room communicated, by a small doorway, with another apartment, the two occupying the whole space of this sylvan mansion. I laid down, concentrating every thought upon my Guru as usual, and soon fell into a profound sleep. Before I went to rest, I had secured the door of the other room and the single window. It may have been between ten and eleven, or perhaps a little later, that I awoke and heard sounds of footsteps in the adjoining room. I could plainly distinguish two or three people talking together in a dialect unknown to me. Now, I cannot recall the same without a shudder. At any moment they might have entered from the other room and murdered me for my money. Had they mistaken me for a burglar the same fate awaited me. These and similar thoughts crowded into my brain in an inconceivably short period. But my heart did not palpitate with fear, nor did I for one moment think of the possibly tragical chances of the moment. I know not what secret influence held me fast, but nothing could put me out or make me fear; I was perfectly calm. Although I lay awake staring into the darkness for upwards of two hours, and even paced the room softly and slowly without making any noise, to see if I could make my escape, in case of need, back to the forest by the same way I had effected my entrance into the hut--no fear, I repeat, or any such feeling ever entered my heart. I recomposed myself to rest. After a sound sleep, undisturbed by any dream, I awoke at daybreak. Then I hastily put on my boots, and cautiously got out of the hut through the same window. I could hear the snoring of the owners of the hut in the other room. But I lost no time, and gained the path to Sikkhim (the city) and held on my way with unflagging zeal. From the inmost recesses of my heart I thanked my revered Guru for the protection he had vouchsafed me during the night. What prevented the owners of the hut from penetrating to the second room? What kept me in the same serene and calm spirit, as if I were in a room of my own house? What could possibly make me sleep so soundly under such circumstances,--enormous, dark forests on all sides abounding in wild beasts, and a party of cut-throats--as most of the Sikkhimese are said to be--in the next room, with an easy and rude door between them and me? When it became quite light, I wended my way on through hills and dales. Riding or walking, the journey was not a pleasant one for any man not as deeply engrossed in thought as I was then myself, and quite oblivious to anything affecting the body. I have cultivated the power of mental concentration to such a degree of late that, on many an occasion, I have been able to make myself quite unconscious of anything around me when my mind was wholly bent upon the one object of my life, as several of my friends will testify; but never to such an extent as in this instance. It was, I think, between eight and nine A.M. I was following the road to the town of Sikkhim, whence, I was assured by the people I met on the road, I could cross over to Tibet easily in my pilgrim's garb, when I suddenly saw a solitary horseman galloping towards me from the opposite direction. From his tall stature and skill in horsemanship, I thought he was some military officer of the Sikkhim Rajah. Now, I thought, I am caught! He will ask me for my pass and what business I have in the independent territory of Sikkhim, and, perhaps, have me arrested and sent back, if not worse. But, as he approached me, he reined up. I looked at and recognized him instantly.... I was in the awful presence of him, of the same Mahatma, my own revered Guru, whom I had seen before in his astral body on the balcony of the Theosophical Headquarters. It was he, the "Himalayan Brother" of the ever-memorable night of December last, who had so kindly dropped a letter in answer to one I had given but an hour or so before in a sealed envelope to Madame Blavatsky, whom I had never lost sight of for one moment during the interval. The very same instant saw me prostrated on the ground at his feet. I arose at his command, and, leisurely looking into his face, forgot myself entirely in the contemplation of the image I knew so well, having seen his portrait (the one in Colonel Olcott's possession) times out of number. I knew not what to say: joy and reverence tied my tongue. The majesty of his countenance, which seemed to me to be the impersonation of power and thought, held me rapt in awe. I was at last face to face with "the Mahatma of the Himavat," and he was no myth, no "creation of the imagination of a medium," as some sceptics had suggested. It was no dream of the night; it was between nine and ten o'clock of the forenoon. There was the sun shining and silently witnessing the scene from above. I see him before me in flesh and blood, and he speaks to me in accents of kindness and gentleness. What more could I want? My excess of happiness made me dumb. Nor was it until some time had elapsed that I was able to utter a few words, encouraged by his gentle tone and speech. His complexion is not as fair as that of Mahatma Koothoomi; but never have I seen a countenance so handsome, a stature so tall and so majestic. As in his portrait, he wears a short black beard, and long black hair hanging down to his breast; only his dress was different: Instead of a white, loose robe he wore a yellow mantle lined with fur, and on his head, instead of the turban, a yellow Tibetan felt cap, as I have seen some Bhootanese wear in this country. When the first moments of rapture and surprise were over, and I calmly comprehended the situation, I had a long talk with him. He told me to go no further, for I should come to grief. He said I should wait patiently if I wanted to become an accepted Chela; that many were those who offered themselves as candidates, but that only a very few were found worthy; none were rejected, but all of them tried, and most found to fail signally, as for example---and---. Some, instead of being accepted and pledged this year, were now thrown off for a year. The Mahatma, I found, speaks very little English--or at least it so seemed to me--and spoke to me in my mother-tongue--Tamil. He told me that if the Chohan permitted Madame Blavatsky to visit Parijong next year, then I could come with her. The Bengali Theosophists who followed the "Upasika" (Madame Blavatsky) would see that she was right in trying to dissuade them from following her now. I asked the blessed Mahatma whether I could tell what I saw and heard to others. He replied in the affirmative, and that moreover I would do well to write to you and describe all. I must impress upon your mind the whole situation, and ask you to keep well in view that what I saw was not the mere "appearance" only, the astral body of the Mahatma, as we saw him at Bombay, but the living man, in his own physical body. He was pleased to say when I offered my farewell namaskarams (prostration) that he approached the British territory to see the Upasika. Before he left me, two more men came on horseback, his attendants I suppose, probably Chelas, for they were dressed like lama-gylungs, and both, like himself, with long hair streaming down their backs. They followed the Mahatma, when he left, at a gentle trot. For over an hour I stood gazing at the place that he had just quitted, and then I slowly retraced my steps. Now it was that I found for the first time that my long boots had pinched my leg in several places, that I had eaten nothing since the day before, and that I was too weak to walk further. My whole body was aching in every limb. At a little distance I saw petty traders with country ponies, carrying burdens. I hired one of these animals. In the afternoon I came to the Rungit River and crossed it. A bath in its cool waters revived me. I purchased some fruit in the only bazaar there and ate heartily. I took another horse immediately and reached Darjiling late in the evening. I could neither eat, nor sit, nor stand. Every part of my body was aching. My absence had seemingly alarmed Madame Blavatsky. She scolded me for my rash and mad attempt to try to go to Tibet after that fashion. When I entered the house I found with Madame Blavatsky, Bahu Parbati Churn Roy, Deputy Collector of Settlements and Superintendent of Dearah Survey, and his assistant, Babu Kanty Bhushan Sen, both members of our Society. At their prayer and Madame Blavatsky's command, I recounted all that had happened to me, reserving of course my private conversation with the Mahatma. They were all, to say the least, astounded. After all, she will not go this year to Tibet; for which I am sure she does not care, since she has seen our Masters and thus gained her only object. But we, unfortunate people! we lose our only chance of going and offering our worship to the "Himalayan Brothers," who, I know, will not soon cross over to British territory, if ever, again. And now that I have seen the Mahatma in the flesh, and heard his living voice, let no one dare say to me that the Brothers do not exist. Come now whatever will, death has no fear for me, nor the vengeance of enemies; for what I know, I know! --S. Ramaswamier, F.T.S. The Sages of the Himavat While on my tour with Col. Olcott several phenomena occurred, in his presence as well as in his absence, such as immediate answers to questions in my Master's handwriting, and over his signature, put by a number of our Fellows. These occurrences took place before we reached Lahore, where we expected to meet in the body my Master. There I was visited by him in the body, for three nights consecutively, for about three hours every time, while I myself retained full consciousness, and, in one case, even went to meet him outside the house. To my knowledge there is no case on the Spiritualist records of a medium remaining perfectly conscious, and meeting, by previous arrangement, his spirit-visitor in the compound, re-entering the house with him, offering him a seat, and then holding a long converse with the "disembodied spirit" in a way to give him the impression that he is in personal contact with an embodied entity. Moreover, him whom I saw in person at Lahore was the same I had seen in astral form at the Headquarters of the Theosophical Society, and again, the same whom I had seen in visions and trances at his house, thousands of miles off, which I reached in my astral Ego by his direct help and protection. In those instances, with my psychic powers hardly yet developed, I had always seen him as a rather hazy form, although his features were perfectly distinct and their remembrance was profoundly graven on my soul's eye and memory, while now at Lahore, Jummoo, and elsewhere, the impression was utterly different. In the former cases, when making Pranam (salutation) my hands passed through his form, while on the latter occasions they met solid garments and flesh. Here I saw a living man before me, the original of the portraits in Madame Blavatsky's possession and in Mr. Sinnett's, though far more imposing in his general appearance and bearing. I shall not here dwell upon the fact of his having been corporeally seen by both Col. Olcott and Mr. Brown separately for two nights at Lahore, as they can do so better, each for himself, if they so choose. At Jummoo again, where we proceeded from Lahore, Mr. Brown saw him on the evening of the third day of our arrival there, and from him received a letter in his familiar handwriting, not to speak of his visits to me almost every day. And what happened the next morning almost every one in Jummoo is aware of. The fact is, that I had the good fortune of being sent for, and permitted to visit a sacred Ashrum, where I remained for a few days in the blessed company of several of the Mahatmas of Himavat and their disciples. There I met not only my beloved Gurudeva and Col. Olcott's master, but several others of the fraternity, including one of the highest. I regret the extremely personal nature of my visit to those thrice blessed regions prevents my saying more about it. Suffice it that the place I was permitted to visit is in the Himalayas, not in any fanciful Summer Land, and that I saw him in my own sthula sarira (physical body) and found my Master identical with the form I had seen in the earlier days of my Chelaship. Thus, I saw my beloved Guru not only as a living man, but actually as a young one in comparison with some other Sadhus of the blessed company, only far kinder, and not above a merry remark and conversation at times. Thus on the second day of my arrival, after the meal hour, I was permitted to hold an intercourse for over an hour with my Master. Asked by him smilingly what it was that made me look at him so perplexed, I asked in my turn:--"How is it, Master, that some of the members of our Society have taken into their heads a notion that you were 'an elderly man,' and that they have even seen you clairvoyantly looking an old man past sixty?" To which he pleasantly smiled and said that this latest misconception was due to the reports of a certain Brahmachari, a pupil of a Vedantic Swami in the Punjab,* who had met last year in Tibet the chief of a sect, an elderly Lama, who was his (my Master's) traveling companion at that time. The said Brahmachari, having spoken of the encounter in India, had led several persons to mistake the Lama for himself. As to his being perceived clairvoyantly as an "elderly man," that could never be, he added, as real clairvoyance could lead no one into such mistaken notions; and then he kindly reprimanded me for giving any importance to the age of a Guru, adding that appearances were often false, &c., and explaining other points. -------- * See infra. Rajani Kanta Brahmachai's "Interview with a Mahatma." -------- These are all stern facts, and no third course is open to the reader. What I assert is either true or false. In the former case, no Spiritualistic hypothesis can hold good, and it will have to be admitted that the Himalayan Brothers are living men, and neither disembodied spirits nor creations of the over-heated imagination of fanatics. Of course I am fully aware that many will discredit my account; but I write only for the benefit of those few who know me well enough to see in me neither a hallucinated medium, nor attribute to me any bad motive, and who have ever been true and loyal to their convictions and to the cause they have so nobly espoused. As for the majority who laugh at and ridicule what they have neither the inclination nor the capacity to understand, I hold them in very small account. If these few lines will help to stimulate even one of my brother-Fellows in the Society, or one right-thinking man outside of it, to promote the cause of Truth and Humanity, I shall consider that I have properly performed my duty. --Damodar K. Mavalankar The Himalayan Brothers--Do They Exist? "Ask and it shall be given unto you; knock and it shall be opened," this is an accurate representation of the position of the earnest inquirer as to the existence of the Mahatmas. I know of none who took up this inquiry in right earnest and were not rewarded for their labours with knowledge, certainty. In spite of all this there are plenty of people who carp and cavil but will not take the trouble of proving the thing for themselves. Both by Europeans and a section of our own countrymen--the too Europeanized graduates of Universities--the existence of the Mahatmas is looked upon with incredulity and distrust, to give it no harder name. The position of the Europeans is easily intelligible, for these things are so far removed from their intellectual horizon, and their self-sufficiency is so great, that they are almost impervious to these new ideas. But it is much more difficult to conceive why the people of India, who are born and brought up in an atmosphere redolent with the traditions of these things, should affect such scepticism. It would have been more natural for them, on the other hand, to hail such proofs as those I am now laying before the public with the same satisfaction as an astronomer feels when a new star, whose elements he has calculated, swims within his ken. I myself was a thorough-going disbeliever only two years back. In the first place I had never witnessed any occult phenomena myself, nor did I find any one who had done so in that small ring of our countrymen for whom only I was taught to have any respect--the "educated classes." It was only in the month of October, 1882, that I really devoted any time and attention to this matter, and the result is that I have as little doubt with respect to the existence of the Mahatmas as of mine own. I now know that they exist. But for a long time the proofs that I had received were not all of an objective character. Many things which are very satisfactory proofs to me would not be so to the reader. On the other hand, I have no right to speak of the unimpeachable evidence I now possess. Therefore I must do the best I can with the little I am permitted to give. In the present paper I have brought forward such evidence as would be perfectly satisfactory to all capable of measuring its probative force. The evidence now laid before the public was collected by me during the months of October and November, 1882, and was at the time placed before some of the leading members of the Theosophical Society, Mr. Sinnett among others. The account of Bro. Ramaswamier's interview with his Guru in Sikkhim being then ready for publication, there was no necessity, in their opinion, for the present paper being brought to light. But since an attempt has been made in some quarters to minimize the effect of Mr. Ramaswamier's evidence by calling it most absurdly "the hallucinations of a half-frozen strolling Registrar," I think something might be gained by the publication of perfectly independent testimony of, perhaps, equal, if not greater, value, though of quite a different character. With these words of explanation as to the delay in its publication, I resign this paper to the criticism of our sceptical friends. Let them calmly consider and pronounce upon the evidence of the Tibetan pedlar at Darjiling, supported and strengthened by the independent testimony of the young Brahmachari at Dehradun. Those who were present when the statements of these persons were taken, all occupy very respectable positions in life--some in fact belonging to the front ranks of Hindu Society, and several in no way connected with the Theosophical movement, but, on the contrary, quite unfriendly to it. In those days I again say I was rather sceptical myself. It is only since I collected the following evidence and received more than one proof of the actual existence of my venerated master, Mahatma Koothoomi, whose presence-- quite independently of Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott or any "alleged" Chela--was made evident to me in a variety of ways, that I have given up the folly of doubting any longer. Now I believe no more--I KNOW; and knowing, I would help others to obtain the same knowledge. During my visit to Darjiling I lived in the same house with several Theosophists, all as ardent aspirants for the higher life, and most of them as doubtful with regard to the Himalayan Mahatmas as I was myself at that time. I met at Darjiling persons who claimed to be Chelas of the Himalayan Brothers and to have seen and lived with them for years. They laughed at our perplexity. One of them showed us an admirably executed portrait of a man who appeared to be an eminently holy person, and who, I was told, was the Mahatma Koothoomi (now my revered master), to whom Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World" is dedicated. A few days after my arrival, a Tibetan pedlar of the name of Sundook accidentally came to our house to sell his things. Sundook was for years well-known in Darjiling and the neighbourhood as an itinerant trader in Tibetan knick-knacks, who visited the country every year in the exercise of his profession. He came to the house several times during our stay there, and seemed to us, from his simplicity, dignity of bearing and pleasant manners, to be one of Nature's own gentlemen. No man could discover in him any trait of character even remotely allied to the uncivilized savages, as the Tibetans are held in the estimation of Europeans. He might very well have passed for a trained courtier, only that he was too good to be one. He came to the house while I was there. On the first occasion he was accompanied by a Goorkha youth, named Sundar Lall, an employee in the Darjiling News office, who acted as interpreter. But we soon found out that the peculiar dialect of Hindi which he spoke was intelligible to some of us without any interpreter, and so there was none needed on subsequent occasions. On the first day we put him some general questions about Tibet and the Gelugpa sect, to which he said he belonged, and his answers corroborated the statements of Bogle, Turnour and other travelers. On the second day we asked him if he had heard of any persons in Tibet who possessed extraordinary powers besides the great lamas. He said there were such men; that they were not regular lamas, but far higher than they, and generally lived in the mountains beyond Tchigatze and also near the city of Lhassa. These men, he said, produce many and very wonderful phenomena or "miracles," and some of their Chelas, or Lotoos, as they are called in Tibet, cure the sick by giving them to eat the rice which they crush out of the paddy with their hands, &c. Then one of us had a glorious idea. Without saying one word, the above-mentioned portrait of the Mahatma Koothoomi was shown to him. He looked at it for a few seconds, and then, as though suddenly recognizing it, he made a profound reverence to the portrait, and said it was the likeness of a Chohan (Mahatma) whom he had seen. Then he began rapidly to describe the Mahatma's dress and naked arms; then suiting the action to the word, he took off his outer cloak, and baring his arms to the shoulder, made the nearest approach to the figure in the portrait, in the adjustment of his dress. He said he had seen the Mahatma in question accompanied by a numerous body of Gylungs, about that time of the previous year (beginning of October 1881) at a place called Giansi, two days' journey southward of Tchigatze, whither the narrator dad gone to make purchases for his trade. On being asked the name of the Mahatma, he said to our unbounded surprise, "They are called Koothum-pa." Being cross-examined and asked what he meant by "they," and whether he was naming one man or many, he replied that the Koothum-pas were many, but there was only one man or chief over them of that name; the disciples being always called after the names of their guru. Hence the name of the latter being Koot-hum, that of his disciples was "Koot-hum-pa." Light was shed upon this explanation by a Tibetan dictionary, where we found that the word "pa" means "man;" "Bod-pa" is a "man of Bod or Thibet," &c. Similarly Koothum-pa means man or disciple of Koothoom or Koothoomi. At Giansi, the pedlar said, the richest merchant of the place went to the Mahatma, who had stopped to rest in the midst of an extensive field, and asked him to bless him by coming to his house. The Mahatma replied, he was better where he was, as he had to bless the whole world, and not any particular man. The people, and among them our friend Sundook, took their offerings to the Mahatma, but he ordered them to be distributed among the poor. Sundook was exhorted by the Mahatma to pursue his trade in such a way as to injure no one, and warned that such was the only right way to prosperity. On being told that people in India refused to believe that there were such men as the Brothers in Tibet, Sundook offered to take any voluntary witness to that country, and convince us, through him, as to the genuineness of their existence, and remarked that if there were no such men in Tibet, he would like to know where they were to be found. It being suggested to him that some people refused to believe that such men existed at all, he got very angry. Tucking up the sleeve of his coat and shirt, and disclosing a strong muscular arm, he declared that he would fight any man who would suggest that he had said anything but the truth. On being shown a peculiar rosary of beads belonging to Madame Blavatsky, the pedlar said that such things could only be got by those to whom the Tesshu Lama presented them, as they could be got for no amount of money elsewhere. When the Chela who was with us put on his sleeveless coat and asked him whether he recognized the latter's profession by his dress, the pedlar answered that he was a Gylung and then bowing down to him took the whole thing as a matter of course. The witnesses in this case were Babu Nobin Krishna Bannerji, deputy magistrate, Berhampore, M.R. Ry. Ramaswamiyer Avergal, district registrar, Madura (Madras), the Goorkha gentleman spoken of before, all the family of the first-named gentleman, and the writer. Now for the other piece of corroborative evidence. This time it came most accidentally into my possession. A young Bengali Brahmachari, who had only a short time previous to our meeting returned from Tibet and who was residing then at Dehradun, in the North-Western Provinces of India, at the house of my grandfather-in-law, the venerable Babu Devendra Nath Tagore of the Brahmo Samaj, gave most unexpectedly, in the presence of a number of respectable witnesses, the following account:-- On the 15th of the Bengali month of Asar last (1882). being the 12th day of the waxing moon, he met some Tibetans, called the Koothoompas, and their guru in a field near Taklakhar, a place about a day's journey from the Lake of Manasarawara. The guru and most of his disciples, who were called gylungs, wore sleeveless coats over under-garments of red. The complexion of the guru was very fair, and his hair, which was not parted but combed back, streamed down his shoulders. When the Brahmachani first saw the Mahatma he was reading in a book, which the Brahmachari was informed by one of the gylungs was the Rig Veda. The guru saluted him, and asked him where he was coming from. On finding the latter had not had anything to eat, the guru commanded that he should be given some ground gram (Sattoo) and tea. As the Brahmachari could not get any fire to cook food with, the guru asked for, and kindled a cake of dry cow-dung--the fuel used in that country as well as in this--by simply blowing upon it, and gave it to our Brahmachari. The latter assured us that he had often witnessed the same phenomenon, produced by another guru or chohan, as they are called in Tibet, at Gauri, a place about a day's journey from the cave of Tarchin, on the northern side of Mount Kailas. The keeper of a flock, who was suffering from rheumatic fever came to the guru, who gave him a few grains of rice, crushed out of paddy, which the guru had in his hand, and the sick man was cured then and there. Before he parted company with the Koothumpas and their guru, the Brahmachari found that they were going to attend a festival held on the banks of the Lake of Manasarawara, and that thence they intended to proceed to the Kailas mountains. The above statement was on several occasions repeated by the Brahmachari in the presence (among others) of Babu Dwijender Nath Tagore of Jorasanko, Calcutta; Babu Cally Mohan Ghose of the Trigonometrical Surcey of India, Dehradun; Babu Cally Cumar Chatterij of the same place; Babu Gopi Mohan Ghosh of Dacca; Babu Priya Nath Sastri, clerk to Babu Devender Nath Tagore, and the writer. Comments would here seem almost superfluous, and the facts might very well have been left to speak for themselves to a fair and intelligent jury. But the averseness of people to enlarge their field of experience and the wilful misrepresentation of designing persons know no bounds. The nature of the evidence here adduced is of an unexceptional character. Both witnesses were met quite accidentally. Even if it be granted, which we certainly do not for a moment grant, that the Tibetan pedlar, Sundook, had been interviewed by some interested person, and induced to tell an untruth, what can be conceived to have been the motive of the Brahmachari, one belonging to a religious body noted for their truthfulness, and having no idea as to the interest the writer took in such things, in inventing a romance, and how could he make it fit exactly with the statements of the Tibetan pedlar at the other end of the country? Uneducated persons are no doubt liable to deceive themselves in many matters, but these statements dealt only with such disunited facts as fell within the range of the narrator's eyes and ears, and had nothing to do with his judgment or opinion. Thus, when the pedlar's statement is coupled with that of the Dehradun Brahmachari, there is, indeed, no room left for any doubt as to the truthfulness of either. It may here be mentioned that the statement of the Brahmachari was not the result of a series of leading questions, but formed part of the account he voluntarily gave of his travels during the year, and that he is almost entirely ignorant of the English language, and had, to the best of my knowledge, information and belief, never even so much as heard of the name of Theosophy. Now, if any one refuses to accept the mutually corroborative but independent testimonies of the Tibetan pedlar of Darjiling and the Brahmachari of Dehradun on the ground that they support the genuineness of facts not ordinarily falling within the domain of one's experience, all I can say is that it is the very miracle of folly. It is, on the other hand, most unshakably established upon the evidence of several of his Chelas, that the Mahatma Koothoomi is a living person like any of us, and that moreover he was seen by two persons on two different occasions. This will, it is to be hoped, settle for ever the doubts of those who believe in the genuineness of occult phenomena, but put them down to the agency of "spirits." Mark one circumstance. It may be argued that during the pedlar's stay at Darjiling, Madame Blavatsky was also there, and, who knows, she might have bribed him (!!) into saying what he said. But no such thing can be urged in the case of the Dehradun Brahmachari. He knew neither the pedlar nor Madame Blavatsky, had never heard of Colonel Olcott, having just returned from his prolonged journey, and had no idea that I was a Fellow of the Society. His testimony was entirely voluntary. Some others, who admit that Mahatmas exist, but that there is no proof of their connection with the Theosophical Society, will be pleased to see that there is no a priori impossibility in those great souls taking an interest in such a benevolent Society as ours. Consequently it is a gratuitous insult to a number of self-sacrificing men and women to reject their testimony without a fair hearing. I purposely leave aside all proofs which are already before the public. Each set of proofs is conclusive in itself, and the cumulative effect of all is simply irresistible. --Mohini M. Chatterji Interview with a Mahatma At the time I left home for the Himalayas in search of the Supreme Being, having adopted Brahmacharyashrama (religious mendicancy), I was quite ignorant of the fact that there was any such philosophical sect as the Theosophists existing in India, who believed in the existence of the Mahatmas or "superior persons." This and other facts connected with my journey are perfectly correct as already published, and so need not be repeated or contradicted. Now I beg to give a fuller account of my interview with the Mahatmas. Before and after I met the so-called Mahatma Koothum-pa, I had the good fortune of seeing in person several other Mahatmas of note, a detailed account of whom, I hope, should time allow, to write to you by-and-by. Here I wish to say something about Koothum-pa only. When I was on my way to Almora from Mansarowar and Kailas, one day I had nothing with me to eat. I was quite at a loss how to get on without food. There being no human habitation in that part of the country, I could expect no help, but pray to God, and take my way patiently on. Between Mansarowar and Taklakhal, by the side of a road, I observed a tent pitched and several Sadhus (holy men), called Chohans, sitting outside it who numbered about seventeen in all. As to their dress, &c., what Babu M.M. Chatterji says is quite correct. When I went to them they entertained me very kindly, and saluted me by uttering, "Ram Ram." Returning their salutations, I sat down with them, and they entered upon conversation with me on different subjects, asking me first the place I was coming from and whither I was going. There was a chief of them sitting inside the tent, and engaged in reading a book. I inquired about his name and the book he was reading from, one of his Chelas, who answered me in rather a serious tone, saying that his name was Guru Koothum-pa, and the book he was reading was Rig Veda. Long before, I had been told by some Pundits of Bengal that the Tibetan Lamas were well-acquainted with the Rig Veda. This proved what they had told me. After a short time, when his reading was over, he called me in by one of his Chelas, and I went to him. He, also bidding me "Ram Ram," received me very gently and courteously, and began to talk with me mildly in pure Hindi. He addressed me in words such as follows:--"You should remain here for some time and see the fair at Mansarowar, which is to come off shortly. Here you will have plenty of time and suitable retreats for meditation, &c. I will help you in whatever I can." He spoke as above for some time, and I replied that what he said was right, and that I would gladly have stayed, but there was some reason which prevented me. He understood my object immediately, and then, having given me some private advice as to my spiritual progress, bade me farewell. Before this he had come to know that I was hungry, and so wished me to take some food. He ordered one of his Chelas to supply me with food, which he did immediately. In order to get hot water ready for my ablutions, he prepared fire by blowing into a cow-dung cake, which burst into flames at once. This is a common practice among the Himalayan Lamas. It is also fully explained by M.M. Chatterji, and so need not be repeated. As long as I was there with the said Lama, he never persuaded me to accept Buddhism or any other religion, but only said, "Hinduism is the best religion; you should believe in the Lord Mahadeva--he will do good to you. You are still quite a young man--do not be enticed away by the necromancy of anybody." Having had a conversation with the Mahatma as described above for about three hours, I at last took leave and resumed my journey. I am neither a Theosophist nor a sectarian, but am the worshipper of the only Om. As regards the Mahatma I personally saw, I dare say that he is a great Mahatma. By the fulfilment of certain of his prophecies, I am quite convinced of his excellence. Of all the Himalayan Mahatmas with whom I had an interview, I never met a better Hindi speaker than he. As to his birth-place and the place of his residence, I did not ask him any question. Neither can I say if he is the Mahatma of the Theosophists. As to the age of the Mahatma Koothum-pa, as I told Babu M. M. Chatterji and others, he was an elderly looking man. --Rajani Kant Brahmachari The Secret Doctrine Few experiences lying about the threshhold of occult studies are more perplexing and tormenting than those which have to do with the policy of the Brothers as to what shall, and what shall not, be revealed to the outer world. In fact, it is only by students at the same time tenacious and patient--continuously anxious to get at the truths of occult philosophy, but cool enough to bide their time when obstacles come in the way--that what looks, at first sight, like a grudging and miserly policy in this matter on the part of our illustrious teachers can be endured. Most men persist in judging all situations by the light of their own knowledge and conceptions, and certainly by reference to standards of right and wrong with which modern civilization is familiar a pungent indictment may be framed against the holders of philosophical truth. They are regarded by their critics as keeping guard over their intellectual possessions, declaring, "We have won this knowledge with strenuous effort and at the cost of sacrifice and suffering; we will not make a present of it to luxurious idlers who have done nothing to deserve it." Most critics of the Theosophical Society and its publications have fastened on this obvious idea, and have denounced the policy of the Brothers as "selfish" and "unreasonable." It has been argued that, as regards occult powers, the necessity for keeping back all secrets which would enable unconscientious people to do mischief, might be granted, but that no corresponding motives could dictate the reservation of occult philosophical truth. I have lately come to perceive certain considerations on this subject which have generally been overlooked; and it seems desirable to put them forward at once; especially as a very considerable body of occult philosophical teaching is now before the world, and as those who appreciate its value best, will sometimes be inclined to protest all the more emphatically against the tardiness with which it has been served out, and the curious precautions with which its further development is even now surrounded. In a nutshell, the explanation of the timid policy displayed is that the Brothers are fully assured that the disclosure of that actual truth (which constitutes the secret doctrine) about the origin of the World and of Humanity--of the laws which govern their existence, and the destinies to which they are moving on--is calculated to have a very momentous effect on the welfare of mankind. Great results ensue from small beginnings, and the seeds of knowledge now being sown in the world may ultimately bear prodigious harvest. We, who are present merely at the sowing, may not realize the magnitude and importance of the impulse we are concerned in giving, but that impulse will roll on, and a few generations hence will be productive of tremendous consequences one way or the other. For occult philosophy is no shadowy system of speculation like any of the hundred philosophies with which the minds of men have been overwhelmed; it is the positive Truth, and by the time enough of it is let out, it will be seen to be so by thousands of the greatest men who may then be living in the world. What will be the consequence? The first effect on the minds of all who come to understand it, is terribly iconoclastic. It drives out before it everything else in the shape of religious belief. It leaves no room for any conceptions belonging even to the groundwork or foundation of ordinary religious faith. And what becomes then of all rules of right and wrong, of all sanctions for morality? Most assuredly there are rules of right and wrong thrilling through every fibre of occult philosophy really higher than any which commonplace theologies can teach; far more cogent sanctions for morality than can be derived at second-hand from the distorted doctrines of exoteric religions; but a complete transfer of the sanction will be a process involving the greatest possible danger for mankind at the time. Bigots of all denominations will laugh at the idea of such a transfer being seriously considered. The orthodox Christian--confident in the thousand of churches overshadowing all western lands, of the enormous force engaged in the maintenance and propagation of the faith, with the Pope and the Protestant hierarchy in alliance for this broad purpose, with the countless clergy of all sects, and the fiery Salvation Army bringing up the rear--will think that the earth itself is more likely to crumble into ruin than the irresistible authority of Religion to be driven back. They are all counting, however, without the progress of enlightenment. The most absurd religions die hard; but when the intellectual classes definitively reject them, they die, with throes of terrible agony, may be, and, perhaps, like Samson in the Temple, but they cannot permanently outlive a conviction that they are false in the leading minds of the age. Just what has been said of Christianity may be said of Mahomedanism and Brahminism. Little or no risk is run while occult literature aims merely at putting a reasonable construction on perverted tenets--in showing people that truth may lurk behind even the strangest theologic fictions. And the lover of orthodoxy, in either of the cases instanced, may welcome the explanation with complacency. For him also, as for the Christian, the faith which he professes-- sanctioned by what looks like a considerable antiquity to the very limited vision of uninitiated historians, and supported by the attachment of millions grown old in its service and careful to educate their children in the convictions that have served their turn--is founded on a rock which has its base in the foundations of the world. Fragmentary teachings of occult philosophy seem at first to be no more than annotations on the canonical doctrine. They may even embellish it with graceful interpretations of its symbolism, parts of which may have seemed to require apology, when ignorantly taken at the foot of the letter. But this is merely the beginning of the attack. If occult philosophy gets before the world with anything resembling completeness, it will so command the assent of earnest students that for them nothing else of that nature will remain standing. And the earnest students in such eases must multiply. They are multiplying now even, merely on the strength of the little that has been revealed. True, as yet--for some time to come--the study will be, as it were, the whim of a few; but "those who know," know among other things that, give it fair-play, and it must become the subject of enthusiasm with all advanced thinkers. And what is to happen when the world is divided into two camps--the whole forces of intellectuality and culture on the one side, those of ignorance and superstitious fanaticism on the other? With such a war as that impending, the adepts, who will be conscious that they prepared the lists and armed the combatants, will require some better justification for their policy before their own consciences than the reflection that, in the beginning, people accused them of selfishness, and of keeping a miserly guard over their knowledge, and so goaded them with this taunt that they were induced to set the ball rolling. There is no question, be it understood, as to the relative merits of the moral sanctions that are afforded by occult philosophy and those which are distilled from the worn-out materials of existing creeds. If the world could conceivably be shunted at one coup from the one code of morals to the other, the world would be greatly the better for the change. But the change cannot be made all at once, and the transition is most dangerous. On the other hand, it is no less dangerous to take no steps in the direction of that transition. For though existing religions may be a great power--the Pope ruling still over millions of consciences if not over towns and States, the name of the Prophet being still a word to conjure with in war, the forces of Brahmanical custom holding countless millions in willing subjection--in spite of all this, the old religions are sapped and past their prime. They are in process of decay, for they are losing their hold on the educated minority; it is still the case that in all countries the camps of orthodoxy include large numbers of men distinguished by intellect and culture, but one by one their numbers are diminishing. Five-and-twenty years only, in Europe, have made a prodigious change. Books are written now that pass almost as matters of course which would have been impossible no further back than that. No further back, books thrilled society with surprise and excitement, which the intellectual world would now ignore as embodying the feeblest commonplaces. The old creeds, in fact, are slowly losing their hold upon mankind--more slowly in the more deliberately moving East than Europe, but even here by degrees also--and a time will come, whether occult philosophy is given out to take their place or not, when they will no longer afford even such faulty sanctions for moral conduct and right as they have supplied in times gone by. Therefore it is plain that something must be given out to take their place, and hence the determinations of which this movement in which we are engaged is one of the undulations--these very words some of the foremost froth upon the advancing wave. But surely, when something which must be done is yet very dangerous in the doing, the persons who control the operations in progress may be excused for exercising the utmost caution. Readers of Theosophical literature will be aware how bitterly our adept Brothers have been criticized for choosing to take their own time and methods in the task of partially communicating their knowledge to the world. Here in India these criticisms have been indignantly resented by the passionate loyalty to the Mahatmas that is so widely spread among Hindus--resented more by instinct than reason in some cases perhaps, though in others, no doubt, as a consequence of a full appreciation of all that is being now explained, and of other considerations beside. But in Europe such criticisms will have seemed hard to answer. The answer is really embodied, however imperfectly, in the views of the situation now set forth. We ordinary mortals in the world work as men traveling by the light of a lantern in an unknown country. We see but a little way to the right and left, only a little way behind even. But the adepts work as men traveling by daylight, with the further advantage of being able at will to get up in a balloon and survey vast expanses of lake and plain and forest. The choice of time and methods for communicating occult knowledge to the world necessarily includes the choice of intermediary agent. Hence the double set of misconceptions in India and Europe, each adapted to the land of its origin. In India, where knowledge of the Brothers' existence and reverence for their attributes is widely diffused, it is natural that persons who may be chosen for their serviceability rather than for their merits, as the recipients of their direct teaching, should be regarded with a feeling resembling jealousy. In Europe, the difficulty of getting into any sort of relations with the fountain-head of Eastern philosophy is regarded as due to an exasperating exclusiveness on the part of the adepts in that philosophy, which renders it practically worth no man's while to devote himself to the task of soliciting their instruction. But neither feeling is reasonable when considered in the light of the explanations now put forward. The Brothers can consider none but public interests, in the largest sense of the words, in throwing out the first experimental flashes of occult revelation into the world. They can only employ agents on whom they can rely for doing the work as they may wish it done--or, at all events, in no manner which may be widely otherwise. Or they can only protect the task on which they are concerned in another way. They may consent sometimes to a very much more direct mode of instruction than that provided through intermediary agents for the world at large, in the cases of organized societies solemnly pledged to secrecy, for the time being at all events, in regard to the teaching to be conveyed to them. In reference to such societies, the Brothers need not be on the watch to see that the teaching is not worked up for the service of the world in a way they would consider, for any reasons of their own, likely to be injurious to final results or dangerous. Different men will assimilate the philosophy to be unfolded in different ways: for some it will be too iconoclastic altogether, and its further pursuit, after a certain point is reached, unwelcome. Such persons, entering too hastily on the path of exploration, will be able to drop off from the undertaking whenever they like, if thoroughly pledged to secrecy in the first instance, without being a source of embarrassment afterwards, as regards the steady prosecution of the work in hand by other more resolute, or less sensitive, labourers. It may be that in some such societies, if any should be formed in which occult philosophy may be secretly studied, some of the members will be as well fitted as, or better than, any other persons employed elsewhere to put the teachings in shape for publication, but in that case it is to be presumed that special qualifications will eventually make themselves apparent. The meaning and good sense of the restrictions, provisionally imposed meanwhile, will be plain enough to any impartial person on reflection, even though their novelty and strangeness may be a little resented at the first glance. --Lay Chela HISTORICAL The Puranas on the Dynasty of the Moryas and on Koothoomi It is stated in Matsya Puran, chapter cclxxii., that ten Moryas would reign over India, and would be succeeded by the Shoongas, and that Shata Dhanva will be the first of these ten Maureyas (or Moryas). In Vishnu Purana (Book IV. chapter iv.) it is stated that there was in the Soorya dynasty a king called Moru, who through the power of devotion (Yoga) is said to be still living in the village called Katapa, in the Himalayas (vide vol. iii. p. 197, by Wilson), and who, in a future age, will be the restorer of the Kshatriya race, in the Solar dynasty, that is, many thousands of years hence. In another part of the same Purana (Book IV. chapter xxiv.) it is stated that, "upon the cessation of the race of Nanda, the Moryas* will possess the earth, for Kautilya will place Chandragupta on the throne." Col. Tod considers Morya, or Maurya, a corruption of Mori, the name of a Rajput tribe. ------- * The particulars of this legend are recorded in the Atthata katha of the Uttaraviharo priests. ------- The Commentary on the Mahavanso thinks that the princes of the town Mori were thence called Mauryas. Vachaspattya, a Sanskrit Encyclopaedia, places the village of Katapa on the northern side of the Himalayas-- hence in Tibet. The same is stated in chapter xii. (Skanda) of Bhagavat, vol. iii. p. 325. The Vayu Purana seems to declare that Moru will re-establish the Kshatriyas in the nineteenth coming Yuga. In