V. THE FUNDAMENTAL TEACHINGS OF THEOSOPHY.

ON GOD AND PRAYER.

ENQ. Do you believe in God?

THEO. That depends what you mean by the term.

ENQ. I mean the God of the Christians, the Father of Jesus, and the
Creator: the Biblical God of Moses, in short.

THEO. In such a God we do not believe. We reject the idea of a
personal, or an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God, who is
but the gigantic shadow of _man_, and not of man at his best,
either. The God of theology, we say—and prove it—is a bundle of
contradictions and a logical impossibility. Therefore, we will
have nothing to do with him.

ENQ. State your reasons, if you please.

THEO. They are many, and cannot all receive attention. But here are a
few. This God is called by his devotees infinite and absolute, is
he not?

ENQ. I believe he is.

THEO. Then, if infinite—_i.e._, limitless—and especially if absolute,
how can he have a form, and be a creator of anything? Form implies
limitation, and a beginning as well as an end; and, in order
to create, a Being must think and plan. How can the ABSOLUTE
be supposed to think—_i.e._, to have any relation whatever
to that which is limited, finite, and conditioned? This is a
philosophical and a logical absurdity. Even the Hebrew Kabala
rejects such an idea, and therefore makes of the one and the
Absolute Deific Principle an infinite Unity called Ain-Soph.[14]
In order to create, the Creator has to become active; and as
this is impossible for ABSOLUTENESS, the infinite principle had
to be shown becoming the cause of evolution (not creation) in an
indirect way—_i.e._, through the emanation from itself (another
absurdity, due this time to the translators of the Kabala)[15] of
the Sephiroth.

ENQ. How about those Kabalists, who, while being such, still believe in
Jehovah, or the _Tetragrammaton_?

THEO. They are at liberty to believe in what they please, as their
belief or disbelief can hardly affect a self-evident fact.
The Jesuits tell us that two and two are not always four to a
certainty, since it depends on the will of God to make 2 x 2 = 5.
Shall we accept their sophistry for all that?

ENQ. Then you are Atheists?

THEO. Not that we know of, and not unless the epithet of “Atheist” is
to be applied to those who disbelieve in an anthropomorphic God.
We believe in a Universal Divine Principle, the root of ALL, from
which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the
end of the great cycle of Being.

ENQ. This is the old, old claim of Pantheism. If you are Pantheists,
you cannot be Deists; and if you are not Deists, then you have to
answer to the name of Atheists.

THEO. Not necessarily so. The term “Pantheism” is again one of the many
abused terms, whose real and primitive meaning has been distorted
by blind prejudice and a one-sided view of it. If you accept the
Christian etymology of this compound word, and form it of παν,
“all,” and θεος, “god,” and then imagine and teach that this means
that every stone and every tree in Nature is a God or the ONE
God, then, of course, you will be right, and make of Pantheists
fetish-worshippers, in addition to their legitimate name. But you
will hardly be as successful if you etymologise the word Pantheism
esoterically, and as we do.

ENQ. What is, then your definition of it?

THEO. Let me ask you a question in my turn. What do you understand by
Pan or Nature?

ENQ. Nature is, I suppose, the sum total of things existing around us;
the aggregate of causes and effects in the world of matter, the
creation or universe.

THEO. Hence the personified sum and order of known causes and effects;
the total of all finite agencies and forces, as utterly
disconnected from an intelligent Creator or Creators, and
perhaps “conceived of as a single and separate force”—as in your
cyclopædias?

ENQ. Yes, I believe so.

THEO. Well, we neither take into consideration this objective and
material nature, which we call an evanescent illusion, nor do
we mean by παν Nature, in the sense of its accepted derivation
from the Latin _Natura_ (becoming, from _nasci_, to be born).
When we speak of the Deity and make it identical, hence coeval,
with Nature, the eternal and uncreate nature is meant, and not
your aggregate of flitting shadows and finite unrealities. We
leave it to the hymn-makers to call the visible sky or heaven,
God’s Throne, and our earth of mud His footstool. Our DEITY is
neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or
mountain; it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the
invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and
divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution
and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient
creative potentiality.

ENQ. Stop! Omniscience is the prerogative of something that thinks, and
you deny to your Absoluteness the power of thought.

THEO. We deny it to the ABSOLUTE, since thought is something limited
and conditioned. But you evidently forget that in philosophy
absolute unconsciousness is also absolute consciousness, as
otherwise it would not be _absolute_.

ENQ. Then your Absolute thinks?

THEO. No, IT does not; for the simple reason that it is _Absolute
Thought_ itself. Nor does it exist, for the same reason, as it
is absolute existence, and _Be-ness_, not a Being. Read the
superb Kabalistic poem by Solomon Ben Jehudah Gabirol, in the
Kether-Malchut, and you will understand:—“Thou art one, the root
of all numbers, but not as an element of numeration; for unity
admits not of multiplication, change, or form. Thou art one, and
in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost, because
they know it not. Thou art one, and Thy unity is never diminished,
never extended, and cannot be changed. Thou art one, and no
thought of mine can fix for Thee a limit, or define Thee. Thou
ART, but not as one existent, for the understanding and vision of
mortals cannot attain to Thy existence, nor determine for Thee the
where, the how and the why,” etc., etc. In short, our Deity is the
eternal, incessantly _evolving_, not _creating_, builder of the
universe; that _universe itself unfolding_ out of its own essence,
not being _made_. It is a sphere, without circumference, in its
symbolism, which has but one ever-acting attribute embracing all
other existing or thinkable attributes—ITSELF. It is the one law,
giving the impulse to manifested, eternal, and immutable laws,
within that never-manifesting, _because_ absolute LAW, which in
its manifesting periods is _The ever-Becoming_.

ENQ. I once heard one of your members remarking that Universal Deity,
being everywhere, was in vessels of dishonour, as in those of
honour, and, therefore, was present in every atom of my cigar ash!
Is this not rank blasphemy?

THEO. I do not think so, as simple logic can hardly be regarded as
blasphemy. Were we to exclude the Omnipresent Principle from one
single mathematical point of the universe, or from a particle of
matter occupying any conceivable space, could we still regard it
as infinite?


IS IT NECESSARY TO PRAY?

ENQ. Do you believe in prayer, and do you ever pray?

THEO. We do not. We _act_, instead of _talking_.

ENQ. You do not offer prayers even to the Absolute Principle?

THEO. Why should we? Being well-occupied people, we can hardly afford
to lose time in addressing verbal prayers to a pure abstraction.
The Unknowable is capable of relations only in its parts to each
other, but is non-existent as regards any finite relations. The
visible universe depends for its existence and phenomena on its
mutually acting forms and their laws, not on prayer or prayers.

ENQ. Do you not believe at all in the efficacy of prayer?

THEO. Not in prayer taught in so many words and repeated externally, if
by prayer you mean the outward petition to an unknown God as the
addressee, which was inaugurated by the Jews and popularised by
the Pharisees.

ENQ. Is there any other kind of prayer?

THEO. Most decidedly; we call it WILL-PRAYER, and it is rather an
internal command than a petition.

ENQ. To whom, then, do you pray when you do so?

THEO. To “our Father in heaven”—in its esoteric meaning.

ENQ. Is that different from the one given to it in theology?

THEO. Entirely so. An Occultist or a Theosophist addresses his prayer
to _his Father which is in secret_ (read, and try to understand,
ch. vi. v. 6, Matthew), not to an extra-cosmic and therefore
finite God; and that “Father” is in man himself.

ENQ. Then you make of man a God?

THEO. Please say “God” and not _a_ God. In our sense, the inner man is
the only God we can have cognizance of. And how can this be
otherwise? Grant us our postulate that God is a universally
diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from
being soaked through _by_, and _in_, the Deity? We call our
“Father in heaven” that deific essence of which we are cognizant
within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which
has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form
of it in our physical brain or its fancy: “Know ye not that ye
are the temple of God, and that the great spirit of that the
spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?”[16] Yet, let no
man anthropomorphise that essence in us. Let no Theosophist, if
he would hold to divine, not human truth, say that this “God in
secret” listens to, or is distinct from, either finite man or the
infinite essence—for all are one. Nor, as just remarked, that a
prayer is a petition. It is a mystery rather; an occult process
by which finite and conditioned thoughts and desires, unable to
be assimilated by the absolute spirit which is unconditioned, are
translated into spiritual wills and the will; such process being
called “spiritual transmutation.” The intensity of our ardent
aspirations changes prayer into the “philosopher’s stone,” or
that which transmutes lead into pure gold. The only homogeneous
essence, our “will-power” becomes the active or creative force,
producing effects according to our desire.

ENQ. Do you mean to say that prayer is an occult process bringing about
physical results?

THEO. I do. _Will-Power_ becomes a living power. But woe unto those
Occultists and Theosophists, who, instead of crushing out the
desires of the lower personal _ego_ or physical man, and saying,
addressing their _Higher_ Spiritual Ego immersed in Atma-Buddhic
light, “Thy will be done, not mine,” etc., send up waves of
will-power for selfish or unholy purposes! For this is black
magic, abomination, and spiritual sorcery. Unfortunately, all
this is the favorite occupation of our Christian statesmen and
generals, especially when the latter are sending two armies to
murder each other. Both indulge before action in a bit of such
sorcery, by offering respectively prayers to the same God of
Hosts, each entreating his help to cut its enemies’ throats.

ENQ. David prayed to the Lord of Hosts to help him smite the
Philistines and slay the Syrians and the Moabites, and “the Lord
preserved David whithersoever he went.” In that we only follow
what we find in the Bible.

THEO. Of course you do. But since you delight in calling yourselves
Christians, not Israelites or Jews, as far as we know, why do
you not rather follow that which Christ says? And he distinctly
commands you not to follow “them of old times,” or the Mosaic law,
but bids you do as he tells you, and warns those who would kill
by the sword, that they, too, will perish by the sword. Christ
has given you one prayer of which you have made a lip prayer and
a boast, and which none but the _true_ Occultist understands. In
it you say, in your dead-sense meaning: “Forgive us our debts, as
we forgive our debtors,” which you never do. Again, he told you
to _love your enemies_ and do _good to them that hate you_. It is
surely not the “meek prophet of Nazareth” who taught you to pray
to your “Father” to slay, and give you victory over your enemies!
This is why we reject what you call “prayers.”

ENQ. But how do you explain the universal fact that all nations and
peoples have prayed to, and worshipped a God or Gods? Some have
adored and propitiated _devils_ and harmful spirits, but this only
proves the universality of the belief in the efficacy of prayer.

THEO. It is explained by that other fact that prayer has several other
meanings besides that given it by the Christians. It means not
only a pleading or _petition_, but meant, in days of old, far more
an invocation and incantation. The _mantra_, or the rhythmically
chanted prayer of the Hindus, has precisely such a meaning, as the
Brahmins hold themselves higher than the common _devas_ or “Gods.”
A prayer may be an appeal or an incantation for malediction, and
a curse (as in the case of two armies praying simultaneously for
mutual destruction) as much as for blessing. And as the great
majority of people are intensely selfish, and pray only for
themselves, asking to be _given_ their “daily bread” instead of
working for it, and begging God not to lead them “into temptation”
but to deliver them (the memoralists only) from evil, the result
is, that prayer, as now understood, is doubly pernicious: (_a_)
It kills in man self-reliance; (_b_) It develops in him a still
more ferocious selfishness and egotism than he is already endowed
with by nature. I repeat, that we believe in “communion” and
simultaneous action in unison with our “Father in secret”; and
in rare moments of ecstatic bliss, in the mingling of our higher
soul with the universal essence, attracted as it is towards its
origin and centre, a state, called during life _Samadhi_, and
after death, _Nirvana_. We refuse to pray to _created_ finite
beings—_i.e._, gods, saints, angels, etc., because we regard it
as idolatry. We cannot pray to the ABSOLUTE for reasons explained
before; therefore, we try to replace fruitless and useless prayer
by meritorious and good-producing actions.

ENQ. Christians would call it pride and blasphemy. Are they wrong?

THEO. Entirely so. It is they, on the contrary, who show Satanic pride
in their belief that the Absolute or the Infinite, even if there
was such a thing as the possibility of any relation between the
unconditioned and the conditioned—will stoop to listen to every
foolish or egotistical prayer. And it is they again, who virtually
blaspheme, in teaching that an Omniscient and Omnipotent God
needs uttered prayers to know what he has to do! This—understood
esoterically—is corroborated by both Buddha and Jesus. The one
says “seek nought from the helpless Gods—pray not! _but rather
act_; for darkness will not brighten. Ask nought from silence, for
it can neither speak nor hear.” And the other—Jesus—recommends:
“Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name (that of Christos) that will I
do.” Of course, this quotation, if taken in its _literal_ sense,
goes against our argument. But if we accept it esoterically, with
the full knowledge of the meaning of the term, “Christos,” which
to us represents _Atma-Buddhi-Manas_, the “SELF,” it comes to
this: the only God we must recognise and pray to, or rather act
in unison with, is that spirit of God of which our body is the
temple, and in which it dwelleth.


PRAYER KILLS SELF RELIANCE.

ENQ. But did not Christ himself pray and recommend prayer?

THEO. It is so recorded, but those “prayers” are precisely of that kind
of communion just mentioned with one’s “Father in secret.”
Otherwise, and if we identify Jesus with the universal deity,
there would be something too absurdly illogical in the inevitable
conclusion that he, the “very God himself” _prayed to himself_,
and separated the will of that God from his own!

ENQ. One argument more; an argument, moreover, much used by some
Christians. They say, “I feel that I am not able to conquer any
passions and weaknesses in my own strength. But when I pray to
Jesus Christ I feel that he gives me strength and that in his
power I am able to conquer.”

THEO. No wonder. If “Christ Jesus” is God, and one independent and
separate from him who prays, of course everything is, and
_must_ be possible to “a mighty God.” But, then, where’s the
merit, or justice either, of such a conquest? Why should the
pseudo-conqueror be rewarded for something done which has cost
him only prayers? Would you, even a simple mortal man, pay your
labourer a full day’s wage if you did most of his work for him, he
sitting under an apple tree, and praying to you to do so, all the
while? This idea of passing one’s whole life in moral idleness,
and having one’s hardest work and duty done by another—whether God
or man—is most revolting to us, as it is most degrading to human
dignity.

ENQ. Perhaps so, yet it is the idea of trusting in a personal Saviour
to help and strengthen in the battle of life, which is the
fundamental idea of modern Christianity. And there is no doubt
that, subjectively, such belief is efficacious, _i.e._, that those
who believe _do_ feel themselves helped and strengthened.

THEO. Nor is there any more doubt, that some patients of “Christian”
and “Mental Scientists”—the great “_Deniers_”[17]—are also
sometimes cured; nor that hypnotism, and suggestion, psychology,
and even mediumship, will produce such results, as often, if not
oftener. You take into consideration, and string on the thread of
your argument, successes alone. And how about ten times the number
of failures? Surely you will not presume to say that failure is
unknown even with a sufficiency of blind faith, among fanatical
Christians?

ENQ. But how can you explain those cases which are followed by full
success? Where does a Theosophist look to for power to subdue his
passions and selfishness?

THEO. To his Higher Self, the divine spirit, or the God in him, and to
his _Karma_. How long shall we have to repeat over and over again
that the tree is known by its fruit, the nature of the cause by
its effects? You speak of subduing passions, and becoming good
through and with the help of God or Christ. We ask, where do
you find more virtuous, guiltless people, abstaining from sin
and crime, in Christendom or Buddhism—in Christian countries or
in heathen lands? Statistics are there to give the answer and
corroborate our claims. According to the last census in Ceylon and
India, in the comparative table of crimes committed by Christians,
Mussulmen, Hindoos, Eurasians, Buddhists, etc., etc., on two
millions of population taken at random from each, and covering the
misdemeanours of several years, the proportion of crimes committed
by the Christian stands as 15 to 4 as against those committed
by the Buddhist population. (Vide LUCIFER for April, 1888, p.
147, Art. Christian Lectures on Buddhism.) No Orientalist, no
historian of any note, or traveller in Buddhist land, from Bishop
Bigandet and Abbé Huc, to Sir William Hunter and every fair-minded
official, will fail to give the palm of virtue to Buddhists before
Christians. Yet the former (not the true Buddhist Siamese sect,
at all events) do not believe in either God or a future reward,
outside of this earth. They do not pray, neither priests nor
laymen. “Pray!” they would exclaim in wonder, “to whom, or what?”

ENQ. Then they are truly Atheists.

THEO. Most undeniably, but they are also the most virtue-loving and
virtue-keeping men in the whole world. Buddhism says: Respect the
religions of other men and remain true to your own; but Church
Christianity, denouncing all the gods of other nations as devils,
would doom every _non_-Christian to eternal perdition.

ENQ. Does not the Buddhist priesthood do the same?

THEO. Never. They hold too much to the wise precept found in the
DHAMMAPADA to do so, for they know that, “If any man, whether he
be learned or not, consider himself so great as to despise other
men, he is like a blind man holding a candle—blind himself, he
illumines others.”


ON THE SOURCE OF THE HUMAN SOUL.

ENQ. How, then, do you account for man being endowed with a Spirit and
Soul? Whence these?

THEO. From the Universal Soul. Certainly not bestowed by a _personal_
God. Whence the moist element in the jelly-fish? From the Ocean
which surrounds it, in which it lives and breathes and has its
being, and whither it returns when dissolved.

ENQ. So you reject the teaching that Soul is given, or breathed into
man, by God?

THEO. We are obliged to. The “Soul” spoken of in ch. ii. of Genesis
(v. 7) is, as therein stated, the “living Soul” or _Nephesh_
(the _vital_, animal soul) with which God (we say “nature” and
_immutable law_) endows man like every animal, is not at all the
thinking Soul or mind; least of all is it the _immortal Spirit_.

ENQ. Well, let us put it otherwise: is it God who endows man with a
human _rational_ Soul and immortal Spirit?

THEO. Again, in the way you put the question, we must object to it.
Since we believe in no _personal_ God, how can we believe that he
endows man with anything? But granting, for the sake of argument,
a God who takes upon himself the risk of creating a new Soul for
every new-born baby, all that can be said is that such a God
can hardly be regarded as himself endowed with any wisdom or
prevision. Certain other difficulties and the impossibility of
reconciling this with the claims made for the mercy, justice,
equity and omniscience of that God, are so many deadly reefs on
which this theological dogma is daily and hourly broken.

ENQ. What do you mean? What difficulties?

THEO. I am thinking of an unanswerable argument offered once in my
presence by a Cingalese Buddhist priest, a famous preacher, to
a Christian missionary—one in no way ignorant or unprepared for
the public discussion during which it was advanced. It was near
Colombo, and the Missionary had challenged the priest Megattivati
to give his reasons why the Christian God should not be accepted
by the “heathen.” Well, the Missionary came out of that for ever
memorable discussion second best, as usual.

ENQ. I should be glad to learn in what way.

THEO. Simply this: the Buddhist priest premised by asking the _padri_
whether his God had given commandments to Moses only for men to
keep, but to be broken by God himself. The missionary denied
the supposition indignantly. Well, said his opponent, “you tell
us that God makes no exceptions to this rule, and that no Soul
can be born without his will. Now God forbids adultery, among
other things, and yet you say in the same breath that it is he
who creates every baby born, and he who endows it with a Soul.
Are we then to understand that the millions of children born in
crime and adultery are your God’s work? That your God forbids and
punishes the breaking of his laws; and that, nevertheless, _he
creates daily and hourly souls for just such children_? According
to the simplest logic, your God is an accomplice in the crime;
since, but for his help and interference, no such children of lust
could be born. Where is the justice of punishing not only the
guilty parents but even the innocent babe for that which is done
by that very God, whom yet you exonerate from any guilt himself?”
The missionary looked at his watch and suddenly found it was
getting too late for further discussion.

ENQ. You forget that all such inexplicable cases are mysteries, and
that we are forbidden by our religion to pry into the mysteries of
God.

THEO. No, we do not forget, but simply reject such impossibilities. Nor
do we want you to believe as we do. We only answer the questions
you ask. We have, however, another name for your “mysteries.”


THE BUDDHIST TEACHINGS ON THE ABOVE.

ENQ. What does Buddhism teach with regard to the Soul?

THEO. It depends whether you mean exoteric, popular Buddhism, or its
esoteric teachings. The former explains itself in the _Buddhist
Catechism_ in this wise: “Soul it considers a word used by the
ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is subject to
change, then man is included, and every material part of him
must change. That which is subject to change is not permanent,
so there can be no immortal survival of a changeful thing.” This
seems plain and definite. But when we come to the question that
the new personality in each succeeding re-birth is the aggregate
of “_Skandhas_,” or the attributes, of the _old_ personality,
and ask whether this new aggregation of _Skandhas_ is a _new_
being likewise, in which nothing has remained of the last, we
read that: “In one sense it is a new being, in another it is
not. During this life the Skandhas are continually changing,
while the man A. B. of forty is identical as regards personality
with the youth A. B. of eighteen, yet by the continual waste and
reparation of his body and change of mind and character, he is
a different being. Nevertheless, the man in his old age justly
reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and
actions at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of
the re-birth, being the _same individuality as before_ (but not
the same personality), with but a changed form, or new aggregation
of _Skandhas_, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and
thoughts in the previous existence.” This is abstruse metaphysics,
and plainly does not express _disbelief_ in Soul by any means.

ENQ. Is not something like this spoken of in _Esoteric Buddhism_?

THEO. It is, for this teaching belongs both to Esoteric _Budhism_ or
Secret Wisdom, and to the exoteric Buddhism, or the religious
philosophy of Gautama Buddha.

ENQ. But we are distinctly told that most of the Buddhists do not
believe in the Soul’s immortality?

THEO. No more do we, if you mean by Soul the _personal Ego_, or
life-Soul—_Nephesh_. But every learned Buddhist believes in
the individual or _divine Ego_. Those who do not, err in their
judgment. They are as mistaken on this point, as those Christians
who mistake the theological interpolations of the later editors
of the Gospels about damnation and hell-fire, for _verbatim_
utterances of Jesus. Neither Buddha nor “Christ” ever wrote
anything themselves, but both spoke in allegories and used “dark
sayings,” as all true Initiates did, and will do for a long time
yet to come. Both Scriptures treat of all such metaphysical
questions very cautiously, and both, Buddhist and Christian
records, sin by that excess of exotericism; the dead letter
meaning far overshooting the mark in both cases.

ENQ. Do you mean to suggest that neither the teachings of Buddha nor
those of Christ have been heretofore rightly understood?

THEO. What I mean is just as you say. Both Gospels, the Buddhist and
the Christian, were preached with the same object in view.
Both reformers were ardent philanthropists and practical
_altruists—preaching most unmistakably Socialism_ of the noblest
and highest type, self-sacrifice to the bitter end. “Let the sins
of the whole world fall upon me that I may relieve man’s misery
and suffering!” cries Buddha; ... “I would not let one cry whom I
could save!” exclaims the Prince-beggar, clad in the refuse rags
of the burial-grounds. “Come unto me all ye that labour and are
heavy laden and I will give you rest,” is the appeal to the poor
and the disinherited made by the “Man of Sorrows,” who hath not
where to lay his head. The teachings of both are boundless love
for humanity, charity, forgiveness of injury, forgetfulness of
self, and pity for the deluded masses; both show the same contempt
for riches, and make no difference between _meum_ and _tuum_.
Their desire was, without revealing to _all_ the sacred mysteries
of initiation, to give the ignorant and the misled, whose burden
in life was too heavy for them, hope enough and an inkling into
the truth sufficient to support them in their heaviest hours. But
the object of both Reformers was frustrated, owing to excess of
zeal of their later followers. The words of the Masters having
been misunderstood and misinterpreted, behold the consequences!

ENQ. But surely Buddha must have repudiated the soul’s immortality, if
all the Orientalists and his own Priests say so!

THEO. The Arhats began by following the policy of their Master and the
majority of the subsequent priests were not initiated, just as in
Christianity; and so, little by little, the great esoteric truths
became almost lost. A proof in point is, that, out of the two
existing sects in Ceylon, the Siamese believes death to be the
absolute annihilation of individuality and personality, and the
other explains Nirvana, as we theosophists do.

ENQ. But why, in that case, do Buddhism and Christianity represent the
two opposite poles of such belief?

THEO. Because the conditions under which they were preached were not
the same. In India the Brahmins, jealous of their superior
knowledge, and excluding from it every caste save their own, had
driven millions of men into idolatry and almost fetishism. Buddha
had to give the death-blow to an exuberance of unhealthy fancy
and fanatical superstition resulting from ignorance, such as has
rarely been known before or after. Better a philosophical atheism
than such ignorant worship for those—

“Who cry upon their gods and are not heard,
Or are not heeded—”

and who live and die in mental despair. He had to arrest first of
all this muddy torrent of superstition, to uproot _errors_ before
he gave out the truth. And as he could not give out _all_, for
the same good reason as Jesus, who reminds _his_ disciples that
the Mysteries of Heaven are not for the unintelligent masses, but
for the elect alone, and therefore “spake he to them in parables”
(Matt. xiii. 11)—so his caution led Buddha _to conceal too much_.
He even refused to say to the monk Vacchagotta whether there was,
or was not an Ego in man. When pressed to answer, “the Exalted one
maintained silence.”[18]

ENQ. This refers to Gautama, but in what way does it touch the Gospels?

THEO. Read history and think over it. At the time the events narrated
in the Gospels are alleged to have happened, there was a similar
intellectual fermentation taking place in the whole civilized
world, only with opposite results in the East and the West. The
old gods were dying out. While the civilized classes drifted
in the train of the unbelieving Sadducees into materialistic
negations and mere dead-letter Mosaic form in Palestine, and
into moral dissolution in Rome, the lowest and poorer classes
ran after sorcery and strange gods, or became hypocrites and
pharisees. Once more the time for a spiritual reform had arrived.
The cruel, anthropomorphic and jealous God of the Jews, with his
sanguinary laws of “an eye for eye and tooth for tooth,” of the
shedding of blood and animal sacrifice, had to be relegated to a
secondary place and replaced by the merciful “Father in Secret.”
The latter had to be shown, not as an extra-Cosmic God, but as a
divine Saviour of the man of flesh, enshrined in his own heart
and soul, in the poor as in the rich. No more here than in India,
could the secrets of initiation be divulged, lest by giving that
which is holy to the dogs, and casting pearls before swine, both
the _Revealer_ and the things revealed should be trodden under
foot. Thus, the reticence of both Buddha and Jesus—whether the
latter lived out the historic period allotted to him or not, and
who equally abstained from revealing plainly the Mysteries of Life
and Death—led in the one case to the blank negations of Southern
Buddhism, and in the other, to the three clashing forms of the
Christian Church and the 300 sects in Protestant England alone.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Ain-Soph, אין סיף = τὸ πάγ = ἔπειρος Nature, the non-existent
which IS, but is not _a_ Being.

[15] How can the non-active eternal principle emanate or emit? The
Parabrahm of the Vedantins does nothing of the kind; nor does the
Ain-Soph of the Chaldean Kabala. It is an eternal and periodical law
which causes an active and creative force (the logos) to emanate from
the ever-concealed and incomprehensible one principle at the beginning
of every maha-manvantara, or new cycle of life.

[16] One often finds in Theosophical writings conflicting statements
about the Christos principle in man. Some call it the sixth principle
(_Buddhi_), others the seventh (_Atman_). If Christian Theosophists
wish to make use of such expressions, let them be made philosophically
correct by following the analogy of the old Wisdom-Religion symbols.
We say that Christos is not only one of the three higher principles,
but all the three regarded as a Trinity. This Trinity represents
the Holy Ghost, the Father, and the Son, as it answers to abstract
spirit, differentiated spirit, and embodied spirit. Krishna and Christ
are philosophically the same principle under its triple aspect of
manifestation. In the _Bhagavatgita_ we find Krishna calling himself
indifferently Atman, the abstract Spirit, Kshetragna, the Higher or
reincarnating Ego, and the Universal SELF, all names which, when
transferred from the Universe to man, answer to _Atma_, _Buddhi_ and
_Manas_. The _Anugita_ is full of the same doctrine.

[17] The new sect of healers, who, by disavowing the existence of
anything but spirit, which spirit can neither suffer nor be ill, claim
to cure all and every disease, provided the patient has faith that what
he denies can have no existence. A new form of self-hypnotism.

[18] Buddha gives to Ananda, his _initiated_ disciple, who enquires
for the reason of this silence, a plain and unequivocal answer in the
dialogue translated by Oldenburg from the _Samyuttaka Nikaya_:—“If
I, Ananda, when the wandering monk Vacchagotta asked me: ‘Is there
the Ego?’ had answered ‘The Ego is,’ then that, Ananda, would have
confirmed the doctrine of the Samanas and Brahmanas, who believed in
permanence. If I, Ananda, when the wandering monk Vacchagotta asked
me, ‘Is there not the Ego?’ had answered, ‘The Ego is not,’ then
that, Ananda, would have confirmed the doctrine of those who believed
in annihilation. If I, Ananda, when the wandering monk Vacchagotta
asked me, ‘Is there the Ego?’ had answered, ‘The Ego is,’ would that
have served my end, Ananda, by producing in him the knowledge: all
existences (dhamma) are non-ego? But if I, Ananda, had answered, ‘The
Ego is not,’ then that, Ananda, would only have caused the wandering
monk Vacchagotta to be thrown from one bewilderment to another:
‘My Ego, did it not exist before? But now it exists no longer!’”
This shows, better than anything, that Gautama Buddha withheld such
difficult metaphysical doctrines from the masses in order not to
perplex them more. What he meant was the difference between the
personal temporary Ego and the Higher Self, which sheds its light on
the imperishable Ego, the spiritual “I” of man.