The author—the writer, rather—feels it necessary to apologize for the long delay which has occurred in the appearance of this work. It has been occasioned by ill-health and the magnitude of the undertaking. Even the two volumes now issued do not complete the scheme, nor do these treat exhaustively of the subjects dealt with in them. A large quantity of material has already been prepared, dealing with the history of Occultism as contained in the lives of the great Adepts of the Âryan Race, and showing the bearing of Occult Philosophy upon the conduct of life, as it is and as it ought to be. Should the present volumes meet with a favourable reception, no effort will be spared to carry out the scheme of the work in its entirety.
This scheme, it must be added, was not in contemplation when the preparation of the work was first announced. As originally announced, it was intended that The Secret Doctrine should be an amended and enlarged version of Isis Unveiled. It was, however, soon found that the explanations which could be added to those already put before the world, in the last-named and other works dealing with Esoteric Science, were such as to require a different method of treatment; and consequently the present volumes do not contain, in all, twenty pages extracted from Isis Unveiled.
The author does not feel it necessary to ask the indulgence of her readers and critics for the many defects of literary style, and the [pg xx] imperfect English which may be found in these pages. She is a foreigner, and her knowledge of the language was acquired late in life. The English tongue is employed because it offers the most widely-diffused medium for conveying the truths which it had become her duty to place before the world.
These truths are in no sense put forward as a revelation; nor does the author claim the position of a revealer of mystic lore, now made public for the first time in the world's history. For what is contained in this work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the Scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden under glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil. What is now attempted is to gather the oldest tenets together and to make of them one harmonious and unbroken whole. The sole advantage which the writer has over her predecessors, is that she need not resort to personal speculations and theories. For this work is a partial statement of what she herself has been taught by more advanced students, supplemented, in a few details only, by the results of her own study and observation. The publication of many of the facts herein stated has been rendered necessary by the wild and fanciful speculations in which many Theosophists and students of Mysticism have indulged, during the last few years, in their endeavour, as they imagined, to work out a complete system of thought from the few facts previously communicated to them.
It is needless to explain that this book is not the Secret Doctrine in its entirety, but a select number of fragments of its fundamental tenets, special attention being paid to some facts which have been seized upon by various writers, and distorted out of all resemblance to the truth.
But it is perhaps desirable to state unequivocally that the teachings, [pg xxi] however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, do not belong to the Hindû, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldæan, or the Egyptian religion, nor to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism or Christianity exclusively. The Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown, developed, and become materialized.
It is more than probable that the book will be regarded by a large section of the public as a romance of the wildest kind; for who has ever even heard of the Book of Dzyan?
The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility for what is contained in this work, and even to face the charge of having invented the whole of it. That it has many shortcomings she is fully aware; all that she claims for it is that, romantic as it may seem to many, its logical coherence and consistency entitle this new Genesis to rank, at any rate, on a level with the “working hypotheses” so freely accepted by Modern Science. Further, it claims consideration, not by reason of any appeal to dogmatic authority, but because it closely adheres to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy.
The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the Occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.
If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content. It is [pg xxii] written in the service of humanity, and by humanity and the future generations it must be judged. Its author recognizes no inferior court of appeal. Abuse she is accustomed to; calumny she is daily acquainted with; at slander she smiles in silent contempt.
De minimis non curat lex.
H. P. B.
London, October, 1888.
Gently to hear, kindly to judge.
Shakespeare.
Since the appearance of Theosophical literature in England, it has become customary to call its teachings “Esoteric Buddhism.” And, having become a habit—as an old proverb based on daily experience has it—“Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”
Old truisms are often the wisest. The human mind can hardly remain entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made. This is said with reference to the prevailing double mistake (a) of limiting Theosophy to Buddhism; and (b) of confounding the tenets of the religious philosophy preached by Gautama, the Buddha, with the doctrines broadly outlined in Esoteric Buddhism. Any thing more erroneous than this could hardly be imagined. It has enabled our enemies to find an effective weapon against Theosophy, because, as an eminent Pâli scholar very pointedly expressed it, there was in the volume named “neither Esotericism nor Buddhism.” The esoteric truths, presented in Mr. Sinnett's work, ceased to be esoteric from the moment they were made public; nor did the book contain the religion of Buddha, but simply a few tenets from a hitherto hidden teaching, which are now explained and supplemented by many more in the present volumes. And even the latter, though giving out many fundamental tenets from the Secret Doctrine of the East, raise but a small corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living Adept, would be permitted to, or could—even if he would—give out promiscuously to a mocking, unbelieving world that which has been so effectually concealed from it for long æons and ages.
Esoteric Buddhism was an excellent work with a very unfortunate title, though it meant no more than does the title of this work, The Secret Doctrine. It proved unfortunate, because people are always in the habit of judging things by their appearance rather than by their meaning, and because the error has now become so universal, that even most of the Fellows of the Theosophical Society have fallen victims to the same misconception. From the first, however, protests were raised by Brâhmans and others against the title; and, in justice to myself, I must add that Esoteric Buddhism was presented to me as a completed volume, and that I was entirely unaware of the manner in which the author intended to spell the word “Budh-ism.”
This has to be laid directly at the door of those who, having been the first to bring the subject under public notice, neglected to point out the difference between “Buddhism”—the religious system of ethics preached by the Lord Gautama, and so named from his title of Buddha, the “Enlightened”—and “Budhism,” from Budha, Wisdom, or Knowledge (Vidyâ), the faculty of cognizing, from the Sanskrit root Budh, to know. We Theosophists of India are ourselves the real culprits, although, at the time, we did our best to correct the mistake.1 To avoid this deplorable misnomer was easy; the spelling of the word had only to be altered, and by common consent both pronounced and written “Budhism,” instead of “Buddhism.” Nor is the latter term correctly spelt and pronounced, as it ought to be called, in English, Buddhaïsm, and its votaries “Buddhaïsts.”
This explanation is absolutely necessary at the beginning of a work like the present. The Wisdom-Religion is the inheritance of all the nations, the world over, in spite of the statement made in Esoteric Buddhism2 that “two years ago (i.e., in 1883), neither I, nor any other European living, knew the alphabet of the Science, here for the first time put into a scientific shape,” etc. This error must have crept in through inadvertence. The present writer knew all that is “divulged” in Esoteric Buddhism, and much more, many years before it became her duty (in 1880) to impart a small portion of the Secret Doctrine to two European gentlemen, one of whom was the author of Esoteric Buddhism; and surely the present writer has the undoubted, though to her, rather equivocal, privilege of being a European by birth and education. Moreover, a considerable part of the philosophy expounded by Mr. Sinnett was taught in America, even before Isis Unveiled was published, to two Europeans and to my colleague, Colonel H. S. Olcott. Of the three teachers the latter gentleman has had, the first was a Hungarian Initiate, the second an Egyptian, the third a Hindû. As permitted, Colonel Olcott has given out some of this teaching in various ways; if the other two have not, it has been simply because they were not allowed, their time for public work having not yet come. But for others it has, and the appearance of Mr. Sinnett's several interesting books is a visible proof of the fact. Moreover, it is above everything important to keep in mind that no Theosophical book acquires the least additional value from pretended authority.
Âdi, or Âdhi Budha, the One, or the First, and Supreme Wisdom, is a term used by Âryâsanga in his secret treatises, and now by all the mystic Northern Buddhists. It is a Sanskrit term, and an appellation given by the earliest Âryans to the Unknown Deity; the word “Brahmâ” not being found in the Vedas and the early works. It means the Absolute Wisdom, and Âdibhûta is translated by Fitzedward Hall, “the primeval uncreated cause of all.” Æons of untold duration must have elapsed, before the epithet of Buddha was so humanized, so to speak, as to allow of the term being applied to mortals, and finally appropriated to one whose unparalleled virtues and knowledge caused him to receive the title of the “Buddha of Wisdom Unmoved.” Bodha means the innate possession of divine intellect or understanding; Buddha, the acquirement of it by personal efforts and merit; while Buddhi is the faculty of cognizing, the channel through which divine knowledge reaches the Ego, the discernment of good and evil, also divine conscience, and the Spiritual Soul, which is the vehicle of Âtmâ. “When Buddhi absorbs our Ego-tism (destroys it) with all its Vikâras, Avalokiteshvara becomes manifested to us, and Nirvâna, or Mukti, is reached,” Mukti being the same as Nirvana, i.e., freedom from the trammels of Mâyâ or Illusion. Bodhi is likewise the name of a particular state of trance-condition, called Samâdhi, during which the subject reaches the culmination of spiritual knowledge.
Unwise are those who, in their blind and, in our age, untimely hatred of Buddhism, and, by reäction, of Budhism, deny its esoteric teachings, which are those also of the Brâhmans, simply because the name suggests what to them, as Monotheists, are noxious doctrines. Unwise is the correct term to use in their case. For in this age of crass and illogical materialism, the Esoteric Philosophy alone is calculated to withstand the repeated attacks on all and everything man holds most dear and sacred in his inner spiritual life. The true philosopher, the student of Esoteric Wisdom, entirely loses sight of personalities, dogmatic beliefs and special religions. Moreover, Esoteric Philosophy reconciles all religions, strips every one of its outward human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of a Divine Absolute Principle in Nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever-Unknowable. Furthermore, the records we mean to place before the reader embrace the esoteric tenets of the whole world since the beginning of our humanity, and Buddhistic Occultism occupies therein only its legitimate place, and no more. Indeed, the secret portions of the Dan or Janna (Dhyâna)3 of Gautama's metaphysics—grand as they appear to one unacquainted with the tenets of the Wisdom-Religion of antiquity—are but a very small portion of the whole. The Hindû reformer limited his public teachings to the purely moral and physiological aspect of the Wisdom-Religion, to ethics and man alone. Things “unseen and incorporeal,” the mysteries of Being outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving the Hidden Truths for a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the famous Saptaparna Cave (the Sattapanni of Mahâvansa) near Mount Baibhâr (the Webhâra of the Pâli MSS.). This cave was in Râjâgriha, the ancient capital of Magadha, and was the Cheta Cave of Fa-hian, as is rightly suspected by some archaeologists.4
Time and human imagination made short work of the purity and philosophy of these teachings, once that they were transplanted from the secret and sacred circle of the Arhats, during the course of their work of proselytism, into a soil less prepared for metaphysical conceptions than India; i.e., once they were transferred into China, Japan, Siam, and Burmah. How the pristine purity of these grand revelations was dealt with may be seen in studying some of the so-called “esoteric” Buddhist schools of antiquity in their modern garb, not only in China and other Buddhist countries in general, but even in not a few schools of Tibet, which have been left to the care of uninitiated Lamas and Mongolian innovators.
Thus the reader is asked to bear in mind the very important difference between orthodox Buddhism—i.e., the public teachings of Gautama, the Buddha—and his esoteric Budhism. His Secret Doctrine, however, differed in no wise from that of the initiated Brahmans of his day. The Buddha was a child of Âryan soil, a born Hindû, a Kshatriya and a disciple of the Twice-born (the initiated Brâhmans) or Dvîjas. His teachings, therefore, could not be different from their doctrines, for the whole Buddhist reform consisted merely in giving out a portion of that which had been kept secret from every man outside of the “enchanted” circle of ascetics and Temple-Initiates. Unable, owing to his pledges, to teach all that had been imparted to him, though the Buddha taught a philosophy built upon the ground-work of the true esoteric knowledge, he gave to the world only its outward material body and kept its soul for his Elect. Many Chinese scholars among Orientalists have heard of the “Soul-Doctrine.” None seem to have understood its real meaning and importance.
That doctrine was preserved secretly—too secretly, perhaps—within the sanctuary. The mystery that shrouded its chief dogma and aspiration—Nirvâna—has so tried and irritated the curiosity of those scholars who have studied it, that, unable to solve it logically and satisfactorily by untying its Gordian knot, they have cut it through by declaring that Nirvâna means absolute annihilation.
Toward the end of the first quarter of this century a distinct class of literature appeared in the world, which with every year became more defined in its tendency. Being based, soi-disant, on the scholarly researches of Sanskritists and Orientalists in general, it was considered scientific. Hindû, Egyptian, and other ancient religions, myths, and emblems were made to yield anything the symbologist wanted them to yield, and thus often the rude outward form was given out in place of the inner meaning. Works, most remarkable for their ingenious deductions and speculations, circulo vicioso—foregone conclusions generally taking the place of premisses in the syllogisms of more than one Sanskrit and Pâli scholar—appeared rapidly in succession, over-flooding the libraries with dissertations on phallic and sexual worship rather than on real symbology, and each contradicting the other.
This is the true reason, perhaps, why the outline of a few fundamental truths from the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic Ages is now permitted to see the light, after long millenniums of the most profound silence and secrecy. I say advisedly “a few truths,” because that which must remain unsaid could not be contained in a hundred such volumes, nor could it be imparted to the present generation of Sadducees. But even the little that is now given is better than complete silence upon these vital truths. The world of to-day, in its mad career towards the unknown, which the Physicist is too ready to confound with the unknowable, whenever the problem eludes his grasp, is rapidly progressing on the reverse plane to that of spirituality. It has now become a vast arena, a true valley of discord and of eternal strife, a necropolis, wherein lie buried the highest and the most holy aspirations of our Spirit-Soul. That soul becomes with every new generation more paralyzed and atrophied. The “amiable infidels and accomplished profligates” of Society, spoken of by Greeley, care little for the revival of the dead sciences of the past; but there is a fair minority of earnest students who are entitled to learn the few truths that may be given to them now; and now much more than ten years ago, when Isis Unveiled appeared, or even when the later attempts to explain the mysteries of esoteric science were published.
One of the greatest and perhaps the most serious objection to the correctness and reliability of the whole work will be the preliminary Stanzas. How can the statements contained in them be verified? True, though a great portion of the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Mongolian works quoted in the present volumes is known to some Orientalists, yet the chief work—that one from which the Stanzas are given—is not in the possession of European Libraries. The Book of Dzyan (or Dzan) is utterly unknown to our Philologists, or at any rate was never heard of by them under its present name. This is, of course, a great drawback to those who follow the methods of research prescribed by official Science; but to students of Occultism, and to every genuine Occultist, this will be of little moment. The main body of the doctrines given, however, is found scattered throughout hundreds and thousands of Sanskrit MSS., some already translated—disfigured in their interpretations, as usual—others still waiting their turn. Every scholar, therefore, has an opportunity of verifying the statements herein made, and of checking most of the quotations. A few new facts, new to the profane Orientalist only, and passages quoted from the Commentaries will be found difficult to trace. Several of the teachings also have hitherto been transmitted orally, yet even these in every instance are hinted at in the almost countless volumes of Brâhmanical, Chinese and Tibetan temple-literature.
However it may be, and whatsoever is in store for the writer through malevolent criticism, one fact is quite certain. The members of several esoteric schools—the seat of which is beyond the Himâlayas, and whose ramifications may be found in China, Japan, India, Tibet, and even in Syria, and also South America—claim to have in their possession the sum total of sacred and philosophical works in MSS. and print, all the works, in fact, that have ever been written, in whatever language or character, since the art of writing began, from the ideographic hieroglyphs down to the alphabet of Cadmus and the Devanâgari.
It has been constantly claimed that, ever since the destruction of the Alexandrian Library,5 every work of a character that might lead the profane to the ultimate discovery and comprehension of some of the mysteries of the Secret Science, owing to the combined efforts of the members of these Brotherhoods, has been diligently searched for. It is added, moreover, by those who know, that once found all such works were destroyed, save three copies of each which were preserved and safely stored away. In India, the last of these precious manuscripts were secured and hidden during the reign of the Emperor Akbar.
Prof. Max Müller shows that no bribes or threats of Akbar could extort the original text of the Vedas from the Brâhmans, and yet boasts that European Orientalists have it.6 That Europe has the complete text is exceedingly doubtful, and the future may have very disagreeable surprises in store for the Orientalists.
It is maintained, furthermore, that every sacred book of this kind, the text of which was not sufficiently veiled in symbolism, or which had any direct references to the ancient mysteries, was first carefully copied in cryptographic characters, such as to defy the art of the best and cleverest palæographer, and then destroyed to the last copy. During Akbar's reign, some fanatical courtiers, displeased at the Emperor's sinful prying into the religions of the infidels, themselves helped the Brâhmans to conceal their MSS. Such was Badáoní, who had an undisguised horror of Akbar's mania for idolatrous religions.
Badáoní, in his Muntakhab at Tawarikh, writes:
As they [the Shramana and Brâhmans] surpass other learned men in their treatises on morals and on physical and religious sciences, and reach a high degree in their knowledge of the future, in spiritual power, and human perfection, they brought proofs based on reason and testimony, ... and inculcated their doctrines so firmly ... that no man ... could now raise a doubt in his Majesty even if mountains were to crumble to dust, or the heavens were to tear asunder.... His Majesty relished inquiries into the sects of these infidels, who cannot be counted, so numerous they are, and who have no end of revealed books.7
This work “was kept secret and, was not published till the reign of Jahángír.”
Moreover in all the large and wealthy Lamasaries, there are subterranean crypts and cave-libraries, cut in the rock, whenever the Gonpa and Lhakhang are situated in the mountains. Beyond the Western Tsaydam, in the solitary passes of Kuen-lun there are several such hiding-places. Along the ridge of Altyn-tag, whose soil no European foot has ever trodden so far, there exists a certain hamlet, lost in a deep gorge. It is a small cluster of houses, a hamlet rather than a monastery, with a poor-looking temple in it, and one old Lama, a hermit, living near by to watch it. Pilgrims say that the subterranean galleries and halls under it contain a collection of books, the number of which, according to the accounts given, is too large to find room even in the British Museum.
According to the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless land of Tarim—a veritable wilderness in the heart of Turkestan—were in days of old covered with flourishing and wealthy cities. At present, a few verdant oases only relieve its dread solitude. One such, carpeting the sepulchre of a vast city buried under the sandy soil of the desert, belongs to no one, but is often visited by Mongolians and Buddhists. The tradition also speaks of immense subterranean abodes, of large corridors filled with tiles and cylinders. It may be an idle rumour, and it may be an actual fact.
All this will very likely provoke a smile of doubt. But before the reader rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over the following well-known facts. The collective researches of Orientalists, and especially of late years the labours of students of Comparative Philology and the Science of Religion, have enabled them to ascertain that an incalculable number of MSS., and even of printed works known to have existed, are now to be no more found. They have disappeared without leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But this is not so, for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys to works still extant, and now entirely incomprehensible, for the greater portion of their readers, without these additional volumes of commentaries and explanations.
Such, for instance, are the works of Lao-tse, the predecessor of Confucius. He is said to have written nine hundred and thirty books on ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, one thousand in all. His great work, however, the Tao-te-King, the heart of his doctrine and the sacred scripture of the Tao-sse, has in it, as Stanislas Julien shows, only “about 5,000 words,”8 hardly a dozen of pages; yet Professor Max Müller finds that “the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so that M. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose of his translation, the earliest going back as far as the year 163 b.c.”, and not earlier, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that preceded this “earliest” of the commentators there was ample time to veil the true Lao-tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests and followers of Lao-tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real occult records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as almost all the texts, have long disappeared from the eyes of the profane.
Of the works of Confucius we read:
If we turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is founded on the Five King and the Four Shu books—in themselves of considerable extent and surrounded by voluminous Commentaries, without which even the most learned scholars would not venture to fathom the depth of their sacred canon.9
But they have not fathomed it; and this is the complaint of the Confucianists, as a very learned member of that body, in Paris, complained in 1881.
If our scholars turn to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Scriptures of Chaldea, the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountain-head of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting-point of Christianity, what do they find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient religions of Babylon, to record the vast cycle of astronomical observations of the Chaldean Magi, to justify the tradition of their splendid and preëminently occult literature, what now remains? Only a few fragments, which are said to be by Berosus.
These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of what has disappeared, for they passed through the hands of his Reverence, the Bishop of Cæsarea—that self-constituted censor and editor of the sacred records of other men's religions—and they doubtless to this day bear the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon?
It was written in Greek for Alexander the Great, by Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, from the astronomical and chronological records preserved by the priests of that temple—records covering a period of 200,000 years—and is now lost. In the first century b.c. Alexander Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it, which are also lost. Eusebius (270-340 a.d.) used these extracts in writing his Chronicon. The points of resemblance—almost of identity—between the Jewish and the Chaldean scriptures,10 made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his rôle of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the former scriptures and together with them an absurd chronology.
Now it is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian synchronistic tables of Manetho—so much so that Bunsen11 charges him with mutilating history most unscrupulously, and Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice-patriarch of Constantinople in the beginning of the eighth, denounce him as the most daring and desperate forger. Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted?
So that, with the exception of these more than doubtful fragments, the entire Chaldean sacred literature has disappeared from the eyes of the profane as completely as the lost Atlantis. A few facts that were contained in the Berosian History are given later on, and may throw great light on the true origin of the Fallen Angels, personified by Bel and the Dragon.
Turning now to the oldest specimen of Âryan literature, the Rig Veda, the student if he strictly follows in this the data furnished by the Orientalists themselves, will find that although the Rig Veda contains only about 10,580 verses, or 1,028 hymns, yet in spite of the Brâhmanas and the mass of glosses and commentaries, it is not understood correctly to this day. Why is this so? Evidently because the Brâhmanas, “the scholastic and oldest treatises on the primitive hymns,” themselves require a key, which the Orientalists have failed to secure.
What, again, do the scholars say of Buddhist literature? Do they possess it in its completeness? Assuredly not. Notwithstanding the 325 volumes of the Kanjur and Tanjur of the Northern Buddhists, each volume, we are told, “weighing from four to five pounds,” nothing, in truth, is known of real Lamaïsm. Yet the sacred canon is said in the Saddharmâlankâra12 to contain 29,368,000 letters, or, exclusive of treatises and commentaries, five or six times the amount of the matter contained in the Bible, which, as Professor Max Müller states, rejoices in only 3,567,180 letters. Notwithstanding, then, these 325 volumes (in reality there are 333, the Kanjur comprising 108, and Tanjur 225 volumes), “the translators, instead of supplying us with correct versions, have interwoven them with their own commentaries, for the purpose of justifying the dogmas of their several schools.”13 Moreover, “according to a tradition preserved by the Buddhist schools, both of the South and of the North, the sacred Buddhist Canon comprised originally 80,000 or 84,000 tracts, but most of them were lost, so that there remained but 6,000”—as the Professor tells his audience. Lost, as usual—for Europeans. But who can be quite sure that they are likewise lost for Buddhists and Brâhmans?
Considering the reverence of the Buddhists for every line written upon Buddha and the Good Law, the loss of nearly 76,000 tracts does seem miraculous. Had it been vice versâ, every one acquainted with the natural course of events would subscribe to the statement that, of these 76,000, 5,000 or 6,000 treatises might have been destroyed during the persecutions in, and emigrations from, India. But as it is well ascertained that the Buddhist Arhats began their religious exodus, for the purpose of propagating the new faith beyond Kashmir and the Himâlayas, as early as the year 300 before our era,14 and reached China in the year 61 a.d.,15 when Kashyapa, at the invitation of the Emperor Ming-ti, went there to acquaint the “Son of Heaven” with the tenets of Buddhism, it does seem strange to hear the Orientalists speaking of such a loss as though it were really possible. They do not seem to allow for one moment the possibility that the texts may be lost only for the West and for themselves, or that the Asiatic people should have the unparalleled boldness to keep their most sacred records out of the reach of foreigners, thus refusing to deliver them to the profanation and misuse even of races so “vastly superior” to themselves.
Judging by the expressed regrets and numerous confessions of almost every one of the Orientalists,16 the public may feel sufficiently sure, (a) that the students of ancient religions have indeed very few data upon which to build such final conclusions as they generally do about the old faiths, and (b) that such lack of data does not in the least prevent them from dogmatizing. One would imagine that, thanks to the numerous records of the Egyptian theogony and mysteries, preserved in the classics and in a number of ancient writers, the rites and dogmas of Pharaonic Egypt, at least, ought to be well understood; better, at any rate, than the too abstruse philosophies and Pantheism of India, of whose religion and language Europe had hardly any idea before the beginning of the present century. Along the Nile and on the face of the whole country, there stand to this hour, yearly and daily exhumed, ever fresh relics which eloquently tell their own history. Still it is not so. The learned Oxford Philologist himself confesses the truth by saying:
We see still standing the pyramids, and the ruins of temples and labyrinths, their walls covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and with the strange pictures of gods and goddesses. On rolls of papyrus, which seem to defy the ravages of time, we have even fragments of what may be called the sacred books of the Egyptians. Yet, though much has been deciphered in the ancient records of the mysterious race, the mainspring of the religion of Egypt and the original intention of its ceremonial worship are far from being fully disclosed to us.17
Here again the mysterious hieroglyphic documents remain, but the keys by which alone they become intelligible have disappeared.
In fact so little acquainted are our greatest Egyptologists with the funerary rites of the Egyptians and the outward marks of the difference of sex on the mummies, that it has led to the most ludicrous mistakes. Only a year or two ago, one of this kind was discovered at Boulaq, Cairo. The mummy of what was considered the wife of an unimportant Pharaoh, has, thanks to an inscription found on an amulet hung round its neck, turned out to be that of Sesostris—the greatest King of Egypt!
Nevertheless, having found that “there is a natural connection between language and religion”; and that “there was a common Âryan religion before the separation of the Âryan race; a common Semitic religion before the separation of the Semitic race; and a common Turanic religion before the separation of the Chinese and the other tribes belonging to the Turanian class”; having, in fact, discovered only “three ancient centres of religion” and “three centres of language”; and though as entirely ignorant of those primitive religions and languages as of their origin—the Professor does not hesitate to declare “that a truly historical basis for a scientific treatment of the principal religions of the world” has been gained!
A “scientific treatment” of a subject is no guarantee for its “historical basis”; and with such scarcity of data on hand, no Philologist, even among the most eminent, is justified in giving out his own conclusions for historical facts. No doubt, the eminent Orientalist has thoroughly proved to the world's satisfaction that, according to the phonetic rules of Grimm's law, Odin and Buddha are two different personages, quite distinct from each other, and has proved it scientifically. When, however, he takes the opportunity of saying in the same breath that Odin “was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the age of the Veda and of Homer,”18 he has not the slightest “historical basis” for it, but makes history and fact subservient to his own conclusions, which may be very “scientific” in the sight of Oriental scholars, but yet very wide of the mark of actual truth. The conflicting views of the various eminent Philologists and Orientalists, from Martin Haug down to Prof. Max Müller himself, on the subject of chronology, in the case of the Vedas, are an evident proof that the statement has no “historical” basis to stand upon, “internal evidence” being very often a Jack-o'-lantern, instead of a safe beacon to follow. Nor has the Science of modern Comparative Mythology any better argument to bring forward to crush the contention of those learned writers who have insisted for the last century or so that there must have been “fragments of a primeval revelation, granted to the ancestors of the whole race of mankind ... preserved in the temples of Greece and Italy.” For this is what all the Eastern Initiates and Pandits have been proclaiming to the world from time to time. And while a prominent Singhalese priest assured the writer that it was well known that the most important tracts, belonging to the Buddhist sacred canon, were stored away in countries and places inaccessible to the European Pandits, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, the greatest Sanskritist of his day in India, assured some members of the Theosophical Society of the same fact with regard to ancient Brâhmanical works. When told that Professor Max Müller had declared to the audiences of his Lectures that the theory “that there was a primeval preternatural revelation granted to the fathers of the human race, finds but few supporters at present”—the holy and learned man laughed. His answer was suggestive. “If Mr. ‘Moksh Mooller’ [as he pronounced the name], were a Brâhman, and came with me, I might take him to a gupa cave [a secret crypt] near Okhee Math, in the Himâlayas, where he would soon find out that what crossed the Kâlapani [the black waters of the ocean] from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books. There was a ‘primeval revelation,’ and it still exists; nor will it ever be lost to the world, but will reäppear; though the Mlechchhas will of course have to wait.”
Questioned further on the point, he would say no more. This was at Meerut, in 1880.
No doubt the mystification played by the Brâhmans upon Colonel Wilford and Sir William Jones, in the last century, at Calcutta, was cruel, but it had been well deserved, and no one was more to blame in that affair than the missionaries and Colonel Wilford himself. The former, on the testimony of Sir William Jones himself,19 were silly enough to maintain that “the Hindûs were even now almost Christians, because their Brahmâ, Vishnu and Mahesha were no other than the Christian trinity.”20 It was a good lesson. It made the Oriental scholars doubly cautious; but perchance it has also made some of them too shy and, in its reäction, has caused the pendulum of foregone conclusions to swing too much the other way. For “that first supply from the Brâhmanical market,” in answer to the demand of Colonel Wilford, has now created an evident necessity and desire in the Orientalists to declare nearly every archaic Sanskrit manuscript so modern as to give the missionaries full justification for availing themselves of their opportunity. That they do so and to the full extent of their mental powers, is shown by the absurd attempts of late to prove that the whole Purânic story about Krishna was plagiarized by the Brâhmans from the Bible! But the facts cited by the Oxford Professor in his Lectures concerning the now famous interpolations, for the benefit, and later on to the sorrow, of Colonel Wilford, do not at all interfere with the conclusions to which one who studies the Secret Doctrine must unavoidably come. For, if the results show that neither the New nor even the Old Testament borrowed anything from the more ancient religion of the Brâhmans and Buddhists, it does not follow that the Jews have not borrowed all they knew from the Chaldean records, the latter being mutilated later on by Eusebius. As to the Chaldeans, they assuredly got their primitive learning from the Brâhmans, for Rawlinson shows an undeniably Vedic influence in the early mythology of Babylon; and Colonel Vans Kennedy has long ago justly declared that Babylonia was, from her origin, the seat of Sanskrit and Brâhman learning. But all such proofs must lose their value, in the presence of the latest theory worked out by Prof. Max Müller. What it is everyone knows. The code of phonetic laws has now become a universal solvent for every identification and “connection” between the gods of many nations. Thus, though the Mother of Mercury (Budha, Thot-Hermes, etc.) was Maia, the mother of Gautama Buddha, also Mâyâ, and the mother of Jesus, likewise Mâyâ (Illusion, for Mary is Mare, the Sea, the great Illusion symbolically)—yet these three characters have no connection, nor can they have any, since Bopp has “laid down his code of phonetic laws.”
In their efforts to collect together the many skeins of unwritten history, it is a bold step for our Orientalists to take, to deny à priori everything that does not dove-tail with their special conclusions. Thus, while new discoveries are daily made of great arts and sciences having existed far back in the night of time, yet even the knowledge of writing is refused to some of the most ancient nations, and they are credited with barbarism instead of culture. Nevertheless traces of an immense civilization, even in Central Asia, are still to be found. This civilization is undeniably prehistoric. And how can there be civilization without a literature in some form, without annals or chronicles? Common sense alone ought to supplement the broken links in the history of departed nations. The gigantic and unbroken wall of the mountains that hem in the whole table-land of Tibet, from the upper course of the river Khuan-Khé down to the Karakorum hills, witnessed a civilization during millenniums of years, and should have strange secrets to tell mankind. The eastern and central portions of these regions—the Nan-chan and the Altyn-tag—were once upon a time covered with cities that could well vie with Babylon. A whole geological period has swept over the land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting sand and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of the basin of Tarim testify. The borderlands alone are superficially known to the traveller. Within those table-lands of sand there is water, and fresh oases are found blooming there, wherein no European foot has ever yet ventured, or trodden the now treacherous soil. Among these verdant oases there are some which are entirely inaccessible even to the profane native traveller. Hurricanes may “tear up the sands and sweep whole plains away,” they are powerless to destroy that which is beyond their reach. Built deep in the bowels of the earth, the subterranean stores are secure; and as their entrances are concealed, there is little fear that anyone would discover them, even should several armies invade the sandy wastes where—
Not a pool, not a bush, not a house is seen,
And the mountain-range forms a rugged screen
Round the parch'd flats of the dry, dry desert....
But there is no need to send the reader across the desert, when the same proofs of ancient civilization are found even in comparatively populated regions of the same country. The oasis of Tchertchen, for instance, situated about 4,000 feet above the level of the river Tchertchen-Darya, is now surrounded in every direction by the ruins of archaic towns and cities. There, some 3,000 human beings represent the relics of about a hundred extinct nations and races, the very names of which are now unknown to our ethnologists. An anthropologist would feel more than embarrassed to class, divide and subdivide them; the more so, as the respective descendants of all these antediluvian races and tribes themselves know as little of their own forefathers as if they had fallen from the moon. When questioned about their origin, they reply that they know not whence their fathers had come, but had heard that their first, or earliest, men were ruled by the great Genii of these deserts. This may be put down to ignorance and superstition, yet in view of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine, the answer may be based upon primeval tradition. Alone the tribe of Khoorassan claims to have come from what is now known as Afghanistan, long before the days of Alexander, and brings legendary lore to that effect in corroboration. The Russian traveller Colonel (now General) Prjevalsky found quite close to the oasis of Tchertchen the ruins of two enormous cities, the oldest of which, according to local tradition, was destroyed 3,000 years ago by a hero and giant, and the other by Mongolians in the tenth century of our era.
The emplacement of the two cities is now covered, owing to shifting sands and the desert wind, with strange and heterogeneous relics; with broken china and kitchen utensils and human bones. The natives often find copper and gold coins, melted silver ingots, diamonds, and turquoises, and what is the most remarkable—broken glass.... Coffins of some undecaying wood, or material, also, within which beautifully preserved embalmed bodies are found.... The male mummies are all extremely tall powerfully built men with long wavy hair.... A vault was found with twelve dead men sitting in it. Another time, in a separate coffin, a young girl was discovered by us. Her eyes were closed with golden discs, and the jaws held firm by a golden circlet running from under the chin across the top of the head. Clad in a narrow woollen garment, her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet being left naked.21
To this, the famous traveller adds that all along their way on the river Tchertchen they heard legends about twenty-three towns buried ages ago by the shifting sands of the deserts. The same tradition exists on the Lob-nor and in the oasis of Kerya.
The traces of such civilization, and these and like traditions, give us the right to credit other legendary lore, warranted by well educated and learned natives of India and Mongolia who speak of immense libraries reclaimed from the sand, together with various relics of ancient Magic Lore, which have all been safely stowed away.