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FOOTNOTES TO “WHO ARE THE ARYAS AND THE BUDDHISTS?”
[This is an extract from the Journal of the Hindu Sabha, on the subject of initiations and initiates in ancient India. The writer says that “the gods were fully Emancipated Theosophists,” to which H. P. B. remarks:]
Or the highest adepts. To this day in Tibet, the “perfect Lamas or Bodhisattvas” are called gods and Spirits—LHAS.
[The writer continues:] “We hold the ancient land of the Aryas with their gods and their Rishis to have been the Himalayan station which is even now Sacred to Hindu Theosophists and where Theosophical merit and learning still flourishes and whence the Brahmaputra still flows.”
We italicize these lines as they have a direct reference to our first section, doubted and ridiculed by blind scoffers— a reality nevertheless. We can only repeat with Galileo his historical and immortal words: Eppur si muove! Other scoffers and bigots as blind as our modern skeptics would not allow the earth to move, and yet it moved, moves and will move unto the last hour of the Pralaya.
And the Brahmaputra flows from Tibet. “There is no reasonable doubt that the Tsampu of great Tibet and the Brahmaputra of the plains are one and the same river,” says 304 Markham in his recent work Tibet.[1] “Great Tibet embraces the region between the Northern and Southern chains of the Himalaya, the towns and principal monasteries . . . are chiefly in the valley of the Brahmaputra.”
[The writer concludes saying: “The Founders of the Theosophical Society say that they are in communion with Yogis, the Editor of the Saddarshana Chintanika that his Yogi will reveal himself in time, and the Hindu Sabha exhorts everyone to invoke the Yogi within himself.” To this H. P. B. appends the following note:]
And the Hindu Sabha is quite right, if, by “Yogi,” it means Atma, the highest Spiritual Soul. But the writer uses an incorrect expression when saying that the Founders of the Theosophical Society claim communion with Yogis; Yogis can be but Hindus and in the Fraternity—with which we claim to have some acquaintance—the Hindus are in a minority. Even these cannot be strictly called “Yogis” since their modes of life, habits, religious worship and form of Initiation differ entirely from those of the Hindu Yogis as known to the general public. In one respect only are the adepts we know, like Yogis; namely, in their great purity of life, self-abnegation, and the practice of Dhyana and Samadhi.
Footnotes
- ↑ [Reference is here to Sir Clements Roberts Markham who edited the Narratives of the Mission of Geo. Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, London, 1876.—Compiler.]