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HPB-SB-11-263: Difference between revisions
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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Notes by the Way|11-262}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Notes by the Way|11-262}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|possibly have not risen above its atmosphere. The connection between the Spiritual phenomena and the dead body is very curious in the light of the experience of some mediums when near a grave-yard. The visit of a medium to a place which an earth-bound Spirit haunts, be it the grave where his body lies, or the place where his crime was committed, will apparently enable the Spirit to attach himself and communicate. At times, as I know by personal experience, such Spirits, so released, will rise superior to the conditions which enthralled them. At others they can but tell of their misery without being able to escape from it But in either case it is the body, as the Buddhists Bay, that is the attraction.}} | ||
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Though it is not a subject for exoteric discussion, I may be permitted to notice the connection which Mr. Lillie traces between Buddhism and Freemasonry. His information as to the mystic ceremonies of the great brotherhood is sometimes deficient and erroneous, but he shews very conclusively that the great weapon of Buddha against the huge priestly tyrannies that he assailed was ''Secrecy. ''He quotes some account of a secret society in China that is “fenced about by secret signs and Masonic passwords,” and which is perhaps the best illustration of the primitive rites of Buddhism. The rite of initiation bears a more than superficial similarity to the mystic rite in Masonry; and the ceremony of perfection, alike in the esoteric societies of the West, in the sepulchral cave of the old Rishi, and in the inner crypt of the Buddhist temple, is connected with the open grave. Mr. Lillie has no difficulty in answering affirmatively the question, “Is there any evidence that early Buddhism was propagated in India by a system of Freemasonry?” “From the nature of the Indian initiation, from the Triad Society of China, from the Buddhist (as opposed to priestly) nature of most Masonic rites—the bloodless sacrifice, the poverty, the charity”—he concludes that the modern Freemason is a survival of the ancient Buddhist. | |||
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More than this. The indefatigable Eastern missionary would seem to have left his traces on the major part of Asia, to have penetrated to Alexandria within two centuries of Alexander’s death, and to have largely prepared the way for Christianity by the foundation of various secret societies, Therapeuts, Essenes, Neo-Pythagoreans, and the like. It is by no means improbable that the same ubiquitous power evangelised America in the fifth century ad. Sir William Jones considered that Buddha and Woden were philologically identical, and that Buddha was the early God of Northern Europe. Thus a purely Spiritual religion, a faith virgin of coercion, a Spiritualism of most ancient date, embracing now one-third of humanity within its fold, has influenced religions in a way hardly credible to a Western mind. | |||
{{Style P-Signature in capitals|M.A. (Oxon.)}} | |||
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