HPB-IU v.2 ch.11: Difference between revisions

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There are four schools of Buddhist theology, in Ceylon, Thibet, and India. One is rather pantheistical than atheistical, but the other three are purely {{Style S-Italic|theistical.}}

As to practical, not theoretical views on the Nirvana, this is what a rationalist and a skeptic says: “I have questioned at the very doors of their temples several hundreds of Buddhists, and have not found one but strove, fasted, and gave himself up to every kind of austerity, to perfect himself and acquire immortality; not to attain final annihilation.

As well as this author we have questioned Buddhists and Brahmanists and studied their philosophy. {{Style S-Italic|Apavarg}} has wholly a different meaning

The same with the doctrine of metempsychosis, so distorted by European scholars. But as the work of translation and analysis progresses, fresh religious beauties will be discovered in the old faiths.

Professor Whitney has in his translation of the {{Style S-Italic|Vedas}} passages in which he says, the assumed importance of the body to its old tenant is brought out in the strongest light. These are portions of hymns read at the funeral services, over the body of the departed one. We quote them from Mr. Whitney’s scholarly work:

Thy spirit gone before, now follow after;

Collect thy body; with its every member;

If some one limb was left behind by Agni,

That very one I now again supply you;

The “body” here referred to is not the physical, but the {{Style S-Italic|astral}} one—a very great distinction, as may be seen.

{{Style P-Quote|“They who within the sphere of earth are stationed,

The Fathers who have the earth—the atmosphere—the heaven for their seat,

The ‘fore-heaven’ the third heaven is styled,

With such majestic views as these people held of God and the immortality of man’s spirit, it is not surprising that a comparison between the

This creed has not decayed, and its hidden philosophy, as understood now by the initiated Hindus, is just as it was 10,000 years ago. But can our scholars seriously hope to have it delivered unto them upon their first demand? Or do they still expect to fathom the mysteries of the World-Religion in its popular exoteric rites?

No orthodox Brahmans and Buddhists would deny the Christian incarnation; only, they understand it in their own philosophical way, and how could they deny it? The very corner-stone of their religious system is periodical incarnations of the Deity. Whenever humanity is about merging into materialism and moral degradation, a Supreme Spirit incarnates himself in his creature selected for the purpose. The “Messenger of the Highest” links itself with the duality of matter and soul, and the triad being thus completed by the union of its Crown, a saviour is born, who helps restore humanity to the path of truth and virtue. The early Christian Church, all imbued with Asiatic philosophy, evidently shared the same belief—otherwise {{Style S-Italic|it would have neither erected into an article of faith the second advent, nor cunningly invented the fable of Anti-Christ as a precaution against possible future incarnations.}} Neither could they have imagined that Melchisedek was an avatar of Christ. They had only to turn to the {{Style S-Italic|Bagavedgitta}} to find Christna or Bhagaved saying to Arjuna: “He who follows me is saved by wisdom and even by works. . . . {{Style S-Italic|As often as virtue declines in the world, I make myself manifest to save it.”}}

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Indeed, it is more than difficult to avoid sharing this doctrine of periodical incarnations. Has not the world witnessed, at rare intervals, the advent of such grand characters as Christna, Sakya-muni, and Jesus? Like the two latter personages, Christna seems to have been a real being, deified by his school at some time in the twilight of history, and made to fit into the frame of the time-honored religious programme. Compare the two Redeemers, the Hindu and the Christian, the one preceding the other by some thousands of years; place between them Siddhartha Buddha, reflecting Christna and projecting into the night of the future his own luminous shadow, out of whose collected rays were shaped the outlines of the mythical Jesus, and from whose teachings were drawn those of the historical Christos; and we find that under one identical garment of poetical legend lived and breathed three real human figures. The individual merit of each of them is rather brought out in stronger relief than otherwise by this same mythical coloring; for no unworthy character could have been selected for deification by the popular instinct, so unerring and just when left untrammeled. {{Style S-Italic|Vox populi, vox Dei}} was once true, however erroneous when applied to the present priest-ridden mob.

Meanwhile, before this smelting is completed by honest science and future generations, let us glance at the present aspect of the legendary three religions.

Between the Lamaico-Buddhistic and Roman Catholic articles of faith and ceremonies, there are fifty-one points presenting a perfect and striking similarity; and four diametrically antagonistic.

As it would be useless to enumerate the “similarities,” for the reader may find them carefully noted in Inman’s work on {{Style S-Italic|Ancient Faith and Modern}}, pp. 237-240, we will quote but the four dissimilarities, and leave every one to draw his own deductions therefrom:

Which of these theologies most commends itself to the sincere inquirer, is a question that may safely be left to the sound judgment of the reader. One offers light, the other darkness.

The {{Style S-Italic|Wheel of the Law}} has the following:

We have often wondered at the extraordinary ideas of God and His justice that seem to be honestly held by those Christians who blindly rely upon the clergy for their religion, and never upon their own reason. How strangely illogical is this doctrine of the Atonement. We propose to discuss it with the Christians from the Buddhistic stand-point, and show at once by what a series of sophistries, directed toward the one object of tightening the ecclesiastical yoke upon the popular neck, its acceptance as a divine command has been finally effected; also, that it has proved one of the most pernicious and demoralizing of doctrines.

But if we step outside the little circle of creed and consider the universe as a whole balanced by the exquisite adjustment of parts, how all sound logic, how the faintest glimmering sense of Justice revolts against this Vicarious Atonement! If the criminal sinned only against himself, and wronged no one but himself; if by sincere repentance he could cause the obliteration of past events, not only from the memory of man, but also from that imperishable record, which no deity—not even the Supremest of the Supreme—can cause to disappear, then this dogma might not be incomprehensible. But to maintain that one may wrong his fellow-man, kill, disturb the equilibrium of society, and the natural order of things, and then—through cowardice, hope, or compulsion, matters not—be forgiven by believing that the spilling of one blood washes out the other blood spilt—this is preposterous! Can the {{Style S-Italic|results}} of a crime be obliterated even though the crime itself should be pardoned? The effects of a cause are never limited to the boundaries of the cause, nor can the results of crime be confined to the offender and his victim. Every good as well as evil action has its effects, as palpably as the stone flung into a calm water. The simile is trite, but it is the best ever conceived, so let us use

So with crime, and so with its opposite. The action may be instantaneous, the effects are eternal. When, after the stone is once flung into the pond, we can recall it to the hand, roll back the ripples, obliterate the force expended, restore the etheric waves to their previous state of non-being, and wipe out every trace of the act of throwing the missile, so that Time’s record shall not show that it ever happened, then, {{Style S-Italic|then}} we may patiently hear Christians argue for the efficacy of this Atonement.

Steve Anderson was one of these American criminals—convicted of double murder, arson, and robbery. Before the hour of his death he was “converted,” but, the record tells us that “{{Style S-Italic|his clerical attendants objected to his reprieve, on the ground that they felt sure of his salvation}}

Or take another crime, one of the most selfish, cruel, and heartless, and yet the most frequent, the seduction of a young girl. Society, by an instinct of self-preservation, pitilessly judges the victim, and ostracizes her. She may be driven to infanticide, or self-murder, or if too averse to die, live to plunge into a career of vice and crime. She may become the mother of criminals, who, as in the now celebrated Jukes, of whose appalling details Mr. Dugdale has published the particulars, breed other generations of felons to the number of hundreds, in fifty or sixty years. All this social disaster came through one man’s selfish passion; shall he be forgiven by Divine Justice until his offense is expiated, and punishment fall only upon the wretched human scorpions begotten of his lust?

An outcry has just been made in England over the discovery that Anglican priests are largely introducing auricular confession and granting absolution after enforcing penances. Inquiry shows the same thing prevailing more or less in the United States. Put to the ordeal of cross-examination, the clergy quote triumphantly from the English {{Style S-Italic|Book of Common Prayer}} the rubrics which clearly give them the absolving authority, through the power of “God, the Holy Ghost,” committed unto them by the bishop by imposition of hands at their ordination. The bishop, questioned, points to {{Style S-Italic|Matthew}} xvi., 19, for the source of his authority to bind and loose on earth those who are to be blessed or damned in heaven; and to the apostolic succession for proof of its transmission from Simon Barjona to himself. The present volumes have been written to small purpose if they have not shown, 1, that Jesus, the Christ-God, is a myth concocted two centuries after the real Hebrew Jesus died; 2, that, therefore, he never had any authority to give Peter, or any one else, plenary power; 3, that even if he had given such authority, the word Petra (rock) referred to the revealed truths of the Petroma, not to him who thrice denied him; and that besides, the apostolic successon is a gross and palpable fraud; 4, that the {{Style S-Italic|Gospel according to Matthew}} is a fabrication based upon a wholly different manuscript. The whole thing, therefore, is an imposition alike upon priest and penitent. But putting all these points aside for the moment, it suffices to ask these pretended

Away from us such an insulting conception of divine justice as that preached by priests on their own authority. It is fit only for cowards and criminals! If they are backed by a whole array of Fathers and Churchmen, we are supported by the greatest of all authorities, an instinctive and reverential sense of the everlasting and everpresent law of harmony and justice.

Again, in the {{Style S-Italic|Puranas}} it may be found that Christna was nailed to a tree by the arrow of a hunter, who, begging the dying god to forgive

It is also to this highly-moral doctrine that the Catholic world became indebted, in the eleventh century, for the institution of the Order known as the Carthusian monks. Bruno, its founder, was driven to the foundation of this monstrous Order by a circumstance well worthy of being recorded here, as it graphically illustrates this {{Style S-Italic|divine}} predestination. A friend of Bruno, a French physician, famed far and wide for his extraordinary {{Style S-Italic|piety, purity of morals,}} and {{Style S-Italic|charity,}} died, and his body was watched by Bruno himself. Three days after his death, and as he was going to be buried, the pious physician suddenly sat up in his coffin and declared, in a loud and solemn voice, “that by the just judgment of God he was eternally damned.” After which consoling message from beyond the “dark river,” he fell back and relapsed into death.

Calvin promulgated views of Divine partiality and bloodthirstiness equally abhorrent. “The human race, corrupted radically in the fall with Adam, has upon it the guilt and impotence of original sin; its redemption can be achieved only through an incarnation and a propitiation; of this redemption only electing grace can make the soul a participant, and such grace, once given, is never lost; {{Style S-Italic|this election can come only from God, and it includes only a part of the race, the rest being left to perdition;}} election and perdition (the {{Style S-Italic|horribile decretum}}) are both predestinated in the Divine plan; that plan is a decree, and this decree is eternal and unchangeable . . . justification is by {{Style S-Italic|faith alone,}} and {{Style S-Italic|faith is the gift of God.”}}

“Let all sins that have been committed in this world fall on me that the world may be delivered,” exclaimed Gautama, the Hindu Saviour, centuries before our era.

In the parable of {{Style S-Italic|the Kingdom of Heaven}} ({{Style S-Italic|Matthew}} xxv.), the {{Style S-Italic|Son of Man}} (Osiris is also called the Son) sits upon the throne of his glory, judging the nations, and says to the justified, “Come ye blessed of my Father ({{Style S-Italic|the}} God) inherit the kingdom. . . . For {{Style S-Italic|I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink}} . . . {{Style S-Italic|naked and}}

The same in relation to Buddhist legends. In {{Style S-Italic|Matthew}} iv. 19, Jesus is made to say: “Follow me and I will make you {{Style S-Italic|fishers}} of men,” the whole adapted to a conversation between him and Simon Peter and Andrew his brother.

Had the erudite Archbishop Cave, Grabe, and Dr. Parker, who so zealously contended in their time for the admission of the {{Style S-Italic|Epistles of Jesus Christ and Abgarus, King of Edessa,}} into the Canon of the {{Style S-Italic|Scripture,}} lived in our days of Max Müller and Sanscrit scholarship, we doubt whether they would have acted as they did. The first mention of these Epistles ever made, was by the famous Eusebius. This pious bishop seems to have been self-appointed to furnish Christianity with the most unexpected proofs to corroborate its wildest fancies. Whether

The “Well” played a prominent part in the Mysteries of the Bacchic festivals. In the sacerdotal language of every country, it had the same significance. A well is “the fountain of salvation” mentioned in {{Style S-Italic|Isaiah}} (xii{{Style S-Italic|.}} 3). The water is the {{Style S-Italic|male principle}} in its spiritual sense. In its physical relation in the allegory of creation, the water is chaos, and chaos is the female principle vivified by the Spirit of God—the male principle. In the “Kabala,” {{Style S-Italic|Zachar}} means “male;” and the Jordan was called Zachar (“Universal History,” vol. ii., p. 429). It is curious that the Father of St. John the Baptist, the Prophet of {{Style S-Italic|Jordan}}—Zacchar—should be called {{Style S-Italic|Zachar-ias.}} One of the names of Bacchus is {{Style S-Italic|Zagreus.}} The ceremony of pouring water on the shrine was sacred in the Osirian rites as well as in the Mosaic institutions. In the {{Style S-Italic|Mishna}} it is said, “Thou shalt dwell in Succa and {{Style S-Italic|pour out water}} seven, and the pipes six days” (“Mishna Succah,” p. 1). “Take {{Style S-Italic|virgin earth}} . . . and work up the {{Style S-Italic|dust}} with {{Style S-Italic|living}} water,” prescribes the {{Style S-Italic|Sohar}} (Introduction to “Sohar;” “Kabbala Denudata,” ii., pp. 220, 221). Only “earth and water, according to Moses, can bring forth a {{Style S-Italic|living soul,”}} quotes Cornelius Agrippa. The water of Bacchus was considered to impart the Holy {{Style S-Italic|Pneuma}} to the initiate; and it washes off all sin by baptism through the Holy {{Style S-Italic|Ghost,}} with the Christians. The “well” in the kabalistic sense, is the mysterious emblem of the {{Style S-Italic|Secret Doctrine.}} “If any man thirst, let him come {{Style S-Italic|unto me and drink}},” says Jesus (John vii.).

Then Moses, who had conquered the seven {{Style S-Italic|evil}} Powers, and won the friendship of the seven {{Style S-Italic|occult}} and beneficent ones, is represented as living with the Reuel Priest of Midian, who invites “the Egyptian” to eat bread, {{Style S-Italic|i.e}}., to partake of his wisdom. In the Bible the elders of Midian are known as great soothsayers and diviners. Finally, Reuel or Jethro, the initiator and instructor of Moses, gives him in marriage his daughter. This daughter is Zipporah, {{Style S-Italic|i.e}}., the esoteric Wisdom, the shining light of knowledge, for Siprah means the “shining” or “resplendent,” from the word “Sapar” to shine. Sippara, in Chaldea, was the city of the “Sun.” Thus Moses was initiated by the Midianite, or rather the Kenite, and thence the biblical allegory.

At the hour of Gautama-Buddha’s birth there were 32,000 wonders performed. The clouds stopped immovable in the sky, the waters of the rivers ceased to flow; the flowers ceased unbudding; the birds re-

We now quote from the {{Style S-Italic|Protevangelion:}}

“At the hour of the Nativity, as Joseph looked up into the air, ‘I saw,’ he says, ‘{{Style S-Italic|the clouds astonished,}} and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight. . . . And I beheld the sheep dispersed . . . and {{Style S-Italic|yet the sheep stood still;}} and I looked into a river, and saw the kids {{Style S-Italic|with their mouths close to the water, and touching it, but they did not drink.}}

The precepts of Hillel, who died forty years b.c., appear rather as quotations than original expressions in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus taught the world nothing that had not been taught as earnestly before by other masters. He begins his sermon with certain purely Buddhistic

This is a happy discovery, indeed!

But turning again from the historical to the mythical narratives, invented alike about Christna, Buddha, and Christ, we find the following:

If we turn now to Christna and attentively compare the prophecies respecting him, as collected in the Ramatsariarian traditions of the

Let there be exaggeration or not in attributing to the {{Style S-Italic|Atharva-Veda}} and the other books such a great antiquity, the fact remains that {{Style S-Italic|these prophecies and their realization preceded Christianity,}} and Christna preceded Christ. That is all we need care to inquire.

As it is, Dr. Lundy contradicts Moor, and maintains that this figure is that of {{Style S-Italic|Wittoba,}} one of the avatars of Vishnu, hence Christna, and {{Style S-Italic|anterior to Christianity,}} which is a fact not very easily to be put down. And yet although he finds it prophetic of Christianity, he thinks it has no relation whatever to Christ! His only reason is that “in a Christian crucifix the glory always comes from the sacred head; here it is from above and beyond. . . . The Pundit’s Wittoba then, given to Moor, would seem to be the crucified {{Style S-Italic|Krishna,}} the shepherd-god of Mathura

Now all these qualities must pertain to Jesus as well as to Christna. The very fact that Jesus was a man upon the mother’s side—even though he were a {{Style S-Italic|God,}} implies as much. His behavior toward the fig-tree, and his self-contradictions, in {{Style S-Italic|Matthew,}} where at one time he promises peace on earth, and at another the sword, etc., are proofs in this direction. Undoubtedly this cut was never intended to represent Jesus of Nazareth. It was Wittoba, as Moor was told, and as moreover the Hindu {{Style S-Italic|Sacred Scriptures}} state, Brahma, the sacrificer who is “at once both sacrificer and victim;” it is “Brahma, victim in His Son Christna, who came to die on earth for our salvation, who Himself accomplishes the solemn sacrifice (of the Sarvameda).” And yet, it is the man Jesus as well as the man Christna, for both were united to their {{Style S-Italic|Chrestos.}}

As to the Jewish {{Style S-Italic|Scriptures,}} only such men as the Jesuit de Carriere, a convenient representative of the majority of the Catholic clergy, can still command their followers to accept only the chronology established by the Holy Ghost. It is on the authority of the latter that we learn that Jacob went, with a family of seventy persons, all told, to settle in Egypt in A.M. 2298, and that in A.M. 2513—just 215 years afterward—these seventy persons had so increased that they left Egypt 600,000 fighting men strong, “without counting women and children,” which, according to the science of statistics, should represent a total population of between two and three millions!! Natural history affords no parallel to such fecundity, except in red herrings. After this let the Christian missionaries laugh, if they can, at Hindu chronology and computations.

But we must resume the thread of our narrative with Buddha.

“{{Style S-Italic|Do not believe merely on the authority of your teachers and masters,}} or believe and practice merely {{Style S-Italic|because they believe and practice.}}

It is impossible to avoid contrasting with these benevolent and human sentiments, the fulminations of the Œcumenical Council and the Pope,

The hierophant-initiator presented symbolically before the final {{Style S-Italic|revelation}} wine and bread to the candidate who had to eat and drink of both in token that the spirit was to quicken matter, {{Style S-Italic|i.e}}., the divine wisdom was to enter into his body through what was to be revealed to him. Jesus, in his Oriental phraseology, constantly assimilated himself to the true vine ({{Style S-Italic|John}} xv. 1). Furthermore, the hierophant, the discloser of the Petroma, was called “Father.” When Jesus says, “Drink . . . this is my blood,” what else was meant, it was simply a metaphorical assimilation of himself to the vine, which bears the grape, whose juice is its blood—wine. It was a hint that as he had himself been initiated by the “Father,” so he desired to initiate others. His “Father” was the husbandman, himself the vine, his disciples the branches. His followers being ignorant of the terminology of the Mysteries, wondered; they even took it as an offense, which is not surprising, considering the Mosaic injunction against blood.