The Key to Theosophy
Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky
1831
-1891
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The Key to Theosophy
By
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
On the Source of the Human Soul
Q. How, then, do you account for man being endowed with a Spirit
and Soul?
Whence these?
A. 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.
Q. So you reject the teaching that Soul is given, or breathed into
man, by God?
A. We are obliged to. The "Soul" spoken of in Genesis 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.
Q. Well, let us put it otherwise: is it God who endows man with a
human rational
Soul and immortal Spirit?
A. Again, in the way you put the question, we must object to it.
Since we
believe in nopersonal 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.
Q. What do you mean? What difficulties?
A. I am thinking of an unanswerable argument offered once in my
presence by a
Singhalese 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
Megattivati to give his
reasons why the Christian God should not be accepted by
the
"heathen." Well, the Missionary came out of that forever memorable
discussion second best,
as usual.
Q. I should be glad to learn in what way.
A. Simply this: the Buddhist priest premised by asking the padre
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.
Q. You forget that all such inexplicable cases are mysteries, and
that we are
forbidden by our
religion to pry into the mysteries of God.
A. 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
Q. What does Buddhism teach with regard to the Soul?
A. 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 rebirth 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 rebirth, 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.
Q. Is not something like this spoken of in Esoteric Buddhism?
A. 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.
Q. But we are distinctly told that most of the Buddhists do not
believe in the
Soul's immortality?
A.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 hellfire, 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.
Q. Do you mean to suggest that neither the teachings of Buddha nor
those of
Christ have been heretofore rightly
understood?
A. 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 labor 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!
Q. But surely Buddha must have repudiated the soul's immortality,
if all the
Orientalists and his own Priests say so!
A. 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
be the absolute
annihilation of individuality and personality, and the other
explains Nirvana, as
we Theosophists do.
Q. But why, in that case, do Buddhism and Christianity represent
the two
opposite poles of
such belief?
A. Because the conditions under which they were preached were not
the same. In
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 uprooterrors before he gave out the
truth. And
as he could not
give out all, for the same good reason as Jesus, who remindshis
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"-so his caution
led Buddhato 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."
Buddha gives to Ananda, his initiated
disciple, who inquires for the reason of
this silence, a
plain and unequivocal answer in the dialogue translated by
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
Brahmans, 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.
Q. This refers to Gautama, but in what
way does it touch the Gospels?
A. 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
moral dissolution
in
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 Savior of the man of flesh, enshrined in
his own heart
and soul, in the poor as in the rich. No more here than in
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.
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