London Lectures of 1907 by Annie Wood Besant

Author:Annie Wood Besant [Besant, Annie Wood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

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The Relation of the Masters to the Theosophical Society

Those of you who have been present in the Queen's Hall on Sunday evenings will remember that I spoke there a fortnight ago on "The Relation of Masters to Religions." There, of course, I dealt with the subject in the most general possible way, while here I propose to deal with it more closely; but I must ask all of you, as I asked you last Thursday and the preceding Thursday, to remember that in dealing with the Theosophical Society we are only dealing with one part of a world-wide and, as I might say, century or millennium-wide story—the story, practically, of the relation of the spiritual world to the physical. Although I am now going to deal specially with the relation of the Masters to our own Society, I would ask you all to bear in mind the more general relation of which I have spoken elsewhere. I do not want to repeat what there I said, but I want to recall to your minds the leading principle that the Theosophical Society cannot claim an exclusive right to any special spiritual privilege, that the spiritual privileges that it enjoys are part of the general spiritual heritage of the world, and that you have to consider any special case in relation to those general principles. So that in thinking of the Masters in relation to our own Society, we must bear in mind how very wide are their relations to all great spiritual movements, to all religions, and that all who are spoken of in the different faiths as Founder or Founders of a particular religion would fall under the name, Master.

Now I was hesitating a moment in completing that sentence, because one almost has to explain that in thus using the word one is including in it a little more than is included under the term in the special significance with which we are going to use it now; for in the case of the religions of the Hinḍus, the religion of the Buḍḍhists, and the religion of the Christians, when we speak of the Founder of each of these religions, we are speaking of great personages who, in the Occult Hierarchy, are higher than those whom we call Masters: in the case of Hinḍuism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the Fifth Root Race; in the case of Buḍḍhism, the Buḍḍha, who is a teacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as the illuminated, the supreme Buḍḍha. And in the case of the Christian Religion also, there is something peculiar in the life of the Founder. You have there, in the first place, a being whom we call by the name Jesus, in himself a disciple, but living in the world at that time under exceedingly strange and peculiar conditions. Some of you may have read with some amount of care that section of the third volume of The Secret Doctrine which is called "The Mystery of the Buḍḍha.

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