Madame Blavatsky by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

A CRISIS IN ADYAR

By the time Mrs. Sinnett’s brooch inexplicably appeared inside her favorite cushion, her husband had already started what has to be one of the strangest correspondences in history. Impressed with HPB’s tales about the Masters and their mission, Sinnett asked Blavatsky if he could communicate with them himself. Naturally he would use her as a go-between, an arrangement that he would nevertheless quickly try to get around. (A. O. Hume, equally impressed, would try the same thing.) Blavatsky said she would ask, but there were no guarantees. The Masters were busy men, and, as she told Sinnett, at first none of them were open to the idea. But eventually one agreed, and between 1880 and 1885, Sinnett received over thirteen hundred pages of eloquent, often elaborate communication, collectively known as “the Mahatma Letters,” mostly from Koot Hoomi (who wrote in blue ink) but also from Morya (who wrote in red). These made up, for the most part, an extensive instruction in esoteric philosophy.

The essence of this Sinnett compressed into a book, Esoteric Buddhism, which caused quite a stir when it was published in 1883. Among its many readers were a young Rudolf Steiner and W. B. Yeats, both of whom, in different ways, made significant contributions to Theosophy, and to modern thought in general. Yet, although the book had popular appeal and remains a staple of Theosophical literature, it was not appreciated by all. Max Müller, the famed Orientalist, pointed out that however esoteric its teaching, it had nothing to do with Buddhism, and that the idea of an “esoteric Buddhism” itself could not be found in any Buddhist literature and was therefore an invention of the book’s author, or of his guru, Madame Blavatsky.1 Yet Blavatsky herself wasn’t happy with the title—or with the book—and took Sinnett to task about it in The Secret Doctrine. We’ve seen that her own form of Buddhism was highly eccentric and had little to do with the Buddhism of scholars like Müller or that of your average Buddhist. As Buddha itself means “awakened” or “enlightened one,” Sinnett’s use of the term can be translated as “Esoteric Awakening” or “Esoteric Enlightenment.” Sinnett himself admitted to the confusion his title triggered, commenting on how people inspired to join the TS after reading his book spoke of themselves as “esoteric Buddhists.” He also pointed out that he could easily have called the teaching he transmitted “Esoteric Brahmanism” or “Esoteric Christianity,” as a central claim of the work is that it communicated the ancient, original wisdom behind these subsequent developments. Brahmanism, Christianity, and other world religions could, through this teaching, be seen to have emerged at various periods “from the same common root of spiritual knowledge.” But “since Buddhism had apparently separated itself less widely than other religions from the parent stem,” and as in its “exterior form” it was already attracting a great deal of attention in the West, he thought it appropriate to use it as a way of leading his readers into the profound teaching which had been revealed to him.

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