Esoteric Buddhism

ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM.

i6mo, $1.25.
ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

New American Edition. With Introduction pre
pared expressly for it by the Author. i6mo,
$1.25.

THE OCCULT WORLD.

Xew American from the Fourth English Edi
tion. With an Introduction written for the
American Edition by the Author, and Appen
dix. i6mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

ESOTERIC BUDDHISM

BY

A. P. SINNETT

PRESIDENT OF THE SIMLA ECLECTIC THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
AUTHOR OF " THE OCCULT WORLD "

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1893

Copyright, 1884,
Br HOUGHTON, MIFF LIN & CO.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Iloughton & Company

PUBLISHER'S NOTE.

THE fifth English edition of Esoteric Bud
dhism consists of the text of the fourth Amer
ican edition, together with the larger part of the
preface specially furnished by Mr. Sinnett for
the American edition. He took the opportunity
afforded by a new edition, also, to append to
some of the chapters annotations upon points
calling for explication. These annotations are
now added to the sixth American edition as an
appendix. The present edition therefore cor
responds with the latest English edition, and
has besides matter in the author's preface not
incorporated in any English edition.

INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN
EDITION.

THIS book was written in the early part of
1883, and now that I am venturing to recom
mend it to public notice afresh in the latter
part of 1884, after three English editions have
passed through the press, I find myself in pos
session of much additional information bearing
on many of the problems dealt with. But I
am glad to be able to say that such later teach
ing as I have yet received only reveals incom
pleteness in my original conceptions of the eso
teric doctrine, — no material error so far. In
deed, I am happy enough to have received, from
the great adept himself from whom I obtained
my instruction in the first instance, the assur
ance that the book as it now stands is a sound
and trustworthy statement of the scheme of
Nature as understood by the initiates of occult
science, which may have to be a good deal de
veloped in future, if the interest it excites is
keen enough to constitute an efficient demand

6 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

for further teaching of this kind on the part of
the world at large, but will never have to be
remodeled or apologized for.

Further than this, the reception of the book
in India has shown that the doctrines thus
for the first time set forth in a coherent and
straightforward way are recognized, when thus
stated, by various schools of Oriental philoso
phy as consonant with their fundamental views.
A Brahman Hindoo, writing in the Indian
magazine, "The Theosophist," for June, 1884,
criticises the present volume as departing un
necessarily from accepted Sanskrit nomencla
ture ; but his objection merely is that I have
given unfamiliar names in some cases to ideas
which are already expressed in Hindoo sacred
writings, and that I have done too much honor
to the religious system commonly known as
Buddhism, by representing that as more closely
allied with the esoteric doctrine than any other.
" The popular wisdom of the majority of the
Hindoos to this day," says my Brahman critic,
" is more or less tinged with the esoteric doc
trines taught in Mr. Sinnett's book, misnamed
4 Esoteric Buddhism,' while there is not a sin
gle hamlet or village in the whole of India in
which people are not more or less acquainted
with the sublime tenets of the Vedanta philoso
phy. . . . The effects of Karma in the next

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 1

birth, the enjoyment of its fruits, good or evil, in
a subjective or spiritual state of existence prior
to the re-incarnation of the spiritual monad in
this or any other world, the loitering of the
unsatisfied souls or human shells in the earth
(Kamaloca), the pralayic and manwantaric pe
riods, . . . are not only intelligible but are even
familiar to a great many Hindoos, under names
different from those made use of by the author
of 4 Esoteric Buddhism.' ' So much the better
from the point of view of Western readers, to
whom it is a matter of indifference whether the
exoteric Hindoo or Buddhist religion is nearest
to absolutely true spiritual science, which should
certainly bear no name that appears to wed it
to any one faith in the external world more
than to another. All that we in the West can
be anxious for is to arrive at a clear understand
ing as to the essential principles of that science,
and if we find the principles denned in this
book claimed by the cultured representatives of
more than one great Oriental creed as equally
the underlying truths of their different systems,
we shall be all the better inclined to believe the
present exposition of doctrine worth our atten
tion.

In regard to the complaint itself, that the
teachings here reduced to an intelligible shape
are incorrectly described by the name this book

8 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

bears, I cannot do better than quote the note
by which the editor of " The Theosophist " re
plies to his Brahman contributor. He says:
" We print the above letter, as it expresses, in
courteous language and in an able manner, the
views of a large number of our Hindoo broth
ers. At the same time it must be stated that
the name of ; Esoteric Buddhism ' was given to
Mr. Sinnett's latest publication, not because
the doctrine propounded therein is meant to be
specially identified with any particular form of
faith, but because Buddhism means the doc
trine of the Buddhas, the Wise, i. e. the Wis
dom Religion." For my own part I need only
add that I fully accept and adopt that explana
tion of the matter. It would, indeed, be a mis
conception of the design which this book is in
tended to subserve, to suppose it concerned with
the recommendation, to a dilettante modern
taste, of old world fashions in religious thought.
The external forms and fancies of religion in
one age may be a little purer, in another age a
little more corrupt, but they inevitably adapt
themselves to their period, and it would be
extravagant to imagine them interchangeable.
The present statement is not put forward in
the hope of making Buddhists from among the
adherents of any other system, but with the
view of conveying to thoughtful readers, as well

INTRODUCTION TO' AMERICAN EDITION. 9

in the East as in the West, a series of leading
ideas, relating to the actual verities of Nature,
and the real facts of Man's progress through
evolution, which have been communicated to the
writer in their present shape by Eastern phi
losophers, and thus fall most readily into an
Oriental mould. But the value of these teach
ings will perhaps be most fully realized when
we clearly perceive that they are scientific in
their character, rather than polemical. Spirit
ual truths, if they are truths, may evidently be
dealt with in a no less scientific spirit than
chemical reactions. And no religious feeling,
of whatever color it may be, need be disturbed
by the importation into the general stock of
knowledge of new discoveries about the consti
tution and nature of Man on the plane of his
higher activities. True religion will eventually
find a way to assimilate such fresh knowledge
in the same way that it finally acquiesces in a
gradual enlargement of knowledge on the phys
ical plane. This, in the first instance, may
sometimes disconcert notions associated with
religious belief, — as geological science at first
embarrassed biblical chronology. But in time
men came to see that the essence of the biblical
statement does not reside in the literal sense of
cosmological passages, and religious conceptions
grew all the purer for the relief thus afforded

10 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

In just the same way, when positive scientific
knowledge begins to embrace a comprehension
of laws relating to the spiritual development
of Man, some misconceptions of Nature long
blended with religion may have to give way,
but still it will be found that the central ideas
of true religion have been cleared up and bright
ened all the better for the process. Especially,
as such processes continue, will the internal dis
sensions of the religious world be inevitably
subdued. The warfare of sects can only be due
to a failure on the part of rival sectarians to
grasp fundamental facts. Could a time come
when the basic ideas on which religion rests
should be comprehended with the same cer
tainty with which we comprehend some pri
mary physical laws, and disagreement about
them be recognized by all educated people as
ridiculous, then there would not be room for
very acrimonious divergences of religious senti
ment. Externals of religious thought would
still differ in different climates and among dif
ferent races, — as dress and dietaries differ, —
but such differences would not give rise to in
tellectual antagonism.

Basic facts of the kind that must, when they
come to be widely recognized as such, have a
tendency in this way to blend together super
ficially divergent views, not to provoke a trial

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 11

of strength between them, are developed, it
appears to me, in the exposition of spiritual
science we have now obtained from our Eastern
friends. It is quite unnecessary for religious
thinkers to turn aside from them under the
impression that they are arguments in favor of
some Eastern, in preference to the more gen
eral Western, creed. If medical science were to
discover a new fact about Man's body, were to
unveil some hitherto concealed principle on
which the growth of skin and flesh and bone
is carried on, that discovery would not be re
garded as trenching at all on the domain of
religion. Would the domain of religion be in
vaded by a discovery, for example, that should
go one step behind the action of the nerves,
and disclose a finer set of activities manipulat
ing these as they manipulate the muscles? At
all events, even if such a discovery might begin
to reconcile science and religion, no man who
allows any of his higher faculties to enter into
his religious thinking would put aside a posi
tive fact of Nature, clearly shown to be such,
as hostile to religion. Being a fact, it is inevi
table that it should fit in with all other facts,
and with religious truth among the number.
So with the great mass of information in refer
ence to the evolution of Man embodied in the
present statement. Our best plan evidently is,

12 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

to ask, before we look into the report I bring
forward, not whether it will square in all re
spects with preconceived views, but whether it
really does introduce us to a series of natural
facts connected with the growth and develop
ment of Man's higher faculties. If it does this,
we may wisely exRmine the facts first in the
scientific spirit, and leave them to exercise
whatever effect on collateral beliefs may be
reasonable and legitimate, later on.

Ramifying, as the explanation proceeds, into
a great many side paths, it will be seen by
the readers of this book that the central idea
now presented to us completes and spiritualizes
the great conception of physical anthropology,
which accounts for the evolution of Man's body
by successive and very gradual improvements
of animal forms from generation to generation.
That is a very barren and miserable theory, re
garded as an all-embracing account of creation ;
but, properly understood, it paves the way for
a comprehension of the higher concurrent pro
cess, which is all the while evolving the soul of
Man in the higher spiritual realms of existence.
The circumstances under which this is done
reconcile the evolutionary method with the in
stinctive craving of every self-conscious entity
for perpetuity of individual life. The dis
jointed series of improving forms on this earth

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 13

have no individuality, and the life of each in
turn is a separate transaction which finds no
compensation for suffering involved, no justice,
no fruit of its efforts, in the life of its successor.
It is possible to argue on the assumption of a
new independent creation of a human soul,
every time a new human form is produced by
physiological growth, that in the after spiritual
state of such soul justice may be awarded ; but
then this conception is itself at variance with
the fundamental idea of evolution, which traces,
or believes that it traces, the origin of each soul
to the working of highly developed matter in
each case. Nor is it less at variance with the
analogies of Nature, as these come under our
observation ; but without going into that, it is
enough for the moment to perceive that the
theory of spiritual evolution, as set forth in the
teaching of esoteric science, is, at any rate, in
harmony with these analogies, while at the
same time it satisfactorily meets the require
ments of justice and of the instinctive demand
for continuity of individual life.

This theory recognizes the evolution of the
soul as a process that is quite continuous in
itself, though carried out partly through the
intermediation of a great series of dissociated
forms. Putting aside, for the moment, the
profound metaphysics of the theory which trace

14 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

the principle of life from the original first
cause of the Cosmos, we find the soul as an
entity emerging from the animal kingdom and
passing into the earliest human forms, without
being at that time ripe for the higher intellec
tual life with which the present state of hu
manity renders us familiar. But through suc
cessive incarnations in forms whose physical
improvement, under the Darwinian law of
evolution, is constantly fitting them to be its
habitations at each return to objective life, it
gradually gathers that enormous range of ex
perience which is summed up in its higher de
velopment. In the intervals between its physi
cal incarnations, it prolongs and works out, and
finally exhausts or transmutes into so much ab
stract development, the personal experiences of
each life. This is the clue to that apparent
difficulty which besets the cruder form of the
theory of re-incarnation, which independent
speculation has sometimes thrown out. Each
man is unconscious of having led previous lives,
therefore he contends that subsequent lives can
afford him no compensations for this one. He
overlooks the enormous importance of the in
tervening spiritual condition, in which he by
no means forgets the personal adventures and
emotions he has just passed through, and in
which he distills them into so much cosmic

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 15

progress. In the following pages the elucida
tion of this profoundly interesting mystery is
attempted, and it will be seen that the view of
events now afforded us is not only a solution
of the problems of life and death, but of many
very perplexing experiences on the border land
between those conditions, — or rather between
physical and spiritual life, — which have en
gaged attention and speculation so widely of
recent years in most civilized countries.

It was time, in fact, that the esoteric doc
trine should be offered to modern thinkers
to assist them in grappling with the enigmas
which the spasmodic operation of very exalted
spiritual faculties in some cases — the manifes
tation of some extra-physical laws and forces
of Nature in others — have been latterly ac
cumulating on our hands in great abundance.
Rather, I imagine, because the conjectures put
forward to account for them were unacceptable
to the cultivated world at large, than because
the occurrence of extra-physical manifestations
of late years has been disbelieved altogether,
have most people been unwilling to pay close
attention to such occurrences. Nor is it neces
sary that they should do so now, in order to
reach an intellectual standpoint from which the
whole range of possibilities in regard to com
munications that may be established between

16 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

the seen and the unseen worlds may be broadly
comprehended. The higher culture of the East
has been concerned with the investigation, in
its own congenial retirement, of that side of Na
ture, while we in the West have been pushing
forward our physical civilization to its present
great height. Different races in the world ad
vance in this way along different lines of prog
ress ; or, rather, — to state the idea more sci
entifically in the light of the occult doctrine,
— all races have their cyclic progress to accom
plish, at one period of which they are concerned
with physical and at another with spiritual cul
ture. We of the white race in Europe and
America — embodying within the last few cen
turies one phase of the progress of our sub
section of humanity — have been concerned al
most entirely, during the historic period, with
the development of our material civilization.
Our religions, meanwhile, have had to do rather
with the maintenance of spiritual aspirations in
a potential state, than with the keen investiga
tion of the facts of Nature in the spiritual re
gion. We have keenly investigated these facts
on the physical plane, for that was the proper
function of our age ; but all earnestness of ef
fort on the part of Oriental races, in the mean
while, has been turned in another direction.
There, physical civilization has been stagnant,

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 17

material progress quite unimportant, but spirit*
ual aspirations have been not merely kept up
as an underlying sentiment in people's minds,
— they have operated to produce the greatest
manifestations of activity with which the race
has been concerned. I do not mean that the
Indian or any other Asiatic race has been as
active in writing books and publishing discov
eries in spiritual science as we in the West
have been with the literature and research of
physics. That kind of activity is itself a mani
festation of material civilization. But the Asi
atic races have fermented with capacities for
great spiritual development, and the conse
quence has been that many Eastern people
have devoted their lives to spiritual study and
research, always, of course, pursuing the meth
ods of research and the modes of life appro
priate to a cycle of spiritual progress, — meth
ods which lead the student of — and still more
the adept in — such science into seclusion and
secrecy.

Probably it may be due in some way to an
opposite fermentation of causes in the East and
the West now that a certain interchange of
methods begins to be possible. I do not mean
that the West is turning away yet from ma
terial civilization, nor the East slackening its
devotion to spirituality, but we here are cer-

18 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

tainly readier now than we were a generation
or two ago to recognize the possibility of ac
quiring real knowledge of spiritual science, and
are more generally impressed with the neces
sity of such acquisitions. The East on the other
hand has partially relaxed its hitherto inviola
ble reserve. The important movement of which
this little book is one outcome constitutes a
double illustration of the new tendency at last
discernible. It is discernible in several differ
ent ways to acute observers who once possess
themselves of the key to what is going on. But
it is only of that particular effort in which my
own willing services have been engaged that I
need now speak. A book more or less, in this
ocean of books which is constantly welling forth
from active Western civilization, may seem a
very small matter ; but to the highly conserva
tive devotees of occult science in the East, a
book which sets forth in plain language, which
all who run may read, the hitherto secret in
terpretations of Nature's spiritual design that
have hitherto been communicated only in the
deadliest secrecy to students of long absorption
in the pursuit of such teaching, constitutes a
violation of the old occult usage which is quite
bewildering and appalling. As my Brahman
critic above referred to points out, now that
the esoteric doctrine is once for all plainly

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 19

stated, it is seen to be embodied, a bit here
and a bit there, in the various sacred writings
of India. But at the same time it was nowhere
stated in such terms as to be comprehensible
without prolonged and special study. And for
the most part the doctrine, in so far as it was
stated, was wrapped in allegory that Western
readers have rarely had the patience to unravel.
To all intents and purposes, though the knowl
edge here set forth is no new discovery for those
by whom it is now revealed, it is a new revela
tion for the whole world, — Eastern and West
ern alike, — in its present explicit distinctness,
and has only been prepared for in the West,
but I trust prepared for sufficiently, by that
widespread seething interest in spiritual things
which has been working among us for some
years past.

This interest has been stimulated in various
ways. The casual occurrence of phenomena
linking our physical perceptions with the un
seen world has kindled an ardent enthusiasm
for inquiry along the path of investigation thus
pointed out, but the laws of Nature affecting
the vast realm of spiritual existence are far too
complicated to be discovered from an observa
tion of the phenomena of the relatively nar
row subdivision of that realm brought within
our cognizance almost exclusively by casual and

20 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

irregular occurrences of the kind referred to.
It is only with the help of esoteric science —
the accumulated experience of a great school of
inquirers, devoting faculties of the highest kind,
for a long series of ages, to the exploration
of spiritual mysteries — that a sufficiently wide
view of Nature can be obtained to embrace the
apparently disorderly phenomena of the astral
world, — the first beyond the physical frontier,
— in all-sufficing generalizations that cover the
whole scheme of spiritual evolution. These far-
reaching and magnificent conceptions of Nature
should not only recommend themselves, when
properly understood, to minds that have shrunk
from crude conclusions based on the imperfect
data of modern spiritual observation in the
West, but should also be recognized by modern
spiritualists themselves as calculated to purify
and expand their own doctrines, and guard
them from liability to underrate the grandeur
of the region into which they have partly
penetrated, by relying, for its interpretation,
too confidently on experiences gathered at its
threshold. For the theosophic teaching, which
has been too hastily resented by some spiritual
ists who have conceived it hostile to their own
acquired knowledge, will be discovered, on a
closer examination, to include these experi
ences, and only to disconcert some of the con-

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 21

elusions derived from them. It must be re
membered that my statements concerning the
phenomena of Kama loca, — the astral world,
from which most of the phenomena of spirit
ualism emanate, — have been the fruit of my
own questions and inquiries rather than a por
tion of a carefully adjusted series of lessons in
occult science, dictated by professors applying
themselves to the art of teaching. That, in
deed, has been the way in which the whole
body of exposition which this book contains
has been worked out, and it naturally follows
that some parts of it are less complete than
others, and that none can be much better than
general outlines. In esoteric science, as in mi
croscopy, the application of higher and higher
powers will always continue to reveal a grow
ing wealth of detail ; and the sketch of an or
ganism that appeared satisfactory enough when
its general proportions were first discerned, is
betrayed to be almost worse than insufficient
when a number of previously unsuspected minu
tiae are brought to notice. In this way, while
no mistake has been made as regards any state
ment actually put forward in the following
pages on the subject of human evolution after
death, there will be more, I apprehend, to add
to that part of the explanation in later expan
sions of it, if these become practicable, than to

22 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

any other. The points which, meanwhile, I
will ask spiritualist readers to bear in mind
are especially these :

1st. It is already indicated that the dissolu
tion of the human principles after death, though
one cannot help speaking of the process as one
of dispersion, is not actually a mechanical sepa
ration of parts, nor even a process analogous to
the chemical dissolution of a compound body
into elements on the same plane of matter.
The discussion of the process as if it were a
mechanical separation was represented from
the first as " a rough way of dealing with the
matter," and was adopted for the sake of em
phasizing the transition of consciousness from
one principle to another which goes on in the
astral world after death. This transition of
•consciousness is, in fact, the struggle between
the higher and lower duad.

2d. The struggle just referred to may be
regarded as an oscillation of consciousness be
tween the two duads ; and when the return of
consciousness to the lower principles, during
this struggle, is stimulated and encouraged by
converse with still living entities on the earth
plane, with the help of mediumship, the proper
spiritual growth of the entity in Kama loca is,
to that extent, — perhaps to a very consider
able extent, — retarded. It is this considers

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 23

tion which may, in a greater degree than any
other, account for the disapproval with which
the adepts of occult science regard the active
practice of spiritualistic intercourse with de
parted human beings. Such intercourse, though
dictated from this side by the purest affection,
may seriously retard and embarrass the spirit
ual development of those who have gone in
advance of us.

3d. It is recognized in the following pages
that intercourse between living human beings
gifted with a very elevated sort of mediumship,
or spiritual clairvoyance, and departed friends
with whom they have been closely united in
sympathy during life, is possible on the higher
spiritual plane, after such persons have passed
through the struggle of Kama loca and have
been completely spiritualized. That intercourse
may be of a more subtle kind than can readily
be realized by reference to examples of inter
course on the earth plane, but may evidently
be none the less exhilarating to the higher per
ceptions.

By dwelling on the points of contact between
the theosophic teachings and the experience of
the higher spiritualism, I think it will be found
that the alleged incompatibility of theosophy
and spiritualism is much less complete than is
supposed. It is impossible, I venture to assert,

24 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION.

that there can be any true psychic experience
which the doctrines of theosophy — or, to speak
more accurately, of that esoteric science of which
theosophy is the study — will fail to interpret
and explain. And if this partial exposition of
esoteric science may leave a good deal not yet
explained in the vast region of mystery which
separates death and re-birth, surely the revela
tions which are made here go far enough to es
tablish a good claim on our respectful attention
for the present, so that some embarrassments
they may still leave to trouble our understand
ing may fairly be passed to a suspense account,
while we await a further illumination, to be,
perhaps, obtainable hereafter.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE teachings embodied in the present vol
ume let in a flood of light on questions con
nected with Buddhist doctrine which have
deeply perplexed previous writers on that re
ligion, and offer the world for the first time a
practical clue to the meaning of almost all
ancient religious symbolism. More than this,
the esoteric doctrine, when properly under
stood, will be found to advance an overpower
ing claim on the attention of earnest thinkers.
Its tenets are not presented to us as the in
vention of any founder or prophet ; its testi
mony is based on no written scriptures ; its
views of Nature have been evolved by the re
searches of an immense succession of investiga
tors, qualified for their task by the possession
of spiritual faculties and perceptions of a higher
order than those belonging to ordinary human
ity. In the course of ages, the block of knowl
edge thus accumulated, concerning the origin
of the world and of man, and the ultimate des-

26 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

times of our race, — concerning also the na
ture of other worlds and states of existence dif
fering from those of our present life, — checked
and examined at every point, verified in all
directions, and constantly under examination
throughout, has come to be looked on by its
custodians as constituting the absolute truth
concerning spiritual things, the actual state of
the facts regarding vast regions of vital activ
ity lying beyond this earthly existence.

European philosophy, whether concerned
with religion or pure metaphysics, has so long
been used to a sense of insecurity in specula
tions outrunning the limits of physical experi
ment, that absolute truth about spiritual tilings
is hardly recognized any longer by prudent
thinkers as a reasonable object of pursuit ; but
different habits of thought have been acquired
in Asia,. The secret doctrine which, to a con
siderable extent, I am now enabled to expound,
is regarded not only by all its adherents, but
by vast numbers who have never expected to
know more of it than that such a doctrine ex
ists, as a mine of entirely trustworthy knowl
edge, from which all religions and philosophies
have derived whatever they possess of truth,
and with which every religion must coincide if
it claims to be a mode of expression for truth.

This is a bold claim indeed, but I venture to

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 27

announce the following exposition as one of
immense importance to the world, because I
believe that claim can be substantiated.

I do not say that within the compass of
this volume the authenticity of the esoteric
doctrine can be proved. Such proof cannot
be given by any process of argument ; only
through the development in each inquirer for
himself of the faculties required for the direct
observation of Nature along the lines indicated.
But his primd facie conclusion may be deter
mined by the extent to which the views of
Nature about to be unfolded may recommend
themselves to his mind, and by the reasons
which exist for trusting the powers of observa
tion of those by whom they are communicated.
Will it be supposed that the very magnitude
of the claim now made on behalf of the eso
teric doctrine, lifts the present statement out
of the • region of inquiry to which its title re
fers, — inquiry as to the real inner meaning of
the definite and specific religion called Bud
dhism? The fact is, however, that esoteric
Buddhism, though by no means divorced from
the associations of exoteric Buddhism, must not
be conceived to constitute a mere imperium in
imperio, — a central school of culture in the
vortex of the Buddhist world. In proportion
as Buddhism retreats into the inner penetralia

28 /'/,•/:/•. ir/' i'o mi.:

1)1 il.S laifll, lhe;;e are folllKl fo mr |-}>;r info the
ini.rr penetralia, of other fa.ilhs. Tin- ru:;mi<-
conceptions, and I lie knou led<;r of Nature on
\vlnrli r.uddliisin not, merely rests, hut which
• •on.,t,ilnl,c csotcri<- r.iid.lliisni, c(|ii:illy consli-
1'il.r <':ioh-ric Km liinil nisin. And j,h(' c,s<»|,rri<'
ilncl.rinn is 1,1ms rr^mli-d l>y those of ;dl creeds
\\lio :uv ik«-idi)dilriird " ( in MK> I '.ndd hist, sense)

:i- lli<' :i.l>si>lnl.e IriiMi e -eniin^ Niilnrc^ MJI.II,

t'i<- ni-i-n,, of Mie Universe, ;iml Mie deslinies
lou.-ird \\lncli ils iiili;i.l)i|,;i.nl,s ;u-e lending. ;\ fc
llie;;:nne 1 1 me, exolcric I inddliisin IIJI.H reinnined
in closer union \viMi Hie esoteric, docl.rine tli:m
••iiiy oilier |)o|)ul:ir reli-ioii. An exjtosilion of
Hie inner knowledge ;id<lressed to I^n^lish i'e;id-
ers in (lie presenl, d;i y, will llins ;issoci;il,e ilsell'
iiTe:;i:;lildy \\illi r.-uni li:i r out lines of Huddli'isf,
Ic.'icliin^. If, \\ill cerl.-iinly iiii|i;irl, lo !lie;e ;i.
living ineiiniiiij; Miey ^rurndly seem lo he \\illi-
oul, l>nl, .ill (he more on I his ncconnl, inny Ihe
•soleric doclrine he mosl, <-on venieiilJ y si ndied
^11 I!M Buddhist :is|»ec(, ; one, moi'eover, \\liicli
li:is heen so .sl.nnijrly impi-essed upon il,
Mie lime of ( lanhini;), I '.iiddliu, lh;il, llioujdi M
Mttnoe of Mir doctrine diiles hack lo ;i, l';ir
remote mil i.piil y, |,|u- liinMliisl. coloring |I:,.H
no\\ permealed its \vliole snhslancr. Thai,
vvliii-li 1 am ahont, |<> put, hefore the reader /«
esoteric l>uddliisin, and for 10nroj>ea,n stndentx

rn i'in<: I--/KW KDITION. 20

approaching ii, for the lirst time, any other des
ignation \v«»iild Ix- ;i, misnomer.

The statement I have to ma.ke must be eon
sidcred in its entirely before UK- reader will \H:
a,ble l.o c()iii|n-elicii(l why inilia.les in I, In; OHO-
j.cric doe! line r«'««;;inl t.he concession involve<| in
Mn; present, disclosure- of t,he ^n-iHTii.! outlines
of this doctrine ;is one of sl;i,rtJin^ magnitude*
( )ne e\|>l;ui;ilion of this feeling, hovvev<-r, m;ty
lie rc;idily seen to .spring from the, extreme
:,;icr<'dne.ss Mi;i.l. h;is ;il\v;i,ys been attached by
llie.ir ;uieient, .^iia,rdi;uis l,o Mio inner vil.'d trntJis
of Nature. MiUierl.o this sarredintss has al-

;» |»re ;ei ii)ed their a,l)solnt,<; concealment

from the prol'iine herd. And so fill1 JIS t,h;i,l,

policy of concealment — the tradition «i count

less ;i|res — is now bein^ ^iven up, the. new de-
par! lire which t,ln» appca,ranc<> of this volume:
:,i"iiaii/es will he coiit (>.nipl:it e< I with surprise,
and regret l>y ;i <n'ea,t many iniliaied disciple;.
'I'he snrr(;nder to ciili<-ism, which m:iy some-
tiiin-:; perhaps l>e cliiinsy and irreverent,, of doc
trines which have hitherto been regarded l>y
such persons as too majestic in their import, to
be taJked of at a,ll except under circumstances
of lielil.lin.r solemnity, will seem to them a, ter
rible profanation of the <.-;reat mysteries. I'Yom
the Kiiropea.n poinl. <»f view it would be mi-
le to expect (Jia,l sn«-h a book as this

BO PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

can be exempt from the usual rough-and-tumble
treatment of new ideas ; and special convictions
or commonplace bigotry may sometimes ren
der such treatment in the present case pecul
iarly inimical. But all that, though a matter
of course to European exponents of the doc
trine like myself, will seem very grievous and
disgusting to its earlier and more regular repre
sentatives. They will appeal sadly to the wis
dom of the time-honored rule which, in the old
symbolical way, forbade the initiates from cast
ing pearls before swine.

Happily, as I think, the rule has not been
allowed to operate any longer to the prejudice
of those who, while still far from being initi
ated, in the occult sense of the term, will prob
ably have become, by sheer force of modern
culture, qualified to appreciate the concession.

Part of the information contained in the fol
lowing pages has been thrown out in a frag
mentary form during the last eighteen months
in " The Theosophist," a monthly magazine,
published hitherto at Bombay, but now at
Madras, by the leaders of the Theosophical So
ciety. As almost all the articles referred to
have been my own writing, I have not hesi
tated to weld parts of them, when this course
has been convenient, into the present volume.
A certain advantage is gained by thus showing

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 31

how the separate pieces of the mosaic, as first
presented to public notice, drop naturally into
their places in the (comparatively) finished
pavement.

The doctrine or system now disclosed in its
broad outlines has been so jealously guarded
hitherto, that no mere literary researches, though
they might have currycombed all India, could
have brought to light any morsel of the infor
mation thus revealed. It is given out to the
world at last by the free grace of those in whose
keeping it has hitherto lain. Nothing could ever
have extorted from them its very first letter. It
is only after a perusal of the present explanations
thaf their position generally, as regards their
present disclosures or their previous reticence,
can be criticised or even comprehended. The
views of Nature now put forward are altogether
unfamiliar to European thinkers ; the policy of
the graduates in esoteric knowledge, which has
grown out of their long intimacy with these
views, must be considered in connection with
the peculiar bearings of the doctrine itself.

As for the circumstances under which these
revelations were first foreshadowed in " The
Theosophist," and are now rounded off and ex
panded as my readers will perceive, it is enough
for the moment to say, that the Theosophical
Society, through my connection with which the

32 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

materials dealt with in this volume have come
into my hands, owes its establishment to certain
persons who -are among the custodians of eso
teric science. The information poured out at
last for the benefit of all who are ripe to receive
it has been destined for communication to the
world through the Theosophical Society since
the foundation of that body, and later circum
stances only have indicated myself as the agent
through whom the communication could be con
veniently made.

Let me add, that I do not regard myself as
the sole exponent for the outer world, at this
crisis, of esoteric truth. These teachings are the
final outcome, as regards philosophical knowl
edge, of the relations with the outer world
which have been established by the custodians
of esoteric truth, through me. And it is only
regarding the acts and intentions of those eso
teric teachers who have chosen to work through
me, that I can have any certain knowledge.
But, in different ways, some other writers are
engaged in expounding for the benefit of the
world — and, as I believe, in accordance with a
great plan, of which this volume is a part —
the same truths, in different aspects, that I am
commissioned to unfold. A remarkable book,
published within the last year or two, "The
Perfect Way," may be specially mentioned, as

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 33

showing how more roads than one may lead
to a mountain-top. The inner inspirations of
" The Perfect Way " appear to me identical with
the philosophy that I have learned. The sym
bols in which those inspirations are clothed, in
my opinion, I am bound to add, are liable to
mislead the student ; but this is a natural con
sequence of the circumstances under which
the inner inspiration has been received. Far
more important and interesting to me than the
discrepancies between the teachings of " The
Perfect Way " and my own, are the identities
that may be traced between the clear scientific
explanations now conveyed to me on the plane
of the physical intellect, and the ideas which
manifestly underlie those communicated on an
altogether different system to the authors of
the book I mention. These identities are a
great deal too close to be the result either of
coincidence or parallel speculation.

Probably the great activity at present of
mere ordinary literary speculation on problems
lying beyond the range of physical knowledge,
may also be in some way provoked by that
policy, on the part of the great custodians of
esoteric truth, of which my own book is cer
tainly one manifestation, and the volume I
have just mentioned, probably another. I find,
for example, in M. Adolphe d'Assier's recently

3

34 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

published " Essai sur rHumanite* Posthume,"
some conjectures respecting the destination of
the higher human principles after death, which
are infused with quite a startling flavor of
true occult knowledge. Again, the ardor now
shown in " Psychical Research," by the very
distinguished, highly gifted, and cultivated men
who lead the society in London devoted to that
object, is, to my inner convictions, — knowing,
as I do, something of the way the spiritual
aspirations of the world are silently influenced
by those whose work lies in that department of
Nature, — the obvious fruit of efforts parallel to
those with which I am more immediately con
cerned.

It only remains for me to disclaim, on behalf
of the treatise which ensues, any pretension to
high finish as regards the language in which it
is cast. Longer familiarity with the vast and
complicated scheme of cosmogony disclosed,
will no doubt suggest improvements in the
phraseology employed to expound it. Two
years ago, neither I nor any other European
living knew the alphabet of the science here
for the first time put into a scientific shape, —
or subject, at all events, to an attempt in that
direction, — the science of spiritual causes and
their effects, of super-physical consciousness,
of cosmical evolution. Though, as I have ex-

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 35

plained above, ideas had begun to offer them
selves to the world in more or less embarrassing
disguise of mystic symbology, no attempt had
ever been made by any esoteric teacher, two
years back, to put the doctrine forward in its
plain abstract purity. As my own instruction
progressed on those lines, I have had to coin
phrases and suggest English words as equiv
alents for the ideas which were presented to
my mind. I am by no means convinced that
in all cases I have coined the best possible
phrases and hit on the most neatly expressive
words. For example, at the threshold of the
subject we come upon the necessity of giving
some name to the various elements or attributes
of which the complete human creature is made
up. " Element " would be an impossible word
to use, on account of the confusion that would
arise from its use in other significations ; and
the least objectionable, on the whole, seemed to
me u principle," though to an ear trained in the
niceties of metaphysical expression this word
will have a very unsatisfactory sound in some
of its present applications. Quite possibly,
therefore, in progress of time the Western
nomenclature of the esoteric doctrine may be
greatly developed in advance of that I have
provisionally constructed. The Oriental no
menclature is far more elaborate, but metaphys-

86 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

ical Sanskrit seems to be painfully embarrassing
to a translator, — the fault, my India friends
assure me, not of Sanskrit, but of the language
in which they are now required to express the
Sanskrit idea. Eventually we may find that,
with the help of a little borrowing from familiar
Greek quarries, English may prove more re
ceptive of the new doctrine — or, rather, of the
primeval doctrine as newly disclosed — than
has yet been supposed possible in the East.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

ESOTERIC TEACHERS.

PAGE

Nature of the Present Exposition. — Seclusion of
Eastern Knowledge. — The Arhats and their At
tributes. — The Mahatmas. — Occultists generally.

— Isolated Mystics. — Inferior Yogis. — Occult
Training. — The Great Purpose. — Its Incidental *
Consequences. — Present Concessions .... 41

CHAPTER II.

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

Esoteric Cosmogony. — Where to Begin. — Working
back from Man to Universe. — Analysis of Man.

— The Seven Principles 60

CHAPTER HI.

THE PLANETARY CHAIN.

Esoteric Views of Evolution. — The Chain of Globes.

— Progress of Man round them. — The Spiral
Advance. — Original Evolution of the Globes. —
The Lower Kingdoms 75

38 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IV.

THE WORLD PERIODS.

PAGE

Uniformity of Nature. — Rounds and Races. — The
Septenary Law. — Objective and Subjective Lives.

— Total Incarnations. — Former Races on Earth.

— Periodic Cataclysms. — Atlantis. — Lemuria.

— The Cyclic Law 94

CHAPTER V.

DEVACHAN.

Spiritual Destinies of the Ego. — Karma. — Divis
ion of the Principles at Death. — Progress of the
Higher Duad. — Existence in Devachan. — Sub
jective Progress. — Avitchi. — Earthly Connection
with Devachan. — Devachanic Periods . . . .121

CHAPTER VI.

OKAMA LOCA.
5 Astral Shell. — Its Habitat. — Its Nature. —
urviving Impulses. — Elementals. — Mediums
ad Shells. — Accidents and Suicides. — Lost Per-
Dnalities 150

CHAPTER VII.

THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE.

Progress of the Main Wave. — Obscurations. — Twi
light and Dawn of Evolution. — Our Neighboring

CONTENTS. 39

PAGE

Planets.— Gradations of Spirituality.— Prematurely
Developed Egos. — Intervals of Re-Incarnation .171

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY.

The Choice of Good or Evil. — The Second Half
of Evolution. — The Decisive Turning-Point. —
Spirituality and Intellect. — The Survival of the
Fittest. — The Sixth Sense. — Development of
the Principles in their Order. — The Subsidence
of the Unfit. — Provision for All. — The Excep
tional Cases. — Their Scientific Explanation. —
Justice Satisfied. — The Destiny of Failures. —
Human Evolution Reviewed 188

CHAPTER IX.

BUDDHA.

The Esoteric Buddha. — Re-Incarnations of Adepts.

— Buddha's Incarnation. — The Seven Buddhas
of the Great Races. — Avalokiteshwara. — Addi
Buddha. — Adeptship in Buddha's Time. — San-
karacharya. — Vedantin Doctrines. — Tsong-ka-pa.

— Occult Reforms in Tibet . 209

CHAPTER X.

NIRVANA.

Its Remoteness. — Preceding Gradations. — Par
tial Nirvana. — The Threshold of Nirvana. — Nir-

40 CONTENTS.

PAGE

vana. — Para Nirvana. — Buddha and Nirvana. —
Nirvana attained by Adepts. — General Progress
towards Nirvana. — Conditions of its Attainment.

— Spirituality and Religion. — The Pursuit of
Truth 233

CHAPTER XL

THE UNIVERSE.

The Days and Nights of Brahma. — The Various
Manvantaras and Pralayas. — The Solar System.
The Universal Pralaya. — Recommencement of
Evolution. — " Creation." — The Great First
Cause. — The Eternal Cyclic Process .... 246

CHAPTER XII.

THE DOCTRINE RK VIE WED.

Correspondences of the Esoteric Doctrine with Visi
ble Nature. — Free Will and Predestination. —
The Origin of Evil. — Geology, Biology, and the
Esoteric Teaching. — Buddhism and Scholarship.

— The Origin of all Things. — The Doctrine as
Distorted. — The Ultimate Dissolution of Con
sciousness. — Transmigration. — The Soul and the
Spirit. — Personality and Individuality. — Karma 265

ESOTEEIO BUDDHISM.

CHAPTER I.

ESOTERIC TEACHERS.

THE information contained in the following
pages is no collection of inferences deduced
from study. I am bringing to my readers
knowledge which I have obtained by favor
rather than by effort. It will not be found
the less valuable on that account ; I venture,
on the contrary, to declare that it will be found
of incalculably greater value, easily as I have
obtained it, than any results in a similar direc
tion which I could possibly have procured by
ordinary methods of research, even had I pos
sessed, in the highest degree, that which I
make no claim to possess at all, Oriental schol
arship.

Every one who has been concerned with In
dian literature, and still more, any one who in
India has taken interest in talking with culti
vated natives on philosophical subjects, will be

42 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

aware of a general conviction existing in the
East that there are men living who know a
great deal more about philosophy, in the high
est acceptation of the word, — the science, the
true knowledge of spiritual things, — than can
be found recorded in any books. In Europe
the notion of secrecy as applied to science is so
repulsive to the prevailing instinct, that the
first inclination of European thinkers is to deny
the existence of that which they so much dis
like. Bat circumstances have fully assured me
during my residence in India that the convic
tion just referred to is perfectly well founded,
and I have been privileged at last to receive a
very considerable mass of instruction in the
hitherto secret knowledge over which Oriental
philosophers have brooded silently till now;
instruction which has hitherto been only im
parted to sympathetic students, prepared them
selves to migrate into the camp of secrecy.
Their teachers have been more than content
that all other inquirers should be left in doubt
as to whether there was anything of importance
to learn at their hands.

With quite as much antipathy at starting
as any one could have entertained to the old
Oriental policy in regard to knowledge, I came
nevertheless to perceive that the old Oriental
knowledge itself was a very real and important

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 43

possession. It may be excusable to regard the
high grapes as sour, so long as they are quite
out of reach ; but it would be foolish to persist
in that opinion if a tall friend hands down a
bunch, and one finds them sweet.

For reasons that will appear, as the present
explanations proceed, the very considerable
block of hitherto secret teaching this volume
contains, has been conveyed to me, not only
without conditions of the usual kind, but to
the express end that I might convey it in my
turn to the world at large.

Without the light of hitherto secret Oriental
knowledge, it is impossible by any study of its
published literature, English or Sanskrit, for
students of even the most scholarly qualifica
tions to reach a comprehension of the inner
doctrines and real meaning of any Oriental
religion. This assertion conveys no reproach
to the sympathetic, learned, and industrious
writers of great ability who have studied Ori
ental religions generally, and Buddhism espe
cially, in their external aspects. Buddhism,
above 8.11, is a religion which has enjoyed a
dual existence from the very beginning of its
introduction to the world. The real inner
meaning of its doctrines has been kept back
from uninitiated students, while the outer
teachings have merely presented the multitude

44 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

with a code of moral lessons, and a veiled,
symbolical literature, hinting at the existence
of knowledge in the background.

This secret knowledge, in reality, long ante-
dated the passage through earth-life of Gau
tama Buddha. Brahmanical philosophy, in
ages before Buddha, embodied the identical
doctrine which may now be described as Eso
teric Buddhism. Its outlines had indeed been
blurred, its scientific form partially confused,
but the general body of knowledge was already
in possession of a select few before Buddha
came to deal with it. Buddha, however, un
dertook the task of revising and refreshing the
esoteric science of the inner circle of initiates,
as well as the morality of the outer world. The
circumstances under which this work was done
have been wholly misunderstood, nor would a
straightforward explanation thereof be intelli
gible without explanations, which must first be
furnished by a survey of the esoteric science
itself.

From Buddha's time till now the esoteric sci
ence referred to has been jealously guarded as
a precious heritage belonging exclusively to
regularly initiated members of mysteriously or
ganized associations. These, so far as Bud
dhism is concerned, are the Arahats, or, more
properly, Arhats, referred to in Buddhist liter-

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 45

ature. They are the initiates who tread the
" fourth path of holiness," spoken of in esoteric
Buddhist writings. Mr. Rhys Davids, refer
ring to a multiplicity of original texts and
Sanskrit authorities, says : " One might fill
pages with the awe-struck and ecstatic praise
which is lavished in Buddhist writings on this
condition of mind, the fruit of the fourth path,
the state of an Arahat, of a man made perfect
according to the Buddhist faith." And then
making a series of running quotations from
Sanskrit authorities, he says : " To him who
has finished the path and passed beyond sor
row, who has freed himself on all sides, thrown
away every fetter, there is no more fever or
grief. . . . For such there are no more births,
. . . they are in the enjoyment of Nirvana.
Their old karma is exhausted, no new karma
is being produced ; their hearts are free from
the longing after future life, and no new yearn
ings springing up within them, they, the wise,
are extinguished like a lamp." These passages,
and all like thorn, convey to European readers,
at all events, an entirely false idea as to what
sort of person an Arhat really is, as to the life
he leads while on earth, and what he antici
pates later on. But the elucidation of such
points may be postponed for the moment.
Some further passages from exoteric treatises

46 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

may first be selected to show what an Arhat is
generally supposed to be.

Mr. Rhys Davids, speaking of Jliana and
Samadhi, — the belief that it was possible by
intense self-absorption to attain supernatural
faculties and powers, — goes on to say: "So
far as I am aware, no instance is recorded of
any one, not either a member of the order,
or a Brahman ascetic, acquiring these powers.
A Buddha always possessed them ; whether
Arahats, as such, could work the particular
miracles in question, and whether of mendicants
only, Arahats or only Asekhas could do so, is at
present not clear." Very little in the sources
of information on the subject that have hitherto
been explored will be found clear. But I am
now merely endeavoring to show that Bud
dhist literature teems with allusions to the
greatness and powers of the Arhats. For more
intimate knowledge concerning them, special
circumstances must furnish us with the required
explanations.

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in " Buddha and Early
Buddhism," tells us: "Six supernatural fac
ulties were expected of the ascetic before he
could claim the grade of Arhat. They are
constantly alluded to in the Sutras as the six
supernatural faculties, usually without further
specification. . . . Man has a body composed

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 47

of the four elements. ... In this transitory body
his intelligence is enchained. The ascetic find
ing himself thus confused, directs his mind to
the creation of the Manas. He represents to
himself, in thought, another body created from
this material body, — a body with a form,
members, and organs. This body, in relation
to the material body, is like the sword and the
scabbard, or a serpent issuing from a basket in
which it is confined. The ascetic then, purified
and perfected, begins to practice supernatural
faculties. He finds himself able to pass through
material obstacles, walls, ramparts, etc. ; he is
able to throw his phantasmal appearance into
many places at once, ... he can leave this
world and even reach the heaven of Brahma
himself. . . . He acquires the power of hearing
the sounds of the unseen world as distinctly as
those of the phenomenal world, — more dis
tinctly, in point of fact. Also by the power of
Manas he is able to read the most secret
thoughts of others, and to tell their characters."
And so on with illustrations. Mr. Lillie has
not quite accurately divined the nature of the
truth lying behind this popular version of the
facts ; but it is hardly necessary to quote more
to show that the powers of the Arhats and their
insight into spiritual things are respected by
the world of Buddhism most profoundly, even

48 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

though the Arhats themselves have been singu
larly indisposed to favor the world with auto
biographies or scientific accounts of "the six
supernatural powers."

A few sentences from Mr. Hoey's recent
translation of Dr. Oldenberg's "Buddha: his
Life, his Doctrine, his Order," may fall con
veniently into this place, and then we may pass
on. We read : " Buddhist proverbial philos
ophy attributes in innumerable passages the
possession of Nirvana to the saint who still
treads the earth, 4 The disciple who has put off
lust and desire, rich in wisdom, has here on
earth attained deliverance from death, the rest,
the Nirvana, the eternal state. He who has
escaped from the trackless hard mazes of the
Sansara, who has crossed over and reached the
shore, self - absorbed, without stumbling and
without doubt, who has delivered himself from
the earthly and attained Nirvana, him I call a
true Brahman.' If the saint will even now put
an end to his state of being, he can do so, but
the majority stand fast until Nature has reached
her goal ; of such may those words be said which
are put in the mouth of the most prominent of
Buddha's disciples, < I long not for death ;
I long not for life ; I wait till mine hour come,
like a servant who awaiteth his reward.' "

A multiplication of such quotations would

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 49

merely involve the repetition in various forms
of exoteric conceptions concerning the Arhats.
Like every fact or thought in Buddhism, the
Arhat has two aspects, that in which he is pre
sented to the world at large, and that in which
he lives, moves, and has his being. In the
popular estimation he is a saint waiting for a
spiritual reward of the kind the populace can
understand, — a wonder-worker meanwhile by
favor of supernatural agencies. In reality he
is the long-tried and proved-worthy custodian
of the deepest and innermost philosophy of
the one fundamental religion which Buddha re
freshed and restored, and a student of natural
science standing in the very foremost front of
human knowledge, in regard not merely to the
mysteries of spirit, but to the material constitu
tion of the world as well.

Arhat is a Buddhist designation. That
which is more familiar in India, . where the
attributes of Arhatship are not necessarily
associated with professions of Buddhism, is
Mahatma. With stories about the Mahatrnas
India is saturated. The older Mahatmas are
generally spoken of as Rishis ; but the terms
are interchangeable, and I have heard the title
Rishi applied to men now living. All the at
tributes of the Arhats mentioned in Buddhist
writings are described, with no less reverence,
4

50 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

in Indian literature as those of the Mahatmas ;
and this volume might be readily filled with
translations of vernacular books, giving accounts
of miraculous achievements by such of them as
are known to history and tradition by name.

In reality, the Arhats and the Mahatmas are
the same men. At that level of spiritual ex
altation, supreme knowledge of the esoteric
doctrine blends all original sectarian distinc
tions. By whatever name such illuminati may
be called, they are the adepts of occult knowl
edge, sometimes spoken of in India now as the
Brothers, and the custodians of the spiritual
science which has been handed down to them
by their predecessors.

We may search both ancient and modern lit
erature in vain, however, for any systematic
explanation of their doctrine or science. A
good deal of this is dimly set forth in occult
writing ; but very little of this is of the least
use to readers who take up the subject without
previous knowledge acquired independently of
books. It is under favor of direct instruction
from one of their numbers that I am now en'
abled to attempt an outline of the Mahatmas'
teaching, and it is in the same way that I have
picked up what I know concerning the organ
ization to which most of them, and the great*
est, in the present day belong.

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 61

Ail over the world there are occultists of vari
ous degrees of eminence, and occult fraternities
even, which have a great deal in common with
the leading fraternity now established in Tibet.
But all my inquiries into the subject have con
vinced me that the Tibetan Brotherhood is
incomparably the highest of such associations,
and regarded as such by all other associations,
— worthy of being looked upon themselves as
really " enlightened " in the occult sense of
the term. There are, it is true, many isolated
mystics in India who are altogether self-taught
and unconnected with occult bodies. Many of
these will explain that they themselves attain
to higher pinnacles of spiritual enlightenment
than the Brothers of Tibet, or any other peo
ple on earth. But the examination of such
claims in all cases I have encountered would,
I think, lead any impartial outsider, however
little qualified himself by personal development
to be a judge of occult enlightenment, to the
conclusion that they are altogether unfounded.
I know one native of India, for example, a man
of European education, holding a high appoint
ment under government, of good station in
society, most elevated character, and enjoying
unusual respect with such Europeans as are
concerned with him in official life, who will
only accord to the Brothers of Tibet a second

52 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

place in the world of spiritual enlightenment.
The first place he regards as occupied by one
person, now in this world no longer, — his own
occult master in life, — whom he resolutely
asserts to have been an incarnation of the
Supreme Being. His own (my friend's) inner
senses were so far awakened by this Master,
that the visions of his entranced state, into
which he can still throw himself at will, are to
him the only spiritual region in which he can
feel interested. Convinced that the Supreme
Being was his personal instructor from the be
ginning, and continues so still in the subjective
state, he is naturally inaccessible to suggestions
that his impressions may be distorted by rea
son of his own misdirected psychological de
velopment. Again, the highly cultivated dev
otees, to be met with occasionally in India,
who build up a conception of Nature, the uni
verse, and God entirely on a metaphysical
basis, and who have evolved their systems by
sheer force of transcendental thinking, will
take some established system of philosophy as
its groundwork, and amplify on this to an
extent which only an Oriental metaphysician
could dream of. They win disciples who put
implicit faith in them, and found their little
school, which flourishes for a time within its
own limits ; but speculative philosophy of such

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 53

a kind is rather occupation for the mind than
knowledge. Such " Masters," by comparison
with the organized adepts of the highest
brotherhood, are like rowing boats compared
with ocean steamships, — helpful conveyances
on their own native lake or river, but not craft
to whose protection you can trust yourself on a
world-wide voyage of exploration over the sea.

Descending lower again in the scale, we find
India dotted all over with Yogis and Fakirs, in
all stages of self-development, from that of dirty
savages, but little elevated above the gypsy for
tune-tellers of an English race-course, to men
whose seclusion a stranger will find it very dif
ficult to penetrate, and whose abnormal facul
ties and powers need only be seen or experi
enced to shatter the incredulity of the most
contented representative of modern Western
skepticism. Careless inquirers are very apt to
confound such persons with the great adepts of
whom they may vaguely hear.

Concerning the real adepts, meanwhile, I
cannot at present venture on any account of
what the Tibetan organization is like, as re
gards its highest ruling authorities. Those
Mahatmas themselves, of whom some more
or less adequate conception may perhaps be
formed by readers who will follow me pa
tiently to the end, are subordinate by several

54 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

degrees to the chief of all. Let us deal rather
with the earlier conditions of occult training,
which can more easily be grasped.

The level of elevation which constitutes a
man — what the outer world calls a Mahatma
or " Brother " — is only attained after pro
longed and weary probation, and anxious or
deals of really terrible severity. One may find
people who have spent twenty or thirty years
or more in blameless and arduous devotion to
the life-task on which they have entered, and
are still in the earlier degrees of chelaship, still
looking up to the heights of adeptship as far
above their heads. And at whatever age a boy
or man dedicates himself to the occult career,
he dedicates himself to it, be it remembered,
without any reservations and for life. The task
he undertakes is the development in himself of
a great many faculties and attributes which are
so utterly dormant in ordinary mankind, that
their very existence is unsuspected, the possi
bility of their development denied. And these
faculties and attributes must be developed by
the chela himself, with very little, if any, help,
beyond guidance and direction from his master.
" The adept," says an occult aphorism, " be
comes : he is not made." One may illustrate
this point by reference to a very commonplace
physical exercise. Every man living, having

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 65

fche ordinary use of his limbs, is qualified to
swim. But put those who, as the common
phrase goes, cannot swim, into deep water, and
they will struggle and be drowned. The mere
way to move the limbs is no mystery ; but un
less the swimmer, in moving them, has a full
belief that such movement will produce the
required result, the required result is not pro
duced. In this case, we are dealing with me.
chanical forces merely, but the same principle
runs up into dealings with subtler forces. Very
much further than people generally imagine
will mere "confidence" carry the occult neo
phyte. How many European readers, who
would be quite incredulous if told of some re
sults which occult chelas in the most incipient
stages of their training have to accomplish by
sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in
church, nevertheless, the familiar biblical as
surances of the power which resides in faith,
and let the words pass by like the wind, leav
ing no impression.

The great end and purpose of adeptship is
the achievement of spiritual development, the
nature of which is only veiled and disguised
by the common phrases of exoteric language.
That the adept seeks to unite his soul with
God, that he may thereby pass into Nirvana, is
a statement that conveys no definite meaning

56 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

to the ordinary reader ; and the more he ex
amines it with the help of ordinary books and
methods, the less likely will he be to realize
the nature of the process contemplated or of
the condition desired. It will be necessary to
deal first with the esoteric conception of Na
ture, and the origin and destinies of Man,
which differ widely from theological concep
tions, before an explanation of the aim which
the adept pursues can become intelligible.
Meanwhile, however, it is desirable, at the very
outset, to disabuse the reader of one misconcep
tion in regard to the objects of adeptship that
he may very likely have framed.

The development of those spiritual faculties,
whose culture has to do with the highest ob
jects of the occult life, gives rise as it pro
gresses to a great deal of incidental knowledge,
having to do with physical laws of Nature not
yet generally understood. This knowledge, and
the practical art of manipulating certain ob
scure forces of Nature, which it brings in its
train, invest an adept, and even an adept's
pupils, at a comparatively early stage of their
education, with very extraordinary powers, the
application of which to matters of daily life
will sometimes produce results that seem alto
gether miraculous ; and, from the ordinary
point of view, the acquisition of apparently

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 57

miraculous power is such a stupendous achieve
ment, that people are sometimes apt to fancy
the adept's object in seeking the knowledge he
attains has been to invest himself with these
coveted powers. It would be as reasonable to
say of any great patriot of military history that
his object in becoming a soldier had been to
wear a gay uniform and impress the imagina
tion of the nurse-maids.

The Oriental method of cultivating knowl
edge has always differed diametrically from
that pursued in the West during the growth
of modern science. Whilst Europe has investi
gated Nature as publicly as possible, every step
being discussed with the utmost freedom, and
every fresh fact acquired circulated at once
for the benefit of all, Asiatic science has been
studied secretly and its conquests jealously
guarded. I need not as yet attempt either
criticism or defense of its methods. But at
all events these methods have been relaxed to
some extent in my own case ; and, as already
stated, it is with the full consent of my teach
ers that I now follow the bent of my own in
clinations as a European, and communicate
what I have learned to all who may be will
ing to receive it. Later on it will be seen how
the departure from the ordinary rules of occult
study embodied in the concessions now made,
falls naturally into its place in the whole scheme

58 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

of occult philosophy. The approaches to that
philosophy have always been open, in one sense,
to all. Vaguely throughout the world in vari
ous ways has been diffused the idea that some
process of study which men here and there did
actually follow, might lead to the acquisition of
a higher kind of knowledge than that taught
to mankind at large in books or by public relig
ious preachers. The East, as pointed out, has
always been more than vaguely impressed with
this belief; but even in the West the whole
block of symbolical literature relating to astrol
ogy, alchemy, and mysticism generally has fer
mented in European society, carrying to some
few peculiarly receptive and qualified minds
the conviction that behind all this superficially
meaningless nonsense great truths lay con
cealed. For such persons eccentric study has
sometimes revealed hidden passages leading to
the grandest imaginable realms of enlighten
ment. But till now, in all such cases, in ac
cordance with the law of those schools, the neo
phyte no sooner forced his way into the region
of mystery, than he was bound over to the most
inviolable secrecy as to everything connected
with his entrance and further progress there.
In Asia, in the same way, the chela, or pupil
of occultism, no sooner became a chela than he
ceased to be a witness on behalf of the reality
of occult knowledge. I have been astonished

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 59

to find, since my own connection with the sub
ject, how numerous such chelas are. But it is
impossible to imagine any human act more im
probable than the unauthorized revelation by
any such chela, to persons in the outer world,
that he is one ; and so the great esoteric school
of philosophy successfully guards its seclusion.

In a former book, "The Occult World," I
have given a full and straightforward narrative
of the circumstances under which I came in con
tact with the gifted and deeply instructed men
from whom I have since obtained the teaching
this volume contains. I need not repeat the
story. I now come forward prepared to deal
with the subject in a new way. The existence
of occult adepts, and the importance of their
acquirements, may be established along two dif
ferent lines of argument : firstly, by means of
external evidence, — the testimony of qualified
witnesses, the manifestation by or through per
sons connected with adepts of abnormal facul
ties, affording more than a presumption of ab
normally enlarged knowledge ; secondly, by the
presentation of such a considerable portion of
this knowledge as may convey intrinsic assur
ances of its own value. My first book pro
ceeded by the former method ; I now approach
the more formidable task of working on the
latter.

CHAPTER II.

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

A SURVEY of cosmogony, as comprehended
by occult science, must precede any attempt to
explain the means by which a knowledge of
that cosmogony itself has been acquired. The
methods of esoteric research have grown out
of natural facts, with which exoteric science is
wholly unacquainted. These natural facts are
concerned with the premature development in
occult adepts of faculties which mankind at
large has not yet evolved ; and these faculties,
in turn, enable their possessors to explore the
mysteries of Nature, and verify the esoteric
doctrines, setting forth its grand design. The
practical student of occultism may develop the
faculties first, and apply them to the observa
tion of Nature afterwards; but the exhibition
of the theory of Nature for Western readers
merely seeking its intellectual comprehension,
must precede consideration of the inner senses,
which occult research employs. On the other
hand, a survey of cosmogony, as comprehended

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 61

by occult science, could only be scientifically
arranged at the expense of intelligibility for
European readers. To begin at the beginning,
we should endeavor to realize the state of the
universe before evolution sets in. This subject
is by no means shirked by esoteric students ;
and later on, in the course of this sketch, some
hints will be given concerning the views occult
ism entertains of the earlier processes through
which cosmic matter passes on its way to evolu
tion. But an orderly statement of the earliest
processes of Nature would embody references
to man's spiritual constitution, which would
not be understood without some preliminary
explanation.

Seven distinct principles are recognized by
esoteric science as entering into the consti
tution of man. The classification differs so
widely from any with which European readers
will be familiar, that I shall naturally be asked
for the grounds on which occultism reaches so
far-fetched a conclusion. But I must, on ac
count of inherent peculiarities in the subject,
which will be comprehended later on, beg for
this Oriental knowledge I am bringing home a
hearing (in the first instance, at all events) of
the Oriental kind The Oriental and the Eu-
vopean systems of conveying knowledge are as
unlike as any two methods can be. The West

62 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

pricks and piques the learner's controversial
instinct at every step. He is encouraged to
dispute and resist conviction. He is forbidden
to take any scientific statement on authority.
Pari passu, as he acquires knowledge, he must
learn how that knowledge has been acquired,
and he is made to feel that no fact is worth
knowing, unless he knows, with it, the way to
prove it a fact. The East manages its pupils
on a wholly different plan. It no more disre
gards the necessity of proving its teaching than
the West, but it provides proof of a wholly dif
ferent sort. It enables the student to search
Nature for himself, and verify its teachings, in
those regions which Western philosophy can
only invade by speculation and argument. It
never takes the trouble to argue about any
thing. It says : " So and so is fact ; here is
the key of knowledge ; now go and see for
yourself." In this way it comes to pass that
teaching per se is never anything else but
teaching on authority. Teaching and proof
do not go hand in hand ; they follow one an
other in due order. A further consequence of
this method is that Eastern philosophy employs
the method which we in the West have dis
carded for good reasons as incompatible with
our own line of intellectual development, — the
system of reasoning from generals to particu-

TEE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 63

lars. The purposes which European science
usually has in view would certainly not be an
swered by that plan, but I think that any one
who goes far in the present inquiry will feel
that the system of reasoning up from the de
tails of knowledge to general inferences is in
applicable to the work in hand. One cannot
understand details in this department of knowl
edge till we get a general understanding of the
whole scheme of things. Even to convey this
general comprehension by mere language is a
large and by no means an easy task. To pause
at every moment of the exposition in order to
collect what separate evidence may be avail
able for the proof of each separate statement,
would be practically impossible. Such a method
would break down the patience of the reader,
and prevent him from deriving, as he may from
a more condensed treatise, that definite concep
tion as to what the esoteric doctrine means to
teach, which it is my business to evoke.

The reflection may suggest, in passing, a new
view, having an intimate connection with our
present subject, of the Platonic and Aristotelian
systems of reasoning. Plato's system, roughly
described as reasoning from universals to partic
ulars, is condemned by modern habits in favor
of the later and exactly inverse system. But
Plato was in fetters in attempting to defend his

64 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

system. There is every reason to believe that
his familiarity with esoteric science prompted
his method, and that the usual restrictions un
der which he labored, as an initiated occultist,
forbade him from saying as much as would
really justify it. No one can study even as
much occult science as this volume contains,
and then turn to Plato, or even to any intelli
gent epitome of Plato's system of thought, with
out finding correspondences cropping out at
every turn.

The higher principles of the series which go
to constitute man are not fully developed in the
mankind with which we are as yet familiar,
but a complete or perfect man would be resolv
able into the following elements. To facilitate
the application of these explanations to ordi
nary exoteric Buddhist writings, the Sanskrit
names of these principles are given, as well as
suitable terms in English.1

1 The nomenclature here adopted differs slightly from that hit
upon when some of the present teachings were first given out in a
fragmentary form in The Theosophist. Later on it will be seen that
the names now preferred embody a fuller conception of the whole
system, and avoid some difficulties to which the earlier names give
rise. If the earlier presentations of esoteric science were thus im
perfect, one can hardly be surprised at so natural a consequence
of the difficulties under which its English exponents labored. But
no substantial errors have to be confessed or deplored. The con
notations of the present names are more accurate than those of the
phrases first selected, but the explanations originally given, as far
as they went, were quite in harmony with those now developed.

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 65

1. The Body Rupa.

2. Vitality Prana, or Jiva.

3. Astral Body Linga Sharira.

4. Animal Soul Kama Rupa.

5. Human Soul Manas.

6. Spiritual Soul Buddhi.

7. Spirit Atma.

Directly conceptions so transcendental as
some of those included in this analysis are set
forth in a tabular statement, they seem to incur
certain degradation, against which, in endeav
oring to realize clearly what is meant, we must
be ever on our guard. Certainly it would be
impossible for even the most skillful professor
of occult science to exhibit each of these princi
ples separate and distinct from the others, as
the physical elements of a compound body can
be separated by analysis and preserved inde
pendently of each other. The elements of a
physical body are all on the same plane of ma
teriality, but the elements of man are on very
different planes. The finest gases of which
the body may to some extent be chemically
composed are still, on one scale at all events,
on nearly the lowest level of materiality. The
second principle which, by its union with gross
matter, changes it from what we generally call
inorganic, or what might more properly be
called inert, into living matter, is at once a

66 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

something different from the finest example of
matter in its lower state. Is the second princi
ple, then, anything that we can truly call mat
ter at all? The question lands ns, thus, at the
very outset of this inquiry, in the middle of the
subtle metaphysical discussion as to whether
force and matter are different or identical.
Enough for the moment to state that occult
science regards them as identical, and that it
contemplates no principle in Nature as wholly
immaterial. In this way, though no concep
tions of the universe, of man's destiny, or of
Nature generally, are more spiritual than those
of occult science, that science is wholly free
from the logical error of attributing material
results to immaterial causes. The esoteric doc
trine is thus really the missing link between
materialism and spirituality.

The clue to the mystery involved lies of
course in the fact, directly cognizable by occult
experts, that matter exists in other states be
sides those which are cognizable by the five
senses.

The second principle of man, Vitality, thus
consists of matter in its aspect as force ; and
its affinity for the grosser state of matter is so
great that it cannot be separated from any
given particle or mass of this, except by instan
taneous translation to some other particle or

TEE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 67

mass. When a man's body dies, by desertion
of the higher principles which have rendered it
a living reality, the second, or life principle, no
longer a unity itself, is nevertheless inherent
still in the particles of the body as this decom
poses, attaching itself to other organisms to
which that very process of decomposition gives
rise. Bury the body in the earth, and its Jiva
will attach itself to the vegetation which springs
above, or the lower animal forms which evolve
from its substance. Burn the body, and inde
structible Jiva flies back none the less instan
taneously to the body of the planet itself from
which it was originally borrowed, entering into
some new combination as its affinities may de
termine.

The third principle, the Astral Body, or
Linga Sharira, is an ethereal duplicate of the
physical body, its original design. It guides
Jiva in its work on the physical particles, and
causes it to build up the shape which these
assume. Vitalized itself by the higher princi
ples, its unity is only preserved by the union of
the whole group. At death it is disembodied
for a brief period, and, under some abnormal
conditions, may even be temporarily visible to
the external sight of still living persons. Under
such conditions it is taken of course for the
ghost of the departed person. Spectral appari-

68 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

tions may sometimes be occasioned in other
ways, but the third principle, when that results
in a visible phenomenon, is a mere aggregation
of molecules in a peculiar state, having no life
or consciousness of any kind whatever. It is
no more a being than any cloud-wreath in the
sky which happens to settle into the semblance
of some animal form. Broadly speaking, the
Lingti Sharira never leaves the body except at
death, nor migrates far from the body even in
ihat case. When seen at all, and this can but
rarely occur, it can only be seen near where the
physical body still lies. In some very peculiar
cases of spiritualistic mediumship, it may for a
short time exude from the physical body and be
visible near it, but the medium in such cases
stands the while in considerable danger of his
life. Disturb unwillingly the conditions under
which the Linga Sharira was set free, and its
return might be impeded. The second prin
ciple would then soon cease to animate the
physical body as a unity, and death would
ensue.

During the last year or two, while hints and
scraps of occult science have been finding their
way out into the world, the expression " Astral
Body " has been applied to a certain semblance
of the human form, fully inhabited by its higher
principles, which can migrate to any distance

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 69

from the physical body, projected consciously
and with exact intention by a living adept, or
unintentionally, by the accidental application
of certain mental forces to his loosened princi
ples, by any person at the moment of death.
For ordinary purposes there is no practical in
convenience in using the expression "Astral
Body " for the appearance so projected ; in
deed, any more strictly accurate expression, as
will be seen directly, would be cumbersome,
and we must go on using the phrase in both
meanings. No confusion need arise ; but,
strictly speaking, the Linga Sharira, or third
principle, is the Astral Body, and that cannot
be sent about as the vehicle of the higher prin
ciples.

The three lower principles, it will be seen,
are altogether of the earth, perishable in their
nature as a single entity, though indestructible
as regards their molecules, and absolutely done
with by man at his death.

The fourth principle is the first of those
which belong to man's higher nature. The
Sanskrit designation, kama rupa, is often trans
lated " Body of Desire," which seems rather a
clumsy and inaccurate form of words. A closer
translation, having regard to meanings rather
than words, would, perhaps, be " Vehicle of
Will," but the name already adopted above,

70 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Animal Soul, may be more accurately sugges
tive still.

In "The Theosophist " for October, 1881,
when the first hints about the septenary con
stitution of man were given out, the fifth prin
ciple was called the animal soul, as contra-dis
tinguished from the sixth or " spiritual soul ; "
but though this nomenclature sufficed to mark
the required distinction, it degraded the fifth
principle, which is essentially the human prin
ciple. Though humanity is animal in its na
ture as compared with spirit, it is elevated
above the correctly defined animal creation in
every other aspect. By introducing a new
name for the fifth principle, we are enabled to
throw back the designation "animal soul " to
its proper place. This arrangement need not
interfere, meanwhile, with an appreciation of
the way in which the fourth principle is the
seat of that will or desire to which the Sanskrit
name refers. And, withal, the Kama Rupa is
the animal soul, the highest developed principle
of the brute creation, susceptible of evolution
into something far higher by its union with
the growing fifth principle in man, but still
the animal soul which man is by no means yet
without, the seat of all animal desires, and a
potent force in the human body as well, press^
ing upward, so to speak, as well as downward,

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 71

and capable of influencing the fifth, for practi
cal purposes, as well as of being influenced by
the fifth for its own control and improvement.

The fifth principle, human soul, or Manas
(as described in Sanskrit in one of its aspects),
is the seat of reason and memory. It is a por
tion of this principle, animated by the fourth,
which is really projected to distant places by
an adept, when he makes an appearance in
what is commonly called his astral body.

Now the fifth principle, or human soul, in
the majority of mankind is not even yet fully
developed. This fact about the imperfect de
velopment as yet of the higher principles is
very important. We cannot get a correct con
ception of the present place of man in Nature
if we make the mistake of regarding him as a
fully perfected being already. And that mis
take would be fatal to any reasonable anticipa
tions concerning the future that awaits him, —
fatal also to any appreciation of the appropri
ateness of the future which the esoteric doctrine
explains to us as actually awaiting him.

Since the fifth principle is not yet fully de
veloped, it goes without saying that the sixth
principle is still in embryo. This idea has been
variously indicated in recent forecasts of the
great doctrine. Sometimes, it has been sa*id,
we do not truly possess any sixth principle, we

72 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

merely have germs of a sixth principle. It has
also been said, the sixth principle is not in us ;
it hovers over us ; it is a something that the
highest aspirations of our nature must work up
toward. But it is also said: All things, not
man alone, but every animal, plant, and min
eral, have their seven principles, and the high
est principle of all — the seventh itself — vital
izes that continuous thread of life which rims
all through evolution, uniting into a definite
succession the almost innumerable incarnations
of that one life which constitute a complete se
ries. We must imbibe all these various con
ceptions, and weld them together, or extract
their essence, to learn the doctrine of the sixth
principle. Following the order of ideas which
just now suggested the application of the term
animal soul to the fourth principle and human
soul to the fifth, the sixth may be called the
spiritual soul of man, and the seventh, there
fore, spirit itself.

In another aspect of the idea, the sixth prin
ciple may be called the vehicle of the seventh,
and the fourth the vehicle of the fifth ; but yet
another mode of dealing with the problem
teaches us to regard each of the higher princi
ples, from the fourth upwards, as a vehicle of
what, in Buddhist philosophy, is called the One
Life or Spirit. According to this view of the

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 73

matter the one life is that which perfects, by
inhabiting the various vehicles. In the animal
the one life is concentrated in the kama rupa.
In man it begins to penetrate the fifth princi
ple as well. In perfected man it penetrates the
sixth, and when it penetrates the seventh, man
ceases to be man, and attains a wholly superior
condition of existence.

This latter view of the position is especially
valuable as guarding against the notion that
the four higher principles are like a bundle of
sticks tied together, but each having individu
alities of its own if untied. Neither the ani
mal soul nlnne, nor the spiritual soul alone, has
any individuality at all ; but, on the other
hand, the fifth principle would be incapable of
separation from the others in such a way, that
its individuality would be preserved while both
the deserted principles would be left uncon
scious. It has been said that the finer princi
ples themselves even are material and molecu
lar in their constitution, though composed of a
higher order of matter than the physical senses
can take note of. So they are separable, and
the sixth principle itself can be imagined as di
vorcing itself from its lower neighbor. But in
that state of separation, and at this stage of
mankind's development, it could simply re-in
carnate itself in such an emergency > and grow

74 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

a new fifth principle by contact with a human
organism ; in such a case, the fifth principle
would lean upon and become one with the
fourth, and be proportionately degraded. And
yet this fifth principle, which cannot stand
alone, is the personality of the man ; and its
cream, in union with the sixth, his continuous
individuality through successive lives.

The circumstances and attractions under the
influence of which the principles do divide up,
and the manner in which the consciousness of
man is dealt with then, will be discussed later
on. Meanwhile, a better understanding of the
whole position than could ensue from a contin
ued prosecution of the inquiry on these lines
now will be obtained by turning first to the
processes of evolution by means of which the
principles of man have been developed.

CHAPTER III,

THE PLANETARY CHAIN.

ESOTERIC Science, though the most spirit
ual system imaginable, exhibits, as running
throughout Nature, the most exhaustive system
of evolution that the human mind can conceive.
The Darwinian theory of evolution is simply
an independent discovery of a portion — unhap
pily but a small portion — of the vast natural
truth. But occultists know how to explain
evolution without degrading the highest prin
ciples of man. The esoteric doctrine finds it
self under no obligation to keep its science and
religion in separate water-tight compartments.
Its theory of physics and its theory of spirit
uality are not only reconcilable with each
other, they are intimately blended together and
interdependent. And the first great fact which
occult science presents to our notice in refer
ence to the origin of man on this globe will be
seen to help the imagination over some serious
embarrassments of the familiar scientific idea
of evolution. The evolution of man is not a

76 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

process carried out on this planet alone. It is
a result to which many worlds in different con
ditions of material and spiritual development
have contributed. If this statement were
merely put forward as a conjecture, it would
surely recommend itself forcibly to rational
minds. For there is a manifest irrationality in
the commonplace notion that man's existence
is divided into a material beginning, lasting
sixty or seventy years, and a spiritual remain
der lasting forever. The irrationality amounts
to absurdity when it is alleged that the acts of
the sixty or seventy years — the blundering,
helpless acts of ignorant human life — are per
mitted by the perfect justice of an all-wise
Providence to define the conditions of that
later life of infinite duration. Nor is it less ex
travagant to imagine that, apart from the ques
tion of justice, the life beyond the grave should
be exempt from the law of change, progress,
and improvement, which every analogy of Na
ture points to as probably running through all
the varied existences of the universe. But once
abandon the idea of a uniform, unvarying, un-
progressive life beyond the grave, once admit
the conception of change and progress in that
life, and we admit the idea of a variety hardly
compatible with any other hypothesis than that
of progress through successive worlds. As we

TEE PLANETARY CHAIN. 77

have said before, this is not hypothesis at all
for occult science, but a fact, ascertained and
verified beyond the reach (for occultists) of
doubt or contradiction.

The life and evolutionary processes of this
planet — in fact, all which constitutes it some
thing more than a dead lump of chaotic matter
— are linked with the life and evolutionary
processes of several other planets. But let it
not be supposed that there is no finality as re
gards the scheme of this planetary union to
which we belong. The human imagination
once set free is apt sometimes to bound too far.
Once let this notion, that the earth is merely
one link in a mighty chain of worlds, be fully
accepted as probable, or true, and it may sug
gest the whole starry heavens as the heritage
of the human family. That idea would involve
a serious misconception. One globe does not
afford Nature scope for the processes by which
mankind has been evoked from chaos, but these
processes do not require more than a limited
and definite number of globes. Separated as
these are, in regard to the gross mechanical
matter of which they consist, they are closely
and intimately bound together by subtle cur
rents and forces, whose existence reason need
not be much troubled to concede since the ex
istence of some connection — of force or ethereal

78 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

media — -uniting all visible celestial bodies is
proved by the mere fact that they are visible.
It is along these subtle currents that the life-
elements pass from world to world.

The fact, however, will at once be liable to
distortion to suit preconceived habits of mind.
Some readers may imagine our meaning to be
that after death the surviving soul wilt be
drawn into the currents of that world with
which its affinities connect it. The real process
is more methodical. The system of worlds is
a circuit round which all individual spiritual
entities have alike to pass; and that passage
constitutes the Evolution of Man. For it must
be realized that the evolution of man is a proc
ess still going on, and by no means yet com
plete. Darwinian writings have taught the
modern world to regard the ape as an ancestor,
but the simple conceit of Western speculation
has rarely permitted European evolutionists to
look in the other direction and recognize the
probability, that to our remote descendants we
may be, as that unwelcome progenitor to us.
Yet the two facts just declared hinge together.
The higher evolution will be accomplished by
our progress through the successive worlds of
the system ; and in higher forms we shall re
turn to this earth again and again. But the
avenues of thought through which we look for-

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 79

ward to this prospect are of almost inconceiv
able length.

It will readily be supposed that the chain of
worlds to which this earth belongs are not all
prepared for a material existence exactly, or
even approximately resembling our own. There
would be no meaning in an organized chain of
worlds which were all alike, and might as well
all have been amalgamated into one. In real
ity the worlds with which we are connected
are very unlike each other, not merely in out
ward conditions, but in that supreme character
istic, the proportion in which spirit and matter
are mingled in their constitution. Our own
world presents us with conditions in which spirit
and matter are, on the whole, evenly balanced
in equilibrium. Let it not be supposed on that
account that it is very highly elevated in the
scale of perfection. On the contrary, it occu
pies a very low place in that scale. The worlds
that are higher in the scale are those in which
spirit largely predominates. There is another
world attached to the chain, rather than form
ing a part of it, in which matter asserts itself
even more decisively than on earth, but this
may be spoken of later.

That the superior worlds which man may
come to inhabit in his onward progress should
gradually become more and more spiritual in

80 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

their constitution — life there being more and
more successfully divorced from gross material
needs — will seem reasonable enough at the first
glance. But the first glance in imagination at
those which might conversely be called the infe
rior, but may with less inaccuracy be spoken of
as the preceding worlds, would perhaps suggest
that they ought to be conversely less spiritual,
more material, than this earth. The fact is quite
the other way, and must be so, it will be seen on
reflection, in a chain of worlds which is an end
less chain — i.e., round and round which the
evolutionary process travels. If that process
had merely one journey to travel along a path
which never returned into itself, one could
think of it, at any rate, as working from almost
absolute matter, up to almost absolute spirit ;
but Nature works always in complete curves,
and travels always in paths which return into
themselves. The earliest, as also the latest,
developed worlds — for the chain itself has
grown by degrees — the furthest back, as also
the furthest forward, are the most immaterial,
the most ethereal of the whole series ; and that
this is in all ways in accordance with the fitness
of things will appear from the reflection that
the furthest forward of the worlds is not a re
gion of finality, but the stepping-stone to the
furthest back, as the mouth of December leads

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 81

ns back again to January. But it is not a cli
max of development from which the individual
monad falls, as by a catastrophe, into the state
from which he slowly began to ascend millions
of years previously. From that which, for rea
sons which will soon appear, must be consid
ered the highest world on the ascending arc of
the circle to that which must be regarded as
the first on the descending arc, in one sense the
lowest — i. e., in the order of development —
there is no descent at all, but still ascent and
progress. For the spiritual monad or entity,
which has worked its way all round the cycle
of evolution, at any one of the many stages of
development into which the various existences
around us may be grouped, begins its next cycle
at the next higher stage, and is thus still ac
complishing progress as it passes from world
Z back again to world A. Many times does it
circle, in this way, right round the system, but
its passage round must not be thought of merely
as a circular revolution in an orbit. In the
scale of spiritual perfection it is constantly as
cending. Thus, if we compare the system of
worlds to a system of towers standing on a
plain — towers each of many stories and sym
bolizing the scale of perfection — the spiritual
monad performs a spiral progress round and
round the series, passing through each tower,

82 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

every time it comes round to it, at a higher
level than before.

It is for want of realizing this idea that spec
ulation, concerned with physical evolution, is
so constantly finding itself stopped by dead
walls. It is searching for its missing links in a
world where it can never find them now, for
they were but required for a temporary pur
pose, and have passed away. Man, says the
Darwinian, was once an ape. Quite true ; but
the ape known to the Darwinian will never be
come a man — i. e., the form will not change
from generation to generation till the tail dis
appears and the hands turn into feet, and so on.
Ordinary science avows that, though changes of
form can be detected in progress within the lim
its of species, the changes from species to species
can only be inferred ; and to account for these,
it is content to assume great intervals of time
and the extinction of the intermediate forms.
There has been no doubt an extinction of the
intermediate or earlier forms of all species (in
the larger acceptation of the word) — i. e., of all
kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, animal, man, etc.
— but ordinary science can merely guess that
to have been the fact without realizing the con
ditions which rendered it inevitable, and which
forbid the renewed generation of the interme
diate forms.

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 83

It is the spiral character of the progress ac
complished by the life impulses that develop the
various kingdoms of Nature, which accounts
for the gaps uow observed in the animated
forms which people the earth. The thread of a
screw, which is a uniform inclined plane in real
ity, looks like a succession of steps when ex
amined only along one line parallel to its axis.
The spiritual monads, which are coming round
the system on the animal level, pass on to other
worlds when they have performed their turn
of animal incarnation here. By the time they
come again, they are ready for human incarna
tion, and there is no necessity now for the up
ward development of animal forms into human
forms — these are already waiting for their spir
itual tenants. But, if we go back far enough,
we come to a period at which there were no
human forms ready developed on the earth.
When spiritual monads, traveling on the ear
liest or lowest human level, were thus begin
ning to come round, their onward pressure in a
world at that time containing none but animal
forms provoked the improvement of the high
est of these into the required form — the much-
talked-of missing link.

In one way of looking at the matter, it may
be contended that this explanation is identical
with the inference of the Darwinian evolution-

84 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ist in regard to the development and extinction
of missing links. After all, it may be argued
by a materialist, " we are not concerned to ex
press an opinion as to the origin of the tendency
in species to develop higher forms. We say
that they do develop these higher forms by
intermediate links, and that the intermediate
links die out ; and you say just the same thing."
But there is a distinction between the two ideas
for any one who can follow subtle distinctions.
The natural process of evolution, from the influ
ence of local circumstances and sexual selection,
must not be credited with producing intermedi
ate forms, and this is why it is inevitable that
the intermediate forms should be of a tempo
rary nature and should die out. Otherwise,
we should find the world stocked with missing
links of all kinds, animal life creeping by
plainly apparent degrees up to manhood, human
forms mingling in indistinguishable confusion
with those of animals. The impulse to the
new evolution of higher forms is really given, as
we have shown, by rushes of spiritual monads
coming round the cycle in a state fit for the
inhabitation of new forms. These superior life
impulses burst the chrysalis of the older form
on the planet they invade, and throw off an ef
florescence of something higher. The forms
which have gone on merely repeating them-

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 85

selves for millenniums start afresh into growth ;
with relative rapidity they rise through the
intermediate into the higher forms, and then,
as these in turn are multiplied with the vigor
and rapidity of all new growths, they supply
tenements of flesh for the spiritual entities com
ing round on that stage or plane of existence,
and for the intermediate forms there are no
longer any tenants offering. Inevitably they
become extinct.

Thus is evolution accomplished, as regards its
essential impulse, by a spiral progress through
the worlds. In the course of explaining this
idea we have partly anticipated the declaration
of another fact of first-rate importance as an aid
to correct views of the world-system to which
we belong. That is, that the tide of life — the
wave of existence, the spiritual impulse, call
it by what name we please — passes on from
planet to planet by rushes, or gushes, not by an
even continuous flow. For the momentary pur
pose of illustrating the idea in hand, the process
may be compared to the filling of a series of
holes or tubs sunk in the ground, such as may
sometimes be seen at the mouths of feeble
springs, and connected with each other by little
surface channels. The stream from the spring,
as it flows, is gathered up entirely in the begin
ning by the first hole, or tub A, and it is only

86 ESOTERJC BUDDHISM.

when this is quite full that the continued in-
pouring of water from the spring causes that
which it already contains to overflow into tub
B. This in turn fills and overflows along the
channel which leads to tub C, and so on. Now,
though, of course, a clumsy analogy of this kind
will not carry us very far, it precisely illustrates
the evolution of life on a chain of worlds like
that we are attached to, and, indeed, the evolu
tion of the worlds themselves. For the process
which goes on does not involve the preexistence
of a chain of globes which Nature proceeds to
stock with life ; but it is one in which the evo
lution of each globe is the result of previous ev
olutions, and the consequence of certain im
pulses thrown off from its predecessor in the
superabundance of their development. Now, it
is necessary to deal with this characteristic of
the process to be described, but directly we be
gin to deal with it we have to go back in imag
ination to a period in the development of our
system very far antecedent to that which is spec
ially our subject at present — the evolution of
man. And manifestly, as soon as we begin
talking of the beginnings of worlds, we are
dealing with phenomena which can have had
very little to do with life, as we understand the
matter, and, therefore, it may be supposed, noth
ing to do with life impulses. But let us go

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 87

back by degrees. Behind the human harvest
of the life impulse there lay the harvest of
mere animal forms, as every one realizes ; be
hind that, the harvest or growths of mere vege
table forms — for some of these undoubtedly
preceded the appearance of the earliest animal
life on the planet. Then, before the vegetable
organizations, there were mineral organizations,
— for even a mineral is a product of Nature, an
evolution from something behind it, as every
imaginable manifestation of Nature must be,
until in the vast series of manifestations the
mind travels back to the unrnanifested begin
ning of all things. On pure metaphysics of
that sort we are not now engaged. It is enough
to show that we may as reasonably — and that
we must if we would talk about these matters
at all — conceive a life impulse giving birth to
mineral forms as of the same sort of impulse
concerned to raise a race of apes into a race of
rudimentary men. Indeed, occult science trav
els back even further in its exhaustive analysis
of evolution than the period at which minerals
began to assume existence. In the process of
developing worlds from fiery nebulae, Nature
begins with something earlier than minerals —
with the elemental forces that underlie the phe
nomena of Nature as visible now and perceptible
to the senses of man. But that branch of the

88 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

subject may be left alone for the present. Let
us take up the process at the period when the
first world of the series, globe A let us call itj
is merely a congeries of mineral forms. No\V
it must be remembered that globe A has already
been described as very much more ethereal,
more predominated by spirit, as distinguished
from matter, than the globe of which we at
present are having personal experience, so that
a large allowance must be made for that state
of things when we ask the reader to think of it,
at starting, as a mere congeries of mineral forms.
Mineral forms may be mineral in the sense of
not belonging to the higher forms of vegetable
organism, and may yet be very immaterial as
we think of matter, very ethereal, consisting of
a very fine or subtle quality of matter, in which
the other pole or characteristic of Nature, spirit,
largely predominates. The minerals we are
trying to portray are, as it were, the ghosts of
minerals ; by no means the highly-finished and
beautiful, hard crystals which the mineralogical
cabinets of this world supply. In these lower
spirals of evolution with which we are now
dealing, as with the higher ones, there is prog
ress from world to world, and that is the great
point at which we have been aiming. There is
progress downwards, so to speak, in finish and
materiality and consistency ; and then, again,

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 89

progress upward in spirituality as coupled with
the finish which matter or materiality rendered
possible in the first instance. It will be found
that the process of evolution in its higher stages
as regards man is carried on in exactly the same
way. All through these studies, indeed, it will
be found that one process of Nature typifies
another, that the big is the repetition of the lit
tle on a larger scale.

It is manifest from what we have already
said, and in order that the progress of organ
isms on globe A shall be accounted for, that
the mineral kingdom will no more develop the
vegetable kingdom on globe A until it receives
an impulse from without, than the earth was
able to develop man from the ape till it re
ceived an impulse from without. But it will
be inconvenient at present to go back to a con
sideration of the impulses which operate on
globe A in the beginning of the system's con
struction.

We have already, in order to be able to ad
vance more comfortably from a far later period
than that to which we have now receded, gone
back so far that further recession would change
the whole character of this explanation. We
must stop somewhere, and for the present it
will be best to take the life impulses behind
globe A for granted. And having stopped

90 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM,

there we may now treat the enormous period
intervening between the mineral epoch on globe
A and the man epoch in a very cursory way,
and so get back to the main problem before us.
What has been already said facilitates a cursory
treatment of the intervening evolution. The
full development of the mineral epoch on globe
A prepares the way for the vegetable develop
ment, and as soon as this begins the mineral
life impulse overflows into globe B. Then
when the vegetable development on globe A is
complete, and the animal development begins,
the vegetable life impulse overflows to globe B,
and the mineral impulse passes on to globe C.
Then, finally, comes the human life impulse on
globe A.

Now it is necessary at this point to guard
against one misconception that might arise.
As just roughly described, the process might
convey the idea that by the time the human
impulse began on globe A the mineral impulse
was then beginning on globe D, and that be
yond lay chaos. This is very far from being
the case, for two reasons. First, as already
stated, there are processes of evolution which
precede the mineral evolution, and thus a wave
of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution
precede the mineral wave in its progress round
the spheres. But over and above this there is

THE PLANETARY CHAIN, 91

a fact to be stated which has such an influence
on the course of events, that, when it is real
ized, it will be seen that the life impulse has
passed several times completely round the
whole chain of worlds before the commence
ment of the human impulse on globe A. This
fact is as follows: Each kingdom of evolution,
vegetable, animal, and so on, is divided into
several spiral layers. The spiritual monads
— the individual atoms of that immense life
impulse of which so much lias been said — do
not fully complete their mineral existence on
globe A, then complete it on globe B, and so
on. They pass several times round the whole
circle as minerals, and then again several times
round as vegetables, and several times as ani
mals. We purposely refrain for the present
from going into figures, because it is more con
venient to state the outline of the scheme in
general terms first ; but figures in reference to
these processes of Nature have now been given
to the world by the occult adepts (for the first
time we believe in its history), and they shall
be brought out in the course of this explana
tion, very shortly, but as we say the outline is
enough for any one to think of at first.

And now we have rudimentary man begin
ning his existence on globe A, in that world
where all things are as the ghosts of the corre-

92 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

spending things in this world. He is beginning
his long descent into matter. And the life im
pulse of each " round " overflows, and the races
of man are established in different degrees of
perfection on all the planets, on each in turn.
But the rounds are more complicated in their
design than this explanation would show, if it
stopped short here. The process for each spir
itual monad is not merely a passage from planet
to planet. Within the limits of each planet,
each time it arrives there, it has a complicated
process of evolution to perform. It is many
times incarnated in successive races of men be
fore it passes onward, and it even has many in
carnations in each great race. It will be found
when we get on further that this fact throws a
flood of light upon the actual condition of man
kind as we know it, accounting for those im
mense differences of intellect and morality, and
even of welfare in its highest sense, which gen
erally appear so painfully mysterious.

That which has a definite beginning gener
ally has an end also. As we have shown that
the evolutionary process under description be
gan when certain impulses first commenced
their operation, so it may be inferred that they
are tending towards a final consummation, to.
wards a goal and a conclusion. That is so,
though the goal is still far off. Man, as we

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 93

know him on this earth, is but half-way through
the evolutionary process to which he owes his
present development. He will be as much
greater before the destiny of our system is ac
complished than he is now as he is now greater
than the missing link. And that improvement
will even be accomplished on this earth, while,
in the other worlds of the ascending series,
there are still loftier peaks of perfection to be
scaled. It is utterly beyond the range of facul
ties, untutored in the discernment of occult
mysteries, to imagine the kind of life which
man will thus ultimately lead before the zenith
of the great cycle is attained. But there is
enough to be done in filling up the details of
the outline now presented to the reader, with
out attempting to forecast those which have to
do with existences towards which evolution is
reaching across the enormous abysses of the
future.

CHAPTER IV.
THE WOULD PERIODS.

A STRIKING illustration of the uniformities
of Nature is brought out by the first glance at
the occult doctrine in reference to the develop
ment of man on the earth. The outline of the
design is the same as the outline of the more
comprehensive design covering the whole chain
of worlds. The inner details of this world, as
regards its units of construction, are the same
as the inner details of the larger organism of
which this world itself is a unit. That is to
say, the development of humanity on this earth
is accomplished by means of successive waves
of development which correspond to the succes
sive worlds in the great planetary chain. The
great tide of human life, be it remembered —
for that has been already set forth — sweeps
round the whole circle of worlds in successive
waves. These primary growths of humanity
may be conveniently spoken of as rounds. We
must not forget that the individual units, con
stituting each round in turn, are identically the

THE WORLD PERIODS. 95

same as regards their higher principles, that is,
that the individualities on the earth during
round one come back again after completing
their travels round the whole series of worlds
and constitute round two, and so on. But
the point to which special attention should be
drawn here is that the individual unit having
arrived at any given planet of the series, in the
course of any given round, does not merely
touch that planet and pass on to the next. Be
fore passing on, he has to live through a series
of races on that planet. And this fact suggests
the outline of the fabric which will presently
develop itself in the reader's mind and exhibit
that similarity of design on the part of the one
world as compared with the whole series to
which attention has already been drawn. As
the complete scheme of Nature that we belong
to is worked out by means of a series of rounds
sweeping through all the worlds, so the devel
opment of humanity on each world is worked
out by a series of races developed within the
limits of each world in turn.

It is time now to make the working of this
law clearer by coming to the actual figures
which have to do with the evolution of our doc
trine. It would have been premature to begin
with them, but as soon as the idea of a system
of worlds in a chain, and of life evolution on

96 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

each through a series of re-births, is satisfac
torily grasped, the further examination of the
laws at work will be greatly facilitated by pre
cise reference to the actual number of worlds
and the actual number of rounds and races re
quired to accomplish the whole purpose of the
system. For the whole duration of the system
is as certainly limited in time, be it remem
bered, as the life of a single man. Probably
not limited to any definite number of years set
irrevocably from the commencement, but that
which has a beginning progresses onward to
wards an end. The life of a man, leaving ac
cidents quite out of the account, is a termina
ble period, and the life of a world system leads
up to a final consummation. The vast periods
of time, concerned in the life of a world sys
tem, dazzle the imagination as a rule, but still
they are measurable ; they are divisible into
sub-periods of various kinds, and these have a
definite number.

By what prophetic instinct Shakespeare
pitched upon seven MS the number which suited
his fantastic classification of the ages of man
is a question with which we need not be much
concerned, but certain it is that he could not
have made a more felicitous choice. In periods
of sevens the evolution of the races of man may
be traced, and the actual number of the objeo

THE WORLD PERIODS. 97

tive worlds which constitute our system, and of
which the earth is one, is seven also. Remem
ber the occult scientists know this MS a fact,
just as the physical scientists know for a fact
that the spectrum consists of seven colors, and
the musical scale of seven tones. There are
seven kingdoms of Nature, not three, as modern
science has imperfectly classified them. Man
belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from
that of the animals, including beings in a
higher state of organization than that which
manhood has familiarized us with as yet ; and
below the mineral kingdom there are three
others which science in the West knows noth
ing about ; but tin's branch of the subject may
be set aside for the present. It is mentioned
merely to show the regular operation of the
septenary law in Nature.

Man, returning to the kingdom we are most
interested in, is evolved in a series of rounds
(progressions round the series of worlds), and
seven of these rounds have to be accomplished
before the destinies of our system are worked
out. The round which is at present going on
is the fourth. There are considerations of the
utmost possible interest connected with precise
knowledge on these points, because each round
is, as it were, specially allotted to the predomi
nance of one of the seven principles in man,
7

98 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

and in the regular order of their upward grada<
tion.

An individual unit, arriving on a planet foi
the first time in the course of a round, has tq
work through seven races on that planet before
he passes on to the next, and each of those races
occupies the earth for a long time. Our old-
fashioned speculations about time and eternity,
suggested by the misty religious systems of the
West, have brought on a curious habit of mind
in connection with problems bearing on the
actual duration of such periods. We can talk
glibly of eternity, and* going to the other end
of the scale, we are not shocked by a few thou
sand years ; but directly years are numbered
with precision in groups which lie in interven
ing regions of thought, illogical Western theo
logians are apt to regard such numbering as
nonsense. Now, we at present living on this
earth — the great bulk of humanity, that is to
say, for there are exceptional cases to be con
sidered later — are now going through the fifth
race of our present fourth round. And yet the
evolution of that fifth race began about a mill
ion of years ago. Will the reader, in consid
eration of the fact that the present cosmogony
does not profess to work with eternity, nerve
himself to deal with estimates that do concern
themselves with millions of years, and even
count such millions by considerable numbers?

THE WORLD PERIODS. 99

Each race of the seven which go to make
up a round — i. e. which are evolved on the
earth in succession during its occupation by
the great wave of humanity passing round the
planetary chain — is itself subject to subdivis
ion. Were this not the case, the active exist
ences of each human unit would be indeed few
and far between. Within the limits of each
race there are seven subdivisional races, and
again within the limits of each subdivision
there are seven branch races. Through all
these races, roughly speaking, each individual
human unit must pass during his stay on earth
each time he arrives there on a round of prog
ress through the planetary system. On reflec
tion, this necessity should not appall the mind
so much as a hypothesis which would provide
for fewer incarnations. For, however many
lives each individual unit may pass through
while on earth during a round, be their num
bers few or many, he cannot pass on until the
time comes for the round wave to sweep for
ward. Even by the calculation already fore
shadowed, it will be seen that the time spent
by each individual unit in physical life, can
only be a small fraction of the whole time he
has to get through between his arrival on earth
and his departure for the next planet. The
larger part of the time — as we reckon dura-

100 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

tion of time — is obviously, therefore, spent in
those subjective conditions of existence which
belong to the " World of Effects," or spiritual
earth attached to the physical earth on which
our objective existence is passed.

The nature of existence on the spiritual earth
must be considered pari passu with the nature
of that passed on the physical earth and dealt
with in the above enumeration of race incarna
tions. We must never forget that between
each physical existence the individual unit
passes through a period of existence in the cor
responding spiritual world. And it is because
the conditions of that existence are defined by
the use that has been made of the opportunities
in the next preceding physical existence that
the spiritual earth is often spoken of in occult
writing as the world of effects. The earth it
self is its corresponding world of causes.

That which passes naturally into the world
of effects after an incarnation in the world of
causes is the individual unit or spiritual monad ;
but the personality just dissolved passes there
with it, to an extent dependent on the qualifi
cations of such personality, — on the use, that is
to say, which the person in question has made
of his opportunities in life. The period to be
spent in the world of effects — enormously
longer in each case than the life which has

THE WORLD PERIODS. 101

paved the way for existence there — corre
sponds to the " hereafter " or heaven of ordi
nary theology. The narrow purview of ordi
nary religious conceptions deals merely with
one spiritual life and its. consequences in the
life to come. Theology conceives that the en
tity concerned had its beginning in this physi
cal life, and that the ensuing spiritual life will
never stop. And this pair of existences, which
is shown, by the elements of occult science that
we are now unfolding, to constitute a part only
of the entity's experience during its connection
with a branch race, which is one of seven be
longing to a subdi visional race, itself one of
seven belonging to a main race, itself one of
seven belonging to the occupation of earth by
one of the seven round waves of humanity
which have each to occupy it in turn before its
functions in Nature are concluded, — this mi
croscopic molecule of the whole structure is
what common theology treats as more than the
whole, for it is supposed to cover eternity.

The reader must here be warned against one
conclusion to which the above explanations —
perfectly accurate as far as they go, but not yet
covering the whole ground — might lead him.
He will not get at the exact number of lives an
individual entity has to lead on the earth in the
course of its occupation by one round, if he

102 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

merely raises seven to its third power. If one
existence only were passed in each branch race,
the total number would obviously be 343, but
each life descends at least twice into objectivity
in the same branch, — each monad, in other
words, incarnates twice in each branch race.
Again, there is a curious cyclic law which op
erates to augment the total number of incarna
tions beyond 686. Each subdivisional race has
a certain extra vitality at its climax, which
leads it to throw off an additional offshoot race
at that point in its progress, and again another
offshoot race is developed at the end of the sub-
divisional race by its dying momentum, so to
speak. Through these races the whole tide of
human life passes, and the result is that the
actual normal number of incarnations for each
monad is not far short of 800. Within rela
tively narrow limits it is a variable number,
but the bearings of that fact may be considered
later on.

The methodical law which carries each and
every individual human entity through the vast
evolutionary process thus sketched out, is in no
way incompatible with that liability to fall
away into abnormal destinies or ultimate anni
hilation which menaces the personal entities of
people who cultivate very ignoble affinities.
The distribution of the seven principles at

THE WORLD PERIODS. 103

death shows that clearly enough, but viewed in
the light of these further explanations about
evolution, the situation may be better realized.
The permanent entity is that which lives
through the whole series of lives, not only
through the races belonging to the present
round wave on earth, but also through those of
other round waves and other worlds. Broadly
speaking, it may in due time, though at some
inconceivably distant future as measured in
years, recover a recollection of all those lives,
which will seem as days in the past to us. But
the astral dross, cast off at each passage into
the world of effects, has a more or less depen
dent existence of its own, quite separate from
that of the spiritual entity from which it has
just been disunited.

The natural history of this astral remnant is
a problem of much interest and importance, but
a methodical continuation of the whole subject
will require us in the first instance to endeavor
to realize the destiny of the higher and more du
rable spiritual Ego ; and before going into that
inquiry, there is a good deal more to be said
about the development of the objective races.

Esoteric science, though interesting itself
mainly with matters generally regarded as ap
pertaining to religion, would not be the com
plete comprehensive and trustworthy system

104 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

that it is, if it failed to bring all the facts of
earth life into harmony with its doctrines. It
would have been little able to search out and
ascertain the manner in which the human race
has evolved through aeons of time and series of
planets, if it had not been in a position to ascer
tain also, as the smaller inquiry is included in
the greater, the manner in which the wave of
humanity with which we are now concerned has
been developed on this earth. The faculties, in
short, which enable adepts to read the mys
teries of other worlds, and of other states of ex
istence, are in no way unequal to the task of
traveling back along the life-current of this
globe. It follows that while the brief record
of a few thousand years is all that our so-called
universal history can deal with, the earth his
tory, which forms a department of esoteric
knowledge, goes back to the incidents of the
fourth race which preceded ours, and to those
of the third race which preceded that. It goes
back still further indeed, but the second and
first races did not develop anything that could
be called civilization, and of them, therefore,
there is less to be said than of their successors.
The third and fourth did — strange as it may
seem to some modern readers to contemplate
the notion of civilization on the earth several
millions of years ago.

THE WORLD PERIODS. 105

Where are its traces ? they will ask. How
could the civilization with which Europe has
now endowed mankind pass away so completely
that any future inhabitants of the earth could
ever be ignorant that it once existed ? How
then can we conceive the idea that any similar
civilization can have vanished, leaving no rec
ords for us?

The answer lies in the regular routine of
planetary life, which goes on pari passu with
the life of its inhabitants. The periods of the
great root races are divided from each other by
great convulsions of Nature and by grout geo
logical changes. Europe was not in existence
as a continent at the time the fourth race flour
ished. The continent on which the fourth race
lived was not in existence at the time the third
race flourished, and neither of the continents
which were thje great vortices of the civilizations
of those two races are in existence now. Seven
great continental cataclysms occur during the
occupation of the earth by the human life-wave
for one round period. Each race is cut off in
this way at its appointed time, some survivors
remaining in parts of the world, not the proper
home of their race ; but these, invariably in
such cases, exhibiting a tendency to decay, and
relapsing into barbarism with more or less
rapidity.

106 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

The proper home of the fourth race, which
directly preceded our own, was that continent
of which some memory has been preserved even
in exoteric literature — the lost Atlantis. But
the great island, the destruction of which is
spoken of by Plato, was really but the last rem
nant of the continent. " In the Eocene age,"
I am told, " even in its very first part, the great
cycle of the fourth race men, the Atlanteans,
had already reached its highest point, and the
great continent, the father of nearly all the
present continents, showed the first symptoms
of sinking, — a process that occupied it down
to 11,446 years ago, when its last island, that,
translating its vernacular name, we may call
with propriety Poseidonis, went down with a
crash.

" Lemuria " (a former continent stretching
southward from India across wrjat is now the
Indian Ocean, but connected with Atlantis, for
Africa was not then in existence) " should no
more be confounded with the Atlantis conti
nent than Europe with America. Both sank
and were drowned, with their high civilizations
and ' gods,' yet between the two catastrophes a
period of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria
flourishing and ending her career just about
that lapse of time before the early part of the
Eocene age, since its race was the third. Be-

THE WORLD PERIODS. 107

hold the relics of that once great nation in some
of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia."

It is a mistake on the part of a recent writer
on Atlantis to people India and Egypt with
the colonies of that continent, but of that more
anon.

" Why should not your geologists," asks my
revered Mahatma teacher, " bear in mind that
under the continents explored and fathomed
by them, in the bowels of which they have
found the Eocene age, and forced it to de
liver to them its secrets, there may be hidden
deep in the fathomless, or rather un fathomed
ocean beds, other and far older continents
w^hose strata have never been geologically ex
plored ; and that they may some day upset en
tirely their present theories. Why not admit
that our present continents have, like Lemuria
and Atlantis, been several times already sub
merged, and had the time to reappear again,
and bear their new groups of mankind and civ
ilization ; and that at the first great geological
upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of
periodical cataclysms that occur from the be
ginning to the end of every round, our already
autopsized continents will go down, and the
Lemurias and Atlantises come up again.

44 Of course the fourtn race had its periods of
the highest civilization." (The letter from

108 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

which I am now quoting was written in answer
to a series of questions I put.) " Greek, and
Roman, and even Egyptian civilizations are
nothing compared to the civilizations that be
gan with the third race. Those of the second
race were not savages, but they could not be
called civilized.

" Greeks and Romans were small sub-races,
and Egyptians part and parcel of our own Cau
casian stock. Look at the latter, and at India.
Having reached the highest civilization, and
what is more, learning, both went down; Egypt,
as a distinct sub-race, disappearing entirely (her
Copts are but a hybrid remnant) ; India, as one
of the first and most powerful offshoots of the
mother race, and composed of a number of sub-
races, lasting to these times, and struggling to
take once more her place in history some day.
That history catches but a few stray, hazy
glimpses of Egypt some 12,000 years back,
when, having already reached the apex of its
cycle thousands of years before, the latter had
begun to go down.

"The Chaldees were at the apex of their
occult fame before what you term the Bronze
Age. We hold — but then what warrant can
you give the world that we are right? — that
far greater civilizations than our own have
risen and decayed. It is not enough to say, as

THE WORLD PERIODS. 109

some of your modern writers do, that an extinct
civilization existed before Rome and Athens
were founded. We affirm that a series of civ
ilizations existed before as well as after the
glacial period, that they existed upon various
points of the globe, reached the apex of glory,
and died. Every trace and memory had been
lost of the Assyrian and Phoenician civiliza
tions, until discoveries began to be made a few
years ago. And now they open a new though
not by far one of the earliest pages in the his
tory of mankind. And yet how far back do
those civilizations go in comparison with the
oldest, and even them history is slow to accept.
Archaeology has sufficiently demonstrated that
the memory of man runs back vastly further
than history has been willing to accept, and
the sacred records of once mighty nations pre
served by their heirs are still more worthy of
trust. We speak of civilizations of the ante-
glacial period, and not only in the minds of
the vulgar and the profane, but even in the
opinion of the highly-learned geologist, the
claim sounds preposterous. What would you
say, then, to our affirmation that the Chinese, —
I now speak of the inland, the true Chinaman,
not of the hybrid mixture between the fourth
and fifth races now occupying the throne, —
the aborigines who belong in their unallied na-

110 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

tionality wholly to the highest and last branch
of the fourth race, reached their highest civili
zation when the fifth had hardly appeared in
Asia? When was it? Calculate. The group
of islands discovered by Nordenskiold, of the
Vega was found strewn with fossils of horses,
sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of ele
phants, mammoths, rhinoceroses, and other
monsters belonging to periods when man, says
your science, had not yet made his appearance
on earth. How came horses and sheep to be
found in company with the huge antediluvians?
" The region now locked in the fetters of
eternal winter, uninhabited by man, that most
fragile of animals, will very soon be proved
to have had not only a tropical climate, some
thing your science knows and does not dispute,
but having been likewise the seat of one of the
most ancient civilizations of the fourth race,
whose highest relics we now find in the degener
ate Chinaman, and whose lowest are hopelessly
(for the profane scientist) intermixed with the
remnants of the third. I told you before that the
highest people now on earth (spiritually) belong
to the first sub-race of the fifth root race, and
those are the Aryan Asiatics; the highest race
(physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of
the fifth, — yourselves, the white conquerors.
The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh

THE WORLD PERIODS. Ill

sub-race of the fourth root race, — the above-
mentioned Chinamen and their offshoots and
branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetens,
Javanese, etc., etc.), — with remnants of other
sub-races of the fourth and the seventh sub-race
of the third race. All these fallen, degraded
semblances of humanity are the direct lineal
descendants of highly civilized nations, neither
the names nor memory of which have survived,
except in such books as 4 Populvuh,' the sacred
book of the Guatemalans, and a few others
unknown to science. "

I had inquired was there any way of ac
counting for what seems the curious rush of
human progress within the last two thousand
years, as compared with the relatively stagnant
condition of the fourth round people up to the
beginning of modern progress. This ques
tion it was that elicited the explanations quoted
above, and also the following remarks in regard
to the recent " rush of human progress."

" The latter end of a very important cycle.
Each round, each race, as every sub-race, has
its great and its smaller cycles on every planet
that mankind passes through. Our fourth
round humanity has its one great cycle, and so
have its races and sub-races. ' The curious
rush ' is due to the double effect of the former
^-the beginning of its downward course — and

112 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

of the latter (the smull cycle of your sub-race)
running on to its apex. Remember you belong
to the fifth race, yet you are but a Western
sub-race. Notwithstanding your efforts, what
you call civilization is confined only to the lat
ter and its offshoots in America. Radiating
around, its deceptive light may seem to throw
its rays on a greater distance than it does in
reality. There is no rush in China, and of
Japan you make but a caricature.

" A student of occultism ought not to speak
of the stagnant condition of the fourth -round
people, since history knows next to nothing of
that condition, ' up to the beginning of modern
progress,' of other nations but the Western.
What do you know of America, for instance,
before the invasion of that country by the
Spaniards? Less than two centuries prior to
the arrival of Cortez there was as great a rush
toward progress among the sub-races of Peru
and Mexico as there is now in Europe and the
United States. Their sub-race ended in nearly
total annihilation through causes generated by
itself. We may speak only of the 4 stagnant '
condition into which, following the law of de
velopment, growth, maturity, and decline, every
race and sub-race falls during the transition
periods. It is that latter condition your uni
versal history is acquainted with, while it re.

THE WORLD PERIODS. 113

mains superbly ignorant of the condition even
India was in some ten centuries back. Your
sub-races are now running toward the apex of
their respective cycles, and that history goes no
further back than the periods of decline of a
few other sub-races belonging most of them to
the preceding fourth race."

I had asked to what epoch Atlantis belonged,
and whether the cataclysm by which it was
destroyed came -in an appointed place in the
progress of evolution, corresponding for the de
velopment of races to the obscuration of plan
ets. The answer was : —

" To the Miocene times. Everything cornea
in its appointed time and place in the evolution
of rounds, otherwise it would be impossible for
the best seer to calculate the exact hour and
year when such cataclysms great and small
have to occur. All an adept could do would
be to predict an approximate time, whereas
now events that result in great geological
changes may be predicted with as mathemat
ical a certainty as eclipses and other revolu
tions in space. The sinking of Atlantis (the
group of continents and isles) began during the
Miocene period, — as certain of your continents
are now observed to be gradually sinking, —
and it culminated first in the final disappear
ance of the largest continent, an event coinci-

114 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

dent with the elevation of the Alps ; and second,
with that of the last of the fair islands men
tioned by Plato. The Egyptian priests of Sai's
told his ancestor Solon, that Atlantis (i. e., the
only remaining large island) had perished nine
thousand years before their time. This was not
a fancy date, since they had for millenniums
preserved most carefully their records. But
then, as I say, they spoke but of the Poseidonis,
-and would not reveal even to the great Greek
legislator their secret chronology. As there
are no geological reasons for doubting, but, on
the contrary, a mass of evidence for accepting
the tradition, science has finally accepted the
existence of the great continent and archipel
ago, and thus vindicated the truth of one more
4 fable.'

" The approach of every new obscuration is
always signaled by cataclysms of either fire or
water. But apart from this, every root race
has to be cut in two, so to say, by either one
or the other. Thus having reached the apex
of its development and glory, the fourth race
— the Atlanteans — were destroyed by water ;
you find now but their degenerate fallen rem
nants, whose sub-races nevertheless, each of
them, had its palmy days of glory and relative
greatness. What they are now, you will be
some day, the law of cycles being one and im-

THE WORLD PERIODS. 115

mutable. When your race, the fifth, will have
reached its zenith of physical intellectuality,
and developed its highest civilization (remem
ber the difference we make between material
and spiritual civilizations), unable to go any
higher in its own cycle, its progress toward
absolute evil will be arrested (as its predeces
sors, the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, the
men of the third and fourth races, were arrested
in their progress toward the same) by one of
such cataclysmic changes, its great civilization
destroyed, and all the sub-races of that race
will be found going down their respective
cycles, after a short period of glory and learn
ing. See the remnants of the Atlanteans, the
old Greeks and Romans (the modern belong to
the fifth race). See how great and how short,
how evanescent were their days of fame and
glory. For they were but sub-races of the seven
offshoots of the root race.1 No mother race,
any more than her sub-races and offshoots, is
allowed by the one reigning law to trespass
upon the prerogatives of the race, or sub-race
that will follow it ; least of all to encroach
upon the knowledge and powers in store for its
successor."
The "progress toward absolute evil," arrested

1 Branches of the subdivisions, according to .he nomenclature I
have adopted previously.

116 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

by the cataclysms of each race in turn, sets
in with the acquisition, by means of ordinary
intellectual research and scientific advance
ment, of those powers over Nature which ac
crue even now in adeptship from the premature
development of higher faculties than those we
ordinarily employ. I have spoken slightly of
these powers in a preceding chapter, when en
deavoring to describe our esoteric teachers ; to
describe them minutely would lead me into a
long digression on occult phenomena. It is
enough to say that they are such as cannot but
be dangerous to society generally, and provo
cative of all manner of crimes which would
utterly defy detection, if possessed by persons
capable of regarding them as anything else but
a profoundly sacred trust. Now some of these
powers are simply the practical application of
obscure forces of Nature, susceptible of dis
covery in the course of ordinary scientific prog
ress. Such progress had been accomplished
by the Atlanteans. The worldly men of sci
ence in that race had learned the secrets of
the disintegration and reintegration of matter,
which few but practical spiritualists as yet
know to be possible, and of control over the
elementals, by means of which that and other
even more portentous phenomena can be pro
duced. Such powers in the hands of persons

THE WORLD PERIODS. 117

willing to use them for merely selfish and un
scrupulous ends, must not only be productive of
social disaster, but also for the persons who hold
them, of progress in the direction of that evilly-
spiritual exaltation, which is a far more terri
ble result than suffering and inconvenience in
this world. Thus it is, when physical intellect,
unguarded by elevated morality, runs over into
the proper region of spiritual advancement, that
the natural law provides for its violent repres
sion. The contingency will be better under
stood when we come to deal with the general
destinies toward which humanity is tending.

The principle under which the various races
of man as they develop are controlled collec
tively by the cyclic law, however they may in
dividually exercise the free will they unques
tionably possess, is thus very plainly asserted.
For people who have never regarded human
affairs as covering more than the very short
period with which history deals, the course of
events will perhaps, as a rule, exhibit no cyclic
character, but rather a checkered progress, has
tened sometimes by great men and fortunate
circumstances, sometimes retarded by war, big
otry, or intervals of intellectual sterility, but
moving continually onward in the long ac
count at one rate of speed or another. As the
esoteric view of the matter, fortified by the

118 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

wide range of observation which occult science
is enabled to take, has an altogether opposite
tendency, it seems worth while to conclude
these explanations with an extract from a dis
tinguished author, quite unconnected with the
occult world, who nevertheless, from a close
observation of the mere historical record, pro
nounces himself decisively in favor of the theory
of cycles. In his " History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe," Dr. J. W. Draper
writes as follows : —

" We are, as we often say, the creatures of
circumstances. In that expression there is a
higher philosophy than might at first sight ap
pear. . . . From this more accurate point of
view we should therefore consider the course
of these events, recognizing the principle that
the affairs of men pass forward in a determi
nate way, expanding and unfolding themselves.
And hence we see that the things of which we
have spoken as though they were matters of
choice, were in reality forced upon their appar
ent authors by the necessity of the times. But
in truth they should be considered as the pres
entation of a certain phase of life which nations
in their onward course sooner or later assume.
To the individual, how well we know that a
sober moderation of action, an appropriate grav-
ity of demeanor, belong to the mature period

THE WORLD PERIODS. 119

of life, change from the wanton willfulness of
youth, which may be ushered in, or its begin
ning marked by many accidental incidents ; in
one perhaps by domestic bereavements, in an
other by the loss of fortune, in a third by ill
health. We are correct enough in imputing to
such trials the change of chnracter ; but we
never deceive ourselves by supposing that it
would have failed to take place had those in
cidents not occurred. There runs an irresisti
ble destiny in the midst of all these vicissitudes.
. . . There are analogies between the life of a
nation and that of an individual, who, though
he may be in one respect the maker of his own
fortunes, for happiness or for misery, for good
or for evil, though he remains here or goes
there as his inclinations prompt, though he
does this or abstains from that as he chooses, is
nevertheless held fast by an inexorable fate, —
a fate which brought him into the world in
voluntarily, as far as he was concerned, which
presses him forward through a definite career,
the stages of which are absolutely invariable, —
infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age,
with all their characteristic actions and pas
sions, — and which removes him from the scene
at the appointed time, in most cases against his
will. So also it is with nations ; the voluntary
is only the outward semblance, covering but

120 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

hardly hiding the predetermined. Over the
events of life we may have control, but none
whatever over the law of its progress. There
is a geometry that applies to nations an equa
tion of their curve of advance. That no mortal
man can touch."

CHAPTER V.

DEVACHAN.

IT was not possible to approach a considera
tion of the states into which the higher human
principles pass at death, without first indicat
ing the general framework of the whole design
worked out in the course of the evolution of
man. That much of my task, however, having
now been accomplished, we may pass on to con
sider the natural destinies of each human Ego,
in the interval which elapses between the close
of one objective life and the commencement of
another. At the commencement of another,
the Karma of the previous objective life deter
mines the state of life into which the individ
ual shall be born. This doctrine of Karma is
one of the most interesting features of Buddhist
philosophy. There has been no secret about it
at any time, though for want of a proper com
prehension of elements in the philosophy which
have been strictly esoteric, it may sometimes
have been misunderstood.

Karma is a collective expression applied to

122 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

that complicated group of affinities for good and
evil generated by a human being during life,
and the character of which inheres in the mole
cules of his fifth principle all through the inter
val which elapses between his death from one
objective life and his birth into the next. As
stated sometimes, the doctrine seems to be one
which exacts the notion of a superior spiritual
authority summing up the acts of a man's life
at its close, taking into consideration his good
deeds and his bad, and giving judgment about
him on the whole aspect of the case. But a
comprehension of the way in which the human
principles divide up at death, will afford a
clue to the comprehension of the way in which
Karma operates, and also of the great subject
we may better take up first, the immediate
spiritual condition of man after death.

At death, the three lower principles — the
body, its mere physical vitality, and its astral
counterpart — are finally abandoned by that
which really is the Man himself, and the four
higher principles escape into that world imme
diately above our own ; above our own, that is,
in the order of spirituality ; not above it at all,
but in it and of it, as regards real locality, — the
astral plane, or Karma Loca, according to a very
familiar Sanskrit expression. Here a division
takes plaoe between the two duads, which the

DE VAC HAN. 123

four higher principles include. The explana
tions already given concerning the imperfect
extent to which the upper principles of man are
as yet developed, will show that this estimation
of the process, as in the nature of a mechanical
separation of the principles, is a rough way of
dealing with the matter. It must be modified
in the reader's mind by the light of what has
been already said. It may be otherwise de
scribed as a trial of the extent to which the
fifth principle has been developed. Regarded
in the light of the former idea, however, we
must conceive the sixth and seventh principles,
on the one hand, drawing the fifth, the human
soul, in one direction, while the fourth draws it
back earthward in the other. Now, the fifth
principle is a very complex entity, separable
itself into superior and inferior elements. In
the struggle which takes place between its late
companion principles, its best, purest, most ele
vated, and spiritual portions cling to the sixth,
its lower instincts, impulses, and recollections
adhere to the fourth, and it is in a measure torn
asunder. The lower remnant, associating itself
with the fourth, floats off in the earth's atmos
phere, while the best elements, those, be it un
derstood, which really constitute the Ego of the
late earthly personality, the individuality, the
consciousness thereof, follows the sixth and sev-

124 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

enth into a spiritual condition, the nature of
which we are about to examine.

Rejecting the popular English name for this
spiritual condition, as incrusted with too many
misconceptions to be convenient, let us keep to
the Oriental designation of that region or state
into which the higher principles of human crea
tures pass at death. This is additionally desir
able because, although the Devachan of Bud
dhist philosophy corresponds in some respects
to the modern European idea of heaven, it dif
fers from heaven in others which are even more
important.

Firstly, however, in Devachan, that which
survives is not merely the individual monad,
which survives through all the changes of the
whole evolutionary scheme, and flits from body
to body, from planet to planet, and so forth, —
that which survives in Devachan is the man's
own self-conscious personality, under some re
strictions indeed, which we will come to direct
ly, but still it is the same personality as regards
its higher feelings, aspirations, affections, and
even tastes, as it was on earth. Perhaps it
would be better to say the essence of the late
self-conscious personality.

It may be worth the reader's while to learn
what Colonel H. S. Olcott has to say in his
" Buddhist Catechism " (14th thousand) of the

DEVACHAN. 125

intrinsic difference between " individuality "
and " personality." Since he wrote not only
under the approval of the High Priest of the
Sripada and Galle, Sumangala, but also under
the direct instruction of his adept Guru, his
words will have weight for the student of Oc
cultism. This is what he says in his Appen
dix : —

44 Upon reflection, I have substituted 4 person
ality ' for ' individuality ' as written in the first
edition. The successive appearances upon one
or many earths, or 4 descents into generation '
of the tanhaically-cohetQut parts (Skandhas) of
a certain being, are a succession of personali
ties. In each birth the personality differs from
that of the previous or next succeeding birth.
Karma, the deus ex mdchina, masks (or shall
we say, reflects?) itself now in the personality
of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on
throughout the string of births. But though
personalities ever shift, the one line of life
along which they are strung like beads, runs
unbroken.

"It is ever that particular line, never any
other. It is therefore individual, an individual
vital undulation which began in Nirvana or the
subjective side of Nature, as the light or heat
undulation through ether began at its dynamic
source ; is careering through the objective side

126 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

of Nature, under the impulse of Karma and the
creative direction of Tanha ; and tends through
many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr.
Rhys Davids calls that which passes from per
sonality to personality along the individual
chain, ' character ' or 'doing.' Since 'charac
ter' is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but
the sum of one's mental qualities and moral
propensities, would it not help to dispel what
Mr. Rhys Davids calls ' the desperate expe
dient of a mystery,' if we regarded the life un
dulation as individuality, and each of its series
of natal manifestations as a separate person
ality ?

" The denial of ' soul * by Buddha (see * San-
yutto Nikaya,' the Sutta Pitaka) points to the
prevalent delusive belief in an independent
transmissible personality ; an entity that could
move from birth to birth unchanged, or go to a
place or state where, as such perfect entity, it
could eternally enjoy or suffer. And what he
shows is that the ' I am I ' consciousness is, as
regards permanency, logically impossible, since
its elementary constituents constantly change,
and the ' I ' of one birth differs from the ' I ' of
every other birth. But everything that I have
found in Buddhism accords with the theory of
a gradual evolution of the perfect man, viz., a
Buddha through numberless natal experiences,

DEVACHAN. 127

And in the consciousness of that person who at
the end of a given chain of beings attains
Buddhahood, or who succeeds in attaining the
fourth stage of Dhyana, or mystic self-develop
ment, in any one of his births anterior to the
final one, the scenes of all these serial births
are perceptible. In the c Jatakattahavannana,'
so well translated by Mr. Rhys Davids, an ex
pression continually recurs which I think rather
supports such an idea, viz., 4 Then the blessed
one made manifest an occurrence hidden by
change of birth,' or ' that which had been hid
den by, etc.' Early Buddhism, then, clearly
held to a permanency of records in the Akasa,
and the potential capacity of man to read the
same when he has evoluted to the stage of true
individual enlightenment."

The purely sensual feelings and tastes of the
late personality will drop off from it in Deva-
chan, but it does not follow that nothing is
preservable in that state, except feelings and
thoughts having a direct reference to religion
or spiritual philosophy. On the contrary, all
the superior phases, even of sensuous emotion,
find their appropriate sphere of development in
Devachan. To suggest a whole range of ideas
by means of one illustration, a soul in Deva
chan, if the soul of a man who was passionately
devoted to music, would be continuously en-

128 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

raptured by the sensations music produces.
The person whose happiness of the higher sort
on earth had been entirely centred in the ex
ercise of the affections will miss none in Deva-
chan of those whom he or she loved. But, at
once it will be asked, if some of these are not
themselves fit for Devachan, how then ? The
answer is, that does not matter. For the per
son who loved them they will be there. It is
not necessary to say much more to give a clue
to the position. Devachan is a subjective state.
It will seem as real as the chairs and tables
round us ; and remember that, above all things,
to the profound philosophy of Occultism, are
the chairs and tables, and the whole objective
scenery of the world, unreal and merely transi
tory delusions of sense. As real as the realities
of this world to us, and even more so, will be
the realities of Devachan to those who go into
that state.

From this it ensues that the subjective isola
tion of Devachan, as it will perhaps be con
ceived at first, is not real isolation at all, as the
word is understood on the physical plane of ex
istence ; it is companionship with all that the
true soul craves for, whether persons, things, or
knowledge. And a patient consideration of
the place in Nature which Devachan occupies
will show that this subjective isolation of each

DEVACHAN. 129

•

human unit is the only condition which renders
possible anything which can be described as a
felicitous spiritual existence after death for
mankind at large, and Devachan is as much a
purely and absolutely felicitous condition for
all who attain it, as Avitchi is the reverse of it.
There is no inequality or injustice in the sys
tem ; Devachan is by no means the same thing
for the good and the indifferent alike, but it is
not a life of responsibility, and therefore there
is no logical place in it for suffering any more
than in Avitchi there is any room for enjoy
ment or repentance. It is a life of effects, not
of causes ; a life of being paid your earnings,
not of laboring for them. Therefore it is im
possible to be during that life cognizant of
what is going on on earth. Under the opera
tion of such cognition there would be no true
happiness possible in the state after death. A
heaven which constituted a watch-tower from
which the occupants could still survey the mis
eries of the earth, would really be a place of
acute mental suffering for its most sympathetic,
unselfish, and meritorious inhabitants. If we
invest them in imagination with such a very
limited range of sympathy that they could be
imagined as not caring about the spectacle of
suffering after the few persons to whom they
were immediately attached had died and joined

130 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

them, still they would have a very unhappy pe
riod of waiting to go through before survivors
reached the end of an often long and toilsome
existence below. And even this hypothesis
would be further vitiated by making heaven
most painful for occupants who were most un
selfish and sympathetic, whose reflected distress
would thus continue on behalf of the afflicted
race of mankind generally, even after their per
sonal kindred had been rescued by the lapse of
time. The only escape from this dilemma lies
in the supposition that heaven is not yet opened
for business, so to speak, and that all people
who have ever lived, from Adam downward,
are still lying in a death-like trance, waiting for
the resurrection at the end of the world. This
hypothesis also has its embarrassments, but we
are concerned at present with the scientific har
mony of esoteric Buddhism, not with the theo
ries of other creeds.

Readers, however, who may grant that a pur
view of earthly life from heaven would render
happiness in heaven impossible, may still doubt
whether true happiness is possible in the state,
as it may be objected, of monotonous isolation
now described. The objection is merely raised
from the point of view of an imagination that
Qannot escape from its present surroundings.
To begin with, about monotony. No one will

DEVACHAN. 131

complain of having experienced monotony dar
ing the minute, or moment, or half hour, as it
may have been, of the greatest happiness he
may have enjoyed in life. Most people have
had some happy moments, at all events, to look
back to for the purpose of this comparison ; and
let us take even one such minute or moment,
too short to be open to the least suspicion of
monotony, and imagine its sensations immensely
prolonged without any external events in prog
ress to mark the lapse of time. There is no
room, in such a condition of things, for the con
ception of weariness. The unalloyed, unchange
able sensation of intense happiness goes on and
on, not forever, because the causes which have
produced it are not infinite themselves, but for
very long periods of time, until the efficient im
pulse has exhausted itself.

Nor must it be supposed that there is, so to
speak, no change of occupation for souls in De-
vachan, — that any one moment of earthly sen
sation is selected for exclusive perpetuation.
As a teacher of the highest authority on this
subject writes : —

"There are two fields of causal manifesta
tions, the objective and subjective. The grosser
energies — those which operate in the denser
condition of matter — manifest objectively in
the next physical life, their outcome being the

132 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

new personality of each birth marshaling within
the grand cycle of the evoluting individuality.
It is but the moral and spiritual activities that
find their sphere of effects in Devachan. And,
thought and fancy being limitless, how can it
be argued for one moment that there is any
thing like monotony in the state of Devachan ?
Few are the men whose lives were so utterly
destitute of feeling, love, or of a more or less
intense predilection for some one line of
thought as to be made unfit for a proportionate
period of Devachanic experience beyond their
earthly life. So, for instance, while the vices,
physical and sensual attractions, say, of a great
philosopher, but a bad friend and a selfish man,
may result in the birth of a new and still
greater intellect, but at the same time a most
miserable man, reaping the Karmic effects of
all the causes produced by the 4 old' being, and
whose make-up was inevitable from the pre
ponderating proclivities of that being in the
preceding birth, the intermedial period between
the two physical births cannot be, in Nature's
exquisitely well-adjusted laws, but a hiatus of
unconsciousness. There can be no such dreary
blank as kindly promised, or rather implied, by
Christian Protestant theology, to the c departed
souls,' which, between death and ' resurrection,'
have to hang on in space, in mental catalepsy,

DEVACHAN. 133

awaiting the 4 Day of Judgment.' Causes pro
duced by mental and spiritual energy being far
greater and more important than those that
are created by physical impulses, their effects
have to be, for weal or woe, proportionately as
great. Lives on this earth, or other earths,
affording no proper field for such effects, and
every laborer being entitled to his own harvest,
they have to expand in either Devachan or
Avitchi.1 Bacon, for instance, whom a poet
called

* The brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind,'

might reappear in his next incarnation as a
greedy money-getter, with extraordinary intel
lectual capacities. But, however great the lat
ter, they would find no proper field in which
that particular line of thought, pursued during
his previous lifetime by the founder of modern
philosophy, could reap all its dues. It would
be but the astute lawyer, the corrupt Attorney-
General, the ungrateful friend, and the dishon
est Lord Chancellor, who might find, led on by
his Karma, a congenial new soil in the body of
the money-lender, and reappear as a new Shy-
lock. But where would Bacon, the incompar
able thinker, with whom philosophical inquiry
upon the most profound problems of Nature
was his 4 first and last and only love,' where

1 The lowest states of Devachan interchain with those of Avitchi

134 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

would this ' intellectual giant of his race once
disrobed of his lower nature, go to ? Have all
the effects of that magnificent intellect to vanish
and disappear? Certainly not. Thus his moral
and spiritual qualities would also have to find a
field in which their energies could expand them
selves. Devachan is such a field. Hence, all
the great plans of moral reform, of intellectual
research into abstract principles of Nature —
all the divine, spiritual aspirations that had so
filled the brightest part of his life would, in
Devachan, come to fruition ; and the abstract
entity, known in the preceding birth as Francis
Bacon, and that may be known in its subse
quent re-incarnation as a despised usurer — that
Bacon's own creation, his Frankenstein, the son
of his Karma — shall in the meanwhile occupy
itself in this inner world, also of its own prepa
ration, in enjoying the effects of the grand
beneficial spiritual causes sown in life. It
would live a purely and spiritually conscious ex
istence — a dream of realistic vividness — until
Karma, being satisfied in that direction, and the
ripple of force reaching the edge of its sub-cy
clic basin, the being should move into its next
area of causes, either in this same world or an
other, according to his stage of progression.
. . . Therefore, there is l a change of occupation,'
a continual change, in Devachan. For that

DEVACHAN. 135

dream-life is but the fruition, the harvest-time,
of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the
tree of physical existence in our moments of
dream and hope — fancy-glimpses of bliss and
happiness, stifled in an ungrateful social soil,
blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and
ripening under its ever -fructifying sky. If
man had but one single moment of ideal expe
rience, not even then could it be, as errone
ously supposed, the indefinite prolongation of
that 'single moment.' That one note, struck
from the lyre of life, would form the key-note
of the being's subjective state, and work out
into numberless harmonic tones and semitones
of psychic phantasmagoria. There, all unreal
ized hopes, aspirations, dreams, become fully
realized, and the dreams of the objective be
come the realities of the subjective existence.
And there, behind the curtain of Maya, its va
porous and deceptive appearances are perceived
by the Initiate, who has learned the great secret
how to penetrate thus deep into the Arcana of
Being." . . .

As physical existence has its cumulative in
tensity from infancy to prime, and its dimin
ishing energy thenceforward to dotnge and
death, so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
correspondentially. There is the first flutter of
psychic life, the attainment of prime, the grad-

136 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ual exhaustion of force passing into conscious
lethargy, semi-unconsciousness, oblivion and — •
not death but birth ! birth into another person
ality and the resumption of action which daily
begets new congeries of causes that must be
worked out in another term of Devachan.

" It is not a reality then, it is a mere dream,"
objectors will urge ; u the soul so bathed in a
delusive sensation of enjoyment which has no
reality all the while is being cheated by Na
ture, and must encounter a terrible shock when
it wakes to its mistake." But, in the nature of
things, it never does or can wake. The waking
from Devachan is its next birth into objective
life, and the draught of Lethe has then been
taken. Nor as regards the isolation of each soul
is there any consciousness of isolation whatever ;
nor is there ever possibly a parting from its
chosen associates. Those associates are not in
the nature of companions who may wish to go
away, of friends who may tire of the friend that
loves them, even if he or she does not tire of
them. Love, the creating force, has placed
their living image before the personal soul
which craves for their presence, and that image
will never fly away.

On this aspect of the subject I may again
avail myself of the language of my teacher : —

" Objectors of that kind will be simply postu

DEVACHAN. 137

lating an incongruity, an intercourse of entities
in Devachan, which applies only to the mutual
relationship of physical existence ! Two sym
pathetic souls, both disembodied, will each
work out its own Devachanic sensations, mak
ing the other a sharer in its subjective bliss.
This will be as real to them, naturally, as
though both were yet on this earth. Neverthe
less, each is dissociated from the other as re-
gardo personal or corporeal association. While
the latter is the only one of its kind that is
recognized by our earth experience as an actual
intercourse, for the Devachanee it would be not
only something unreal, but could have no exist
ence for it in any sense, not even as a delusion :
a physical body or even a Mayavi-rupa remain
ing to its spiritual senses as invisible as it is it
self to the physical senses of those who loved it
best on earth. Thus even though one of the
1 sharers ' were alive and utterly unconscious of
that intercourse in his waking state, still every
dealing with him would be to the Devachanee
an absolute reality. And what actual compan
ionship could there ever be other than the purely
idealistic one as above described, between two
subjective entities which are not even as mate
rial as that ethereal body-shadow — the Mayavi-
rupa? To object to this on the ground that
one is thus 4 cheated by Nature ' and to call it

138 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

* a delusive sensation of enjoyment which has
no reality,' is to show one's self utterly unfit
to comprehend the conditions of life and being
outside of our material existence. For how can
the same distinction be made in Devachan —
i. e., outside of the conditions of earth-life — be
tween what we call a reality, and a factitious
or an artificial counterfeit of the same, in this,
our world ? The same principle cannot apply
to the two sets of conditions. Is it conceivable
that what we call a reality in our embodied phys
ical state will exist under the same conditions
as an actuality for a disembodied entity ? On
earth, man is dual — in the sense of being a
thing of matter and a tiling of spirit ; hence the
natural distinction made by his mind — the an
alyst of his physical sensations and spiritual
perceptions — between an actuality and a fic
tion ; though, even in this life, the two groups
of faculties are constantly equilibrating each
other, each group when dominant seeing as fic
tion or delusion what the other believes to be
most real. But in Devachan our Ego has
ceased to be dualistic, in the above sense, and
becomes a spiritual, mental entity. That which
was a fiction, a dream in life, and which had
its being but in the region of c fancy,' becomes,
under the new conditions of existence, the only
possible reality. Thus, for us, to postulate the

DEVACHAN. 139

possibility of any other reality for a Devachanee
is to maintain an absurdity, a monstrous fallacy,
an idea unphilosophical to the last degree.
The actual is that which is acted or performed
de facto : 'the reality of a thing is proved by
its actuality.' And the supposititious and artifi
cial having no possible existence in that De-
vachanic state, the logical sequence is that
everything in it is actual and real. For, again,
whether overshadowing the five principles dur
ing the life of the personality, or entirely sepa
rated from the grosser principles by the dissolu
tion of the body — the sixth principle, or our
* Spiritual Soul,' has no substance — it is ever
Arupa ; nor is it confined to one place with a
limited horizon of perceptions around it. There
fore, whether in or out of its mortal body, it is
ever distinct, and free from its limitations ; and
if we call its Devachanic experiences 4a cheat
ing of Nature,' then we should never be allowed
to call ' reality ' any of those purely abstract feel
ings that belong entirely to, and are reflected
and assimilated by, our higher soul — such, for
instance, as an ideal perception of the beautiful,
profound philanthropy, love, etc., as well as
every other purely spiritual sensation that dur
ing life fills our inner being with either im
mense joy or pain."

We must remember that by the very nature

140 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

of the system described there are infinite va
rieties of well-being in Devachan, suited to the
infinite varieties of merit in mankind. If " the
next world " really were the objective heaven
which ordinary theology preaches, there would
be endless injustice and inaccuracy in its oper
ation. People, to begin with, would be either
admitted or excluded, and the differences of
favor shown to different guests within the all-
favored region would not sufficiently provide
for differences of merit in this life. But the
real heaven of our earth adjusts itself to the
needs and merits of each new arrival with un
failing certainty. Not merely as regards the
duration of the blissful state, which is deter
mined by the causes engendered during objec
tive life, but as regards the intensity and
amplitude of the emotions which constitute
that blissful state, the heaven of each person
who attains the really existent heaven is pre
cisely fitted to his capacity for enjoying it. It
is the creation of his own aspirations and facul
ties. More than this it may be impossible for
the uninitiated comprehension to realize. But
this indication of its character is enough to
show how perfectly it falls into its appointed
place in the whole scheme of evolution.

" Devachan," to resume my direct quota
tions, " is, of course, a state, not a locality, as

DEVACHAN. 141

much as Avitchi, its antithesis (which please
not to confound with hell). Esoteric Buddhist
philosophy has three principal lokas so-called

— namely, 1, Kama loka ; 2, Rupa loka ; and
3, Arupa loka ; or in their literal translation
and meaning — 1, world of desires or passions,
of unsatisfied earthly cravings — the abode of
4 Shells ' and Victims, of Elementaries and
Suicides ; 2, the world of Forms — i. e., of
shadows more spiritual, having form and objec
tivity, but no substance ; and 3, the formless
world, or rather the world of no form, the in
corporeal, since its denizens can have neither
body, shape, nor color for us mortals, and in the
sense that we give to these terms. These are
the three spheres of ascending spirituality, in
which the several groups of subjective and semi-
subjective entities find their attractions. All
but the suicides and the victims of premature
violent deaths go, according to their attractions
and powers, either into the Devachanic or the
Avitchi state, which two states form the num
berless subdivisions of Rupa and Arupa lokas

— that is to say, that such states not only vary
in degree, or in their presentation to the sub
ject entity as regards form, color, etc., but that
there is an infinite scale of such states, in their
progressive spirituality and intensity of feeling;
from the lowest in the Rupa, up to the highest

142 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

and the most exalted in the Arupa-loka. The
student must bear in mind that personality is
the synonym for limitation ; and that the more
selfish, the more contracted the person's ideas,
the closer will he cling to the lower spheres of
being, the longer loiter on the plane of selfish
social intercourse."

Devachan being a condition of mere subjec
tive enjoyment, the duration and intensity of
which is determined by the merit and spiritual
ity of the earth-life last past, there is no oppor
tunity, while the soul inhabits it, for the punc
tual requital of evil deeds. But Nature does
not content herself with either forgiving sins in
a free and easy way, or damning sinners out
right, like a lazy master too indolent, rather
than too good-natured, to govern his household
justly. The Karma of evil, be it great or
small, is as certainly operative at the appointed
time as the Karma of good. But the place of
its operation is not Devachan, but either a new
re-birth or Avitchi — a state to be reached only
in exceptional cases and by exceptional natures.
In other words, while the commonplace sinner
will reap the fruits of his evil deeds in a follow
ing re-incarnation, the exceptional criminal, the
aristocrat of sin, has Avitchi in prospect — that
is to say, the condition of subjective spiritual
misery which is the reverse side of Devachan.

DEVACHAN. 143

" Avitchi is a state of the most idc.al spirit
ual wickedness, something akin to the state of
Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not
many, though, are there who can reach it, as
the thoughtful reader will perceive. And if it
is urged that since there is Devachan for nearly
all, for the good, the bad, and the indiffer
ent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium are
frustrated and the law of retribution and of
impartial, implacable justice, hardly met and
satisfied by such a comparative scarcity if not
absence of its antithesis, then the answer will
show that it is not so. 4 Evil is the dark
son of Earth (matter) and Good — the fair
daughter of Heaven ' (or Spirit) says the
Chinese philosopher ; hence the place of pun
ishment for most of our sins is the earth — its
birth-place and play-ground. There is more
apparent and relative than actual evil even on
earth, and it is not given to the hoi polloi to
reach the fatal grandeur and eminence of a
' Satan ' every day."

Generally, the re-birth into objective exist
ence is the event for which the Karma of evil
patiently waits, and then it irresistibly asserts
itself; not that the Karma of good exhausts
itself in Devachan, leaving the unhappy monad
to develop a new consciousness with no mate
rial beyond the evil deeds of its last personality.

144 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

The re-birth will be qualified by the merit as
well as the demerit of the previous life, but the
Devachan existence is a rosy sleep — a peace
ful night with dreams more vivid than day, and
imperishable for many centuries.

It will be seen that the Devachan state is
only one of the conditions of existence which go
to make up the whole spiritual or relatively spir
itual complement of our earth life. Observers of
spiritualistic phenomena would never have been
perplexed as they have been if there were no
other but the Devachan state to be dealt with.
For once in Devachan there is very little op
portunity for communication between a spirit,
then wholly absorbed in its own sensations and
practically oblivious of the earth left behind,
and its former friends still living. Whether
gone before or yet remaining on earth, those
friends, if the bond of affection has been suffi
ciently strong, will be with the happy spirit
still to all intents and purposes for him, and as
happy, blissful, innocent, as the disembodied
dreamer himself. It is possible, however, for
yet living persons to have visions of Devachan,
though such visions are rare, and only one
sided, the entities in Devachan, sighted by the
earthly clairvoyant, being quite unconscious
themselves of undergoing such observation.
The spirit of the clairvoyant ascends into the

DEVACHAN. 145

condition of Devachan in such rare visions, and
thus becomes subject to the vivid delusions of
that existence. It is under the impression that
the spirits, with which it is in Devachanic
bonds of sympathy, have come down to visit
earth and itself, while the converse operation
has really taken place. The clairvoyant's spirit
has been raised towards those in Devachan.
Thus many of the subjective spiritual commu
nications — most of them when the sensitives
are pure-minded — are real, though it is most
difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in
his mind the true and correct pictures of what
he sees and hears. In the same way some of
the phenomena called psychography (though
more rarely) are also real. The spirit of the
sensitive getting odylized, so to say, by the
aura of the spirit in the Devachan becomes for
a few minutes that departed personality, and
writes in the handwriting of the latter, in his
language and in his thoughts as they were
during his lifetime. The two spirits become
blended in one, and the preponderance of one
over the other during such phenomena deter
mines the preponderance of personality in the
characteristics exhibited. Thus, it may inci
dentally be observed, what is called rapport,
is, in plain fact, an identity of molecular vibra
tion between the astral part of the incarnate

146 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

medium and the astral part of the disincarnate
personality.

As already indicated, and as the common
sense of the matter would show, there are great
varieties of states in Devachan, and each per
sonality drops into its befitting place there.
Thence, consequently, he emerges in his befit
ting place in the world of causes, this earth or
another, as the case may be, when his time for
re-birth comes. Coupled with survival of the
affinities, comprehensively described as Karma,
the affinities both for good and evil engendered
by the previous life, this process will be seen to
accomplish nothing less than an explanation of
the problem which has always been regarded
as so incomprehensible — the inequalities of
life. The conditions on which we enter life are
the consequences of the use we have made of
our last set of conditions. They do not impede
the development of fresh Karma, whatever they
may be, for this will be generated by the use
we make of them in turn. Nor is it to be sup
posed that every event of a current life which
bestows joy or sorrow is old Karma bearing
fruit. Many may be the immediate conse
quences of acts in the life to which they belong
— ready-money transactions with Nature, so to
speak, of which it may be hardly necessary to
make any entry in her books. But the great

DE VAC HAN. 147

inequality of life, as regards the start in it
which different human beings make, is a mani
fest consequence of old Karma, the infinite va
rieties of which always keep up a constant sup
ply of recruits for all the manifold varieties of
human condition.

It must not be supposed that the real Ego
slips instantaneously at death from the earth-
life and its entanglements into the Devachanic
condition. When the division or purification
of the fifth principle has been accomplished
in Kama loca by the contending attractions of
the fourth and sixth principles, the real Ego
passes into a period of unconscious gestation.
I have spoken already of the way in whicli the
Devachanic life is 'itself a process of growth,
maturity, and decline ; but the analogies of
earth are even more closely preserved. There
is a spiritual ante-natal state at the entrance to
spiritual life, as there is a similar and equally
unconscious physical state at the entrance to
objective life. And this period, in different
cases, may be of very different duration — from
a few moments to immense periods of years.
When a man dies, his soul or fifth principle be
comes unconscious and loses all remembrance
of things internal as well as external. Whether
his stay in Kama loca has to last but a few mo
ments, hours, days, weeks, months or years;

148 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

whether he dies a natural or a violent death ;
whether this occurs in youth or age, and
whether the Ego has been good, bad, or indif
ferent, his consciousness leaves him as suddenly
as the flame leaves the wick when it is blown
out. When life has retired from the last par
ticle of the brain matter, his perceptive facul
ties become extinct forever, and his spiritual
powers of cognition and volition become for the
time being as extinct as the others. His Ma-
yavi-rupa may be thrown into objectivity as in
the case of apparitions after death, but unless
it is projected by a conscious or intense desire
to see or appear to some one shooting through
the dying brain, the apparition will be simply
automatic. The revival of consciousness in
Kama loea is obviously, from what has been al
ready said, a phenomenon that depends on the
characteristic of the principles passing, uncon
sciously at the moment, out of the dying body.
It may become tolerably complete under cir
cumstances by no means to be desired, or it
may be obliterated by a rapid passage into the
gestation state leading to Devachan. This ges
tation state may be of very long duration in
proportion to the Ego's spiritual stamina, and
Devachan accounts for the remainder of the
period between death and the next physical re
birth. The whole period is, of course, of very

DEVACHAN. 149

varying length in the case of different persons,
but re-birth in less than fifteen hundred years
is spoken of as almost impossible, while the
stay in Devachan which rewards a very rich
Karma is sometimes said to extend to enormous
periods.

CHAPTER VL
KAMA LOCA.

THE statements already made in reference to
the destiny of the higher human principles at
death will pave the way for a comprehension of
the circumstances in which the inferior remnant
of these principles finds itself, after the real
Ego has passed either into the Devachanic
state or that unconscious intervening period of
preparation therefor which corresponds to phys
ical gestation. The sphere in which such rem
nants remain for a time is known to occult
science as Kama loca, the region of desire, not
the region in which desire is developed to any
abnormal degree of intensity as compared with
desire as it attaches to earth-life, but the sphere
in which that sensation of desire, which is a
part of the earth-life, is capable of surviving.

It will be obvious, from what has been said
about Devachan, that a large part of the recol
lections which accumulate round the human
Ego during life are incompatible in their nature
with the pure subjective existence to which the

KAMA LOCA. 151

real, durable, spiritual Ego passes ; but they
are not necessarily on that account extinguished
or annihilated out of existence. They inhere
in certain molecules of those finer ( but not fin
est) principles, which escape from the body at
death ; and just as dissolution separates what
is loosely called the soul from the body, so also
it provokes a further separation between the
constituent elements of the soul. So much of
the fifth principle, or human soul, which is in
its nature assimilable with, or has gravitated
upwards toward, the sixth principle, the spirit
ual soul, passes with the germ of that divine
soul into the superior region, or state of Deva-
chan, in which it separates itself almost com
pletely from the attractions of the earth ; quite
completely, as far as its own spiritual course is
concerned, though it still has certain affinities
with the spiritual aspirations emanating from
the earth, and may sometimes draw these to
wards itself. But the animal soul, or fourth
principle (the element of will and desire as as
sociated with objective existence), has no up
ward attraction, and no more passes away from
the earth than the particles of the body con
signed to the grave. It is not in the grave, how
ever, that this fourth principle can be put away.
It is not spiritual in its nature or affinities, but
it is not physical in its nature. In its affinities

152 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

it is physical, and hence the result. It remains
within the actual physical local attraction of the
earth — in the earth's atmosphere — or, since it
is not the gases of the atmosphere that are spe
cially to be considered in connection with the
problem in hand, let us say, in Kama loca.

And with the fourth principle a large part
(as regards most of mankind unfortunately,
though a part very variable in its relative mag
nitude) inevitably remains. There are plenty
of attributes which the ordinary composite hu
man being exhibits, many ardent feelings, de
sires, and acts, floods of recollections, which
even if not concerned with a life as ardent per
haps as those which have to do with the higher
aspirations, are nevertheless essentially belong
ing to the physical life, which take time to die.
They remain behind in association with the
fourth principle, which is altogether of the
earthly perishable nature, and disperse or fade
out, or are absorbed into the respective univer
sal principles to which they belong, just as the
body is absorbed into the earth, in progress of
time, and rapidly or slowly in proportion to the
tenacity of their substance. And where, mean
while, is the consciousness of the individual
who has died or dissolved ? Assuredly in Deva*
chan ; but a difficulty presents itself to the
mind untrained in occult science, from the fact

KAMA LOCA 153

that a semblance of consciousness inheres in the
astral portion — the fourth principle with a
portion of the fifth — which remains behind in
Kama loca. The individual consciousness, it
is argued, cannot be in two places at once. But
first of all, to a certain extent, it can. As may
be perceived presently, it is a mistake to speak
of consciousness, as we understand the feeling
in life, attaching to the astral shell or remnant ;
but nevertheless a certain spurious semblance
may be reawakened in that shell, without hav
ing any connection with the real consciousness
all the while growing in strength and vitality
in the spiritual sphere. There is no power on
the part of the shell of taking in and assimilat
ing new ideas and initiating courses of action
on the basis of those new ideas. But there is
in the shell a survival of volitional impulses im
parted to it during life. The fourth principle
is the instrument of volition though not voli
tion itself, and impulses imparted to it during
life by the higher principles may run their
course and produce results almost indistinguish
able for careless observers from those which
would ensue were the four higher principles
really all united as in life.

It, the fourth principle, is the receptacle or
vehicle during life of that essentially moral con
sciousness which cannot suit itself to conditions

154 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

of permanent existence ; but the consciousness
even of the lower principles during life is a very
different thing from the vaporous fleeting and
uncertain consciousness, which continues to
inhere in them when that which really is the
life, the overshadowing of them, or vitalization
of them by the infusion of the spirit, has ceased
as far as they are concerned. Language cannot
render all the facets of a many-sided idea in
telligible at once any more than a plain draw
ing can show all sides of a solid object at once.
And at the first glance different drawings of
the same object from different points of view
may seem so unlike as to be unrecognizable as
the same ; but none the less, by the time they
are put together in the mind, will their diver
sities be seen to harmonize. So with these
subtle attributes of the invisible principles of
man — no treatise can do more than discuss
their different aspects separately. The vari
ous views suggested must mingle in the read
er's mind before the complete conception corre
sponds to the realities of Nature.

In life the fourth principle is the seat of will
and desire, but it is not will itself. It must be
alive, in union with the overshadowing spirit,
or " one life," to be thus the agent of that very
elevated function of life — will, in its sublime
potency. As already mentioned, the Sanskrit

KAMA LOCA. 155

names of the higher principles connote the idea
that they are vehicles of the one life. Not
that the one life is a separable molecular
principle itself, it is the union of all — the
influences of the spirit ; but in truth the idea
is too subtle for language, perhaps for intellect
itself. Its manifestation in the present case,
however, is apparent enough. Whatever the
willing fourth principle may be when alive, it
is no longer capable of active will when dead.
But then, under certain abnormal conditions, it
may partially recover life for a time ; and this
fact it is which explains many, though by no
means all, of the phenomena of spiritualistic
mediumship. The " elementary," be it remem
bered — as the astral shell has generally been
called in former occult writings — is liable to
be galvanized for a time in the mediumistic
current into a state of consciousness and life
which may be suggested by the first condition
of a person who, carried into a strange room in
a state of insensibility during illness, wakes up
feeble, confused in mind, gazing about with a
blank feeling of bewilderment, taking in im
pressions, hearing words addressed to him and
answering vaguely. Such a state of conscious
ness is unassociated with the notions of past or
future. It is an automatic consciousness, de
rived from the medium. A medium, be it

156 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

remembered, is a person whose principles are
loosely united and susceptible of being bor
rowed by other beings, or floating principles,
having an attraction for some of them or some
part of them. Now what happens in the case
of a shell drawn into the neighborhood of
a person so constituted ? Suppose the person
from whom the shell has been cast died with
some strong unsatisfied desire, not necessarily
of an unholy sort, but connected entirely with
the earth-life, a desire, for example, to com
municate some fact to a still living person.
Certainly the shell does not go about in Kama
loca with a persistent intelligent conscious pur
pose of communicating that fact ; but, amongst
others, the volitional impulse to do this has
been infused into the fourth jDiinciple, and
while the molecules of that principle remain in
association, and that may be for many years,
they only need a partial galvanization into life
again to become operative in the direction of
the original impulse. Such a shell comes into
contact with a medium (not so dissimilar in
nature from the person who has died as to
render a rapport impossible), and something
from the fifth principle of the medium associates
itself with the wandering fourth principle and
sets the original impulse to work. So much
consciousness and so much intelligence as may

KAMA LOCA. 157

be required to guide the fourth principle in the
use of the immediate means of communication
at hand — a slate and pencil, or a table to rap
upon — are borrowed from the medium, and
then the message given may be the message
which the dead person originally ordered his
fourth principle to give, so to speak, but which
the shell has never till then had an opportunity
of giving. It may be argued that the produc
tion of writing on a closed slate, or of raps on a
table without the use of a knuckle or a stick,
is itself a feat of a marvelous nature, bespeak
ing a knowledge on the part of the communi
cating intelligence of powers of Nature we in
physical life know nothing about. But the
shell is itself in the astral world ; in the realm
of such powers. A phenomenal manifestation
is its natural mode of dealing. It is no more
conscious of producing a wonderful result by
the use of new powers acquired in a higher
sphere of existence than we are conscious of
the forces by which in life the volitional im
pulse is communicable to nerves and muscles.

But, it may be objected, the " communicating
intelligence" at a spiritual seance will constant
ly perform remarkable feats for no other than
their own sake, to exhibit the power over
natural forces which it possesses. The reader
will please remember, however, that occult

158 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

science is very far from saying that all the
phenomena of spiritualism are traceable to one
class of agents. Hitherto in this treatise little
has been said of the " elementals," those semi-
intelligent creatures of the astral light who
belong to a wholly different kingdom of Nature
from ourselves. Nor is it possible at present
to enlarge upon their attributes for the simple
and obvious reason, that knowledge concerning
the elementals, detailed knowledge on that sub
ject, and in regard to the way they work, is
scrupulously withheld by the adepts of occult
ism. To possess such knowledge is to wield
power, and the whole motive of the great se
crecy in which occult science is shrouded turns
upon the danger of conferring powers upon peo
ple who have not, first of all, by undergoing
the training of initiates, given moral guarantees
of their trustworthiness. It is by command
over the elementals that some of the greatest
physical feats of adeptship are accomplished ;
and it is by the spontaneous playful acts of the
elementals that the greatest physical phenom
ena of the seance room are brought about.
So also with almost all Indian Fakirs and
Yogis of the lower class who have power of
producing phenomenal results. By some means,
by a scrap of inherited occult teaching, most
likely, they have come into possession of a mor-

KAMA LOG A. 159

sel of occult science. Not necessarily that they
understand the action of the forces they employ
any more than an Indian servant in a telegraph
office, taught how to mix the ingredients of the
liquid used in a galvanic battery, understands
the theory of electric science. He can perform
the one trick he has been taught ; and so with
the inferior Yogi. He has got influence over
certain elementals, and can work certain won
ders.

Returning to a consideration of the ex-human
shells in Kama loca, it may be argued that
their behavior in spiritual seances is not cov
ered by the theory that they have had some
message to deliver from their late master, and
have availed themselves of the mediumship
present to deliver it. Apart altogether from
phenomena that may be put aside as elemental
pranks, we sometimes encounter a continuity of
intelligence on the part of the elementary or
shell that bespeaks much more than the sur
vival of impulses from the former life. Quite
so; but with portions of the medium's fifth
principle conveyed into it the fourth principle
is once more an instrument in the hands of a
master. With a medium entranced so that the
energies of his fifth principle are conveyed into
the wandering shell to a very large extent, the
result is that there is a very tolerable revival of

160 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

consciousness in the shell for the time being, as
regards the given moment. But what is the
nature of such consciousness, after all ? Noth
ing more, really, than a reflected light. Mem
ory is one thing, and perceptive faculties quite
another. A madman may remember very
clearly some portions of his past life ; yet he
is unable to perceive anything in its true light,
for the higher portion of his Manas (fifth) and
Buddhi (sixth) principles are paralyzed in him
and have left him. Could an animal — a dog,
for instance — explain himself, he could prove
that his memory, in direct relation to his ca
nine personality, is as fresh as his master's ;
nevertheless, his memory and instinct cannot
be called perceptive faculties.

Once that a shell is in the aura of a medium,
he will perceive, clearly enough, whatever he
can perceive through the borrowed principles
of the medium, and through organs in mag
netic sympathy therewith ; but this will not
carry him beyond the range of the perceptive
faculties of the medium, or of some one else
present in the circle. Hence the often rational
and sometimes highly intelligent answers he
may give, and hence, also, his invariably com
plete oblivion of all things unknown to that
medium or circle, or not found in the lower
recollections of his late personality, galvanized

KAMA LOCA. 161

afresh by the influences under which he is
placed. The shell of a highly intelligent,
learned, but utterly unspiritual man, who died
a natural death, will last longer than those of
weaker temperament, and (the shadow of his
own memory helping) he may deliver, through
trance-speakers, orations of no contemptible
kind. But these will never be found to relate
to anything beyond the subjects he thought
much and earnestly of during life, nor will any
word ever fall from him indicating a real ad
vance of knowledge.

It will easily be seen that a shell, drawn into
the mediumistic current, and getting into rap
port with the medium's fifth principle, is not
by any means sure to be animated with a con
sciousness (even for what such consciousnesses
are worth) identical with the personality of the
dead person from whose higher principles it
was shed. It is just as likely to reflect some
quite different personality, caught from the
suggestions of the medium's mind. In this
personality it will perhaps remain and answer
for a time; then some new current of thought,
thrown into the minds of the people present,
will find its echo in the fleeting impressions of
the elementary, and his sense of identity will
begin to waver ; for a little while it flickers
over two or three conjectures, and ends by go-
n

162 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ing out altogether for a time. The shell is
once more sleeping in the astral light, and may
be unconsciously wafted in a few moments to
the other ends of the earth.

Besides the ordinary elementary or shell of
the kind just described, Kama loca is the abode
of another class of astral entities, which must
be taken into account if we desire to compre
hend the various conditions under which hu^
man creatures may pass from this life to others.
So far we have been examining the normal
course of events, when people die in a natural
manner. But an abnormal death will lead to
abnormal consequences. Thus, in the case of
persons committing suicide, and in that of per
sons killed by sudden accident, results ensue
which differ widely from those following nat
ural deaths. A thoughtful consideration of
such cases must show, indeed, that in a world
governed by rule and law, by affinities work
ing out their regular effects in that deliberate
way which Nature favors, the case of a person
dying a sudden death at a time when all his
principles are firmly united, and ready to hold
together for twenty, forty, or sixty years, what
ever the natural remainder of his life would be,
must surely be something different from that
of a person who, by natural processes of decay,
finds himself, when the vital machine stops,

KAMA LOG A.

readily separable into his various principles,
each prepared to travel its separate way. Na
ture, always fertile in analogies, at once illus
trates the idea by showing us a ripe and an
unripe fruit. From out of the first the inner
stone will come away as cleanly and easily as a
hand from a glove, while from the unripe fruit
the stone can only be torn with difficulty, half
the pulp clinging to its surface. Now, in the
case of the sudden accidental death or of the
suicide, the stone has to be torn from the un
ripe fruit. There is no question here about the
moral blame which may attach to the act of
suicide. Probably, in the majority of cases,
such moral blame does attach to it, but that is
a question of Karma which will follow the per
son concerned into the next re-birth, like any
other Karma, and has nothing to do with the
immediate difficulty such person may find in
getting himself thoroughly and wholesomely
dead. This difficulty is manifestly just the
same whether a person kills himself, or is killed
in the heroic discharge of duty, or dies the vic
tim of an accident over which he haS no con
trol whatever.

As an ordinary rule, when a person dies, the
long account of Karma naturally closes itself ;
that is to say, the complicated set of affinities
which have been set up during life in the first

164 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

durable principle, the fifth is no longer suscep
tible of extension. The balance-sheet, so to
speak, is made out afterwards, when the time
comes for the next objective birth ; or, in other
words, the affinities long dormant in Devachan,
by reason of the absence there of any scope for
their action, assert- themselves as soon as they
come in contact once more with physical exis
tence. But the fifth principle, in which these
affinities are grown, cannot be separated in the
case of the person dying prematurely from the
earthly principle — the fourth. The elemen
tary, therefore, which finds itself in Kama loca,
on its violent expulsion from the body, is not a
mere shell — it is the person himself who was
lately alive minus nothing but the body. In
the true sense of the word he is not dead at
all.

Certainly elementaries of this kind may com
municate very effectually at spiritual seances at
their own heavy cost; for they are unfortu
nately able, by reason of the completeness of
their astral constitution, to go on generating
Karma, to assuage their thirst for life at the
unwholesome spring of mediumship. If they
were of a very material sensual type in life, the
enjoyments they will seek will be of a kind the
indulgence of which in their disembodied state
may readily be conceived even more prejudiciaj

KAMA LOCA. 165

to their Karma than similar indulgences would
have been in life. In such cases facilis est de-
scensus. Cut off in the full flush of earthly
passions which bind them to familiar scenes,
they are enticed by the opportunity which me
diums afford for the gratification of these vica
riously. They become the incubi and succubi
of mediaeval writing, demons of thirst and glut
tony, provoking their victims to crime. A brief
essay on this subject, which I wrote last year,
and from which I have reproduced some of the
sentences just given, appeared in "The Theoso-
phist," with a note, the authenticity of which I
have reason to trust, and the tenor of which
was as follows : —

" The variety of states after death is greater
if possible than the variety of human lives upon
this earth. The victims of accident do not
generally become earth walkers, only those fall
ing into the current of attraction who die full
of some engrossing earthly passion, the selfish
who have never given a thought to the welfare
of others. Overtaken by death in the consum
mation, whether real or imaginary, of some
master passion of their lives, the desire remain
ing unsatisfied even after a full realization, and
they still craving for more, such personalities
can never pass beyond the earth attraction to
wait for the hour of deliverance in happy igno-

166 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ranee and full oblivion. Among the suicides,
those to whom the above statement about pro
voking their victims to crime, etc., applies, are
that class who commit the act in consequence of
a crime to escape the penalty of human law or
their own remorse. Natural law cannot be
broken with impunity ; the inexorable causal
relation between action and result has its full
sway only in the world of effects, the Kama
loca, and every case is met there by an ade
quate punishment, and in a thousand ways,
that would require volumes even to describe
them superficially."

Those who " wait for the hour of deliverance
in happy ignorance and full oblivion " are of
course such victims of accident as have already
on earth engendered pure and elevated affinities,
and after death are as much beyond the reach
of temptation in the shape of mediumistic cur
rents as they would have been inaccessible in
life to common incitements to crime.

Entities of another kind occasionally to be
found in Kama loca have yet to be considered.
We have followed the higher principles of per
sons recently dead, observing the separation of
the astral dross from the spiritually durable
portion, that spiritually durable portion being
either holy or Satanic in its nature, and pro
vided for in Devachan or Avitchi accordingly

KAMA LOCA. 167

We have examined the nature of the elemen
tary shell cast off and preserving for a time a
deceptive resemblance to a true entity ; we
have paid attention also to the exceptional cases
of real four principled beings in Kama loca who
are the victims of accident or suicide. But
what happens to a personality which has abso
lutely no atom of spirituality, no trace of spir
itual affinity in its fifth principle, either of the
good or bad sort? Clearly in such a case there
is nothing for the sixth principle to attract to
itself. Or, in other words, such a personality
has already lost its sixth principle by the time
death comes. But Kama loca is no more a
sphere of existence for such a personality than
the subjective world ; Kama loca may be per
manently inhabited by astral beings, by ele-
mentals, but can only be an antechamber to
some other state for human beings. In the case
imagined, the surviving personality is promptly
drawn into the current of its future destinies,
and these have nothing to do with this earth's
atmosphere or with Devachan, but with that
" eighth sphere " of which occasional mention
will be found in older occult writings. It will
have been unintelligible to ordinary readers
hitherto why it was called the " eighth " sphere,
but since the explanation, now given out for the
first time, of the sevenfold constitution of our

168 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

planetary system, the meaning will be clear
enough. The spheres of the cyclic process of
evolution are seven in number, but there is an
eighth in connection with our earth, our earth
being, it will be remembered, the turning-point
in the cyclic chain, and this eighth sphere is
out of circuit, a cul de sac, and the bourne from
which it may be truly said no traveler returns.

It will readily be guessed that the only sphere
connected with our planetary chain, which is
lower than our own in the scale, having spirit
at the top and matter at the bottom, must it
self be no less visible to the eye and to optical
instruments than the earth itself, and as the
duties which this sphere has to perform in our
planetary system are immediately associated
with this earth, there is not much mystery left
now in the riddle of the eighth sphere, nor as
to the place in the sky where it may be sought.
The conditions of existence there, however, are
topics on which the adepts are very reserved in
their communications to uninitiated pupils, and
concerning these I have for the present no fur
ther information to give.

One statement though is definitely made,
viz., that such a total degradation of a person
ality as may suffice to draw it, after death,
into the attraction of the eighth sphere, is of
very rare occurrence. From the vast majority

KAMA LOCA. 169

of lives there is something which the higher
principles may draw to themselves, something
to redeem the page of existence just passed
from total destruction : and here it must be
remembered that the recollections of life in
Devachan, very vivid as they are, as far as they
go, touch only those episodes in life which are
productive of the elevated sort of happiness of
which alone Devachan is qualified to take cog
nizance ; whereas the life from which for the
time being the cream is thus skimmed may
come to be remembered eventually in all its
details quite fully. That complete remem
brance is only achieved by the individual at
the threshold of a far more exalted spiritual
state than that which we are now concerned
with, and which is attained far later on in the
progress of the vast cycles of evolution. Each
one of the long series of lives that will have
been passed through will then be, as it were, a
page in a book to which the possessor can turn
back at pleasure, even though many such pages
will then seem to him, most likely, very dull
reading, and will not be frequently referred to.
It is this revival eventually of recollection con
cerning all the long-forgotten personalities that
is really meant by the doctrine of the Resurrec
tion. But we have no time at present to stop
and unravel the enigmas of symbolism as bear-

170 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ing upon the teachings at present under con
veyance to the reader. It may be worth while
to do this as a separate undertaking at a later
period ; but meanwhile, to revert to the narra
tive of how the facts stand, it may be explained
that in the whole book of pages, when at last
the ''resurrection" has been accomplished,
there will be no entirely infamous pages ; for
even if any given spiritual individuality has
occasionally, during its passage through this
world, been linked with personalities so deplor
ably and desperately degraded that they have
passed completely into the attraction of the
lower vortex, that spiritual individuality in
such cases will have retained in its own affini
ties no trace or taint of them. Those pages
will, as it were, have been cleanly torn out from
the book. And, as at the end of the struggle,
after crossing the Kama loca, the spiritual indi
viduality will have passed into the unconscious
gestation state from which, skipping the Deva-
chan state, it will be directly (though not
immediately in time) re-born into its next life
of objective activity, all the self-consciousness
connected 'with that existence will have passed
into the lower world, there eventually to " per
ish everlastingly ; " an expression of which, as
of so many more, modern theology has proved
a faithless custodian, making pure nonsense
out of psycho-scientific facts.

CHAPTER VII.
THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE.

A GENERAL account has already been given
of the way in which the great evolutionary
life-wave sweeps round and round the seven
worlds which compose the planetary chain of
which our earth is a part. Further assistance
may now be offered, with the view of expanding
this general idea into a fuller comprehension of*
the processes to which it relates. And no one
additional chapter of the great story will do
more towards rendering its character intelligi
ble than an explanation of certain phenomena
connected with the progress of worlds, that
may be conveniently called obscurations.

Students of occult philosophy who enter on
that pursuit with minds already abundantly
furnished in other ways are very liable to mis
interpret its earlier statements. Everything
cannot be said at once, and the first broad
explanations are apt to suggest conceptions in
regard to details which are most likely to be
erroneous with the most active-minded and

172 • ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

intelligent thinkers. Such readers are not con
tent with shadowy outlines even for a moment.
Imagination fills in the picture, and if its work
is undisturbed for any length of time, the au
thor of it will be surprised afterwards to find
that later information is incompatible with that
which he had come to regard as having been
distinctly taught in the beginning. Now in
this treatise the writer's effort is to convey
the information in such a way that hasty weed-
growths of the mind may be prevented as far
as possible; but in this very effort it is neces
sary sometimes to run on quickly in advance,
leaving some details, even very important de
tails, to be picked up during a second journey
over the old ground. So now the reader must
be good enough to go back to the explanation
given in Chapter III. of the evolutionary prog
ress through the whole planetary chain.

Some few words were said then concerning
the manner in which the life impulse passed on
from planet to planet in "rushes or gushes;
not by an even continuous flow." Now the
course of evolution in its earlier stages is so
far continuous that the preparation of several
planets for the final tidal-wave of humanity
may be going on simultaneously. Indeed, the
preparation of all the seven planets may, at one
stage of the proceedings, be going on simulta-

THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 173

neously, but the important point to remember
is that the main wave of evolution — the fore
most growing wave — cannot be in more than
one place at a time. The process goes on in
the way which may now be described, and
which the reader may be the better able to fol
low, if he constructs either on paper or in his
own mind a diagram consisting of seven circles
(representing the worlds) arranged in a ring.
Calling them A, B, C, etc., it will be observed
from what has been already stated that circle
(or globe) D stands for our earth. Now the
kingdoms of Nature as known to occultists, be
it remembered, are seven in number ; three hav
ing to do with astral and elementary forces,
preceding the grosser material kingdoms in the
order of their development. Kingdom 1 evolves
on globe A, and passes on to B, as kingdom 2
begins to evolve on A. Carry out this system
and of course it will be seen that kingdom 1 is
evolving on globe G, while kingdom 7, the hu
man kingdom, is evolving on globe A. But
now what happens as kingdom 7 passes on to
globe B ? There is no eighth kingdom to en
gage the activities of globe A. The great pro
cesses of evolution have culminated in the final
tidal-wave of humanity, which, as it sweeps on,
leaves a temporary lethargy of Nature behind.
When the life- wave goes on to B, in fact, globe

174 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

A passes for the time into a state of obscura
tion. This state is not one of decay, dissolu
tion, or anything that can be properly called
death. Decay itself, though its aspect is apt
to mislead the mind, is a condition of activity
in a certain direction, this consideration afford
ing a clue to the meaning of a great deal which
is otherwise meaningless in that part of Hindu
mythology which relates to the deities presid
ing over destruction. The obscuration of a
world is a total suspension of its activity; this
does not mean that the moment the last human
monad passes on from any given world that
world is paralyzed by any convulsion, or sub
sides into the enchanted trance of a sleeping
palace. The animal and vegetable life goes on
as before, for a time, but its character begins to
recede instead of advancing. The great life-
wave has left it, and the animal and vegetable
kingdoms gradually return to the condition in
which they were found when the great life-
wave first reached them. Enormous periods of
time are available for this slow process by
which the obscured world settles into sleep, for
it will be seen that obscuration in each case
lasts six times l as long as the period of each

1 Or we may say five times, allowing for the half period of
morning which precedes and the half period of evening which fol
lows the dav of full activitv.

THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 175

world's occupation by the human life-wave.
That is to say, the process which is accom
plished as above described in connection with
the passage of the life-wave from globe A to
globe B is repeated all along the chain. When
the wave passes to C, B is left in obscuration
as well as A. Then D receives the life-wave,
and A, B, C are in obscuration. When the
wave reaches G, all the preceding six worlds
are in obscuration. Meanwhile the life- wave
passes on in a certain regular progression, the
symmetrical character of which is very satis
factory to scientific instincts. The reader will
be prepared to pick up the idea at once, in
view of the explanations already given of the
way in which humanity evolves through seven
great races, during each round period on a
planet; that is to say, during the occupation
of such planet by the tidal wave of life. The
fourth race is obviously the middle race of the
series. As soon as this middle point is turned,
and the evolution of the fifth race on any given
planet begins, the preparation for humanity be
gins on the next. The evolution of the fifth
race on E, for example, is commensurate with
the evolution, or rather with the revival, of the
mineral kingdom on I), and so on. That is to
say, the evolution of the sixth race on D , coin
cides with the revival of the vegetable kingdom

176 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

on E ; the seventh race on D with the revival
of the animal kingdom on E ; and then when
the last monads of the seventh race on D have
passed into the subjective state or world of ef
fects, the human period on E begins, and the
first race begins its development there. Mean
while the twilight period on the world preced
ing D has been deepening into the night of ob
scuration in the same progressive way, and
obscuration there definitely sets in when the
human period on D passes its half-way point.
But just as the heart of a man beats and respi
ration continues, no matter how profound his
sleep, there are processes of vital action which
go on in the resting world even during the most
profound depths of its repose. And these pre
serve, in view of the next return of the human
wave, the results of the evolution that preceded
its first arrival. Recovery for the re-awaking
planet is a larger process than its subsidence
into rest, for it has to attain a higher degree of
perfection against the return of the human life-
wave than that at which it was left when the
wave last went onward from its shore. But
with every new beginning, Nature is infused
with a vigor of its own, — the freshness of a
morning, — and the later obscuration period,
which is a time of preparation and hopefulness
as it were, invests evolution itself with a new

THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 177

momentum. By the time the great life-wave
returns, all is ready for its reception.

In the first essay on this subject it was
roughly indicated that the various worlds mak
ing up our planetary chain were not all of the
same materiality. Putting the conception of
spirit at the north pole of the circle and that of
matter at the south pole, the worlds of the de
scending arc vary in materiality and spiritual
ity, like those of the ascending arc. This varia
tion must now be considered more attentively
if the reader wishes to realize the whole pro
cesses of evolution more fully than heretofore.

Besides the earth, which is at the lowest ma
terial point, there are only two other worlds of
our chain which are visible to physical eyes, —
the one behind and the one in advance of it.
These two worlds, as a matter of fact, are Mars
and Mercury, — Mars being behind and Mer
cury in advance of us : Mars in a state of en
tire obscuration now as regards the human life-
wave, Mercury just beginning to prepare for its
next human period.1

1 It may be worth while here to remark for the benefit of people
who ma)' be disposed, from physical science reading, to object
that Mercury is too near the Sun, and consequently too hot to be a
suitable place of habitation for man, that in the official report of
the Astronomical Department of the United States on the recent
"Mount Whitney observations" statements will be found that
may check too confident criticisms of occult science along tlurt line.
12

178 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

The two planets of our chain that are behind
Mars, and the two that are in advance of Mer
cury, are not composed of an order of matter
which telescopes can take cognizance of. Four
out of the seven are thus of an ethereal nature,
which people who can only conceive matter in
its earthly form will be inclined to call immate
rial. But they are not really immaterial at all.
They are simply in a finer state of materiality
than the earth, but their finer state does not in
any way defeat the uniformity of Nature's de
sign in regard to the methods and stages of their

The results of the Mount Whitney observations on selective absorp
tion of solar rays showed, according to the official reporter, that it
would no longer be impossible to suggest the conditions of an at
mosphere which should render Mercury habitable at the one ex
treme of the scale, and Saturn at the other. We have no concern
with Saturn at present, nor, if it were necessary to explain on oc
cult principles the habitability of Mercury, should the task be at
tempted with calculations about selective absorption. The fact is
that ordinary science makes at once too much and too little of the
Sun, as the storehouse of force for the solar system, — too much in
so far as the heat of planets has a great deal to do with another in
fluence quite distinct from the Sun, an influence which will not be
thoroughly understood till more is known than at present about the
correlations of heat and magnetism, and of the magnetic, meteoric
dust, with which inter-planetary space is pervaded. However, it
is enough — to rebut any objection that might be raised against
the explanations now in progress, from the point of view of loyal
devotees of last year's science — to point out that such objections
would be already out of date. Modern science is very progressive,
• — this is one of its greatest merits, — but it is not a meritorious
habit with modern scientists to think, at each stage of its progress,
)hat all conceptions incompatible with that stage must necessarily
be absurd.

THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 179

evolution. Within the scale of their subtle
"invisibility," the successive rounds and races
of mankind pass through their stages of greater
and less materiality just as on this earth ; but
whoever would comprehend them must compre
hend this earth first, and work out their deli
cate phenomena by correspondential inferences.
Let us return, therefore, to the consideration of
the great life-wave in its aspects on this planet.
Just as the chain of worlds treated as a unity
has its north and south, its spiritual and ma
terial, pole, working from spirituality down
through materiality up to spirituality again, so
the rounds of mankind constitute a similar se
ries which the chain of globes itself might be
taken to symbolize. In the evolution of man
in fact, on any one plane as on all, there is a
descending and an ascending arc ; spirit, so to
speak, involving itself into matter, and matter
evolving itself into spirit. The lowest or most
material point in the cycle thus becomes the
inverted apex of physical intelligence, which is
the masked manifestation of spiritual intelli
gence. Each round of mankind evolved on the
downward arc (as each race of each round if
we descend to the smaller mirror of the cosmos)
must thus be more physically intelligent than
its predecessor, and each in. the upward arc
must be invested with a more refined form of

180 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

mentality commingled with greater spiritual in-
tuitiveness. In the first round, therefore, we
find man a relatively ethereal being compared
even on earth with the state he has now at
tained here, not intellectual, but super-spiritual.
Like the animal and vegetable shapes around
him, he inhabits an immense but loosely organ
ized body. In the second round he is still gi
gantic and ethereal, but growing firmer and
more condensed in body, — a more physical
man, but still less intelligent than spiritual.
In the third round he has developed a perfectly
concrete and compacted body, at first the form
rather of a giant ape than of a true man, but
with intelligence coming more and more into
the ascendant. In the last half of the third
round his gigantic stature decreases, his body
improves in texture, and he begins to be a ra
tional man. In the fourth round intellect, now
fully developed, achieves enormous progress.
The direct races with which the round begins
acquire human speech as we understand it.
The world teems with the results of intellectual
activity and spiritual decline. At the half-way
point of the fourth round here the polar point
of the whole seven-world period is passed.
From this point outwards the spiritual Ego
begins its real struggle with body and mind
to manifest its transcendental powers. lu

THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE, 181

the fifth round the struggle continues, but the
transcendental faculties are largely developed,
though the struggle between these on the one
hand with physical intellect and propensity is
fiercer than ever, for the intellect of the fifth
round as well as its spirituality is an advance
on that of the fourth. In the sixth round
humHnity attains a degree of perfection both
of body and soul, of intellect and spirituality,
which ordinary mortals of the present epoch
will not readily realize in their imaginations.
The most supreme combinations of wisdom,
goodness, and transcendental enlightenment
ivhich the world has ever seen or thought of
will represent the ordinary type of manhood.
Those faculties which now, in the rare efflores
cence of a generation, enable some extraordi
narily gifted persons to explore the mysteries
of Nature and gather the knowledge of which
some crumbs are now being offered (through
these writings and in other ways) to the ordi
nary world, will then be the common appanage
of all. As to what the seventh round will be
like, the most communicative occult teachers
are solemnly silent. Mankind in the seventh
round will be something altogether too God
like for mankind in the fourth round to fore
cast its attributes.

During the occupation of any planet by the

182 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

human life-wave, each individual monad is
inevitably incarnated many times. This has
been partly explained. If one existence only
be passed by the monad in each of the branch
races through which it must pass at least once,
the total number accomplished during a round
period on one planet would be 343, — the third
power of seven. But as a matter of fact each
monad is incarnated twice in each of the
branch races, and also comes in, necessarily, for
some few extra incarnations as well. For rea
sons which are not easy for the outsider to di
vine, the possessors of occult knowledge are
especially reluctant to give out numerical facts
relating to cosmogony, though it is hard for the
uninitiated to understand why these should be
withheld. At present, for example, we shall
not be able to state what is the actual duration
in years of the round period. But a concession,
which only those who have long been students
of occultism by the old method will fully appre
ciate, has been made about the numbers with
which we are immediately concerned ; and this
concession is valuable at all events, as it helps
to elucidate an interesting fact connected with
evolution, on the threshold of which we have
now arrived. This fact is that while the earth,
for example, is inhabited, as at present, by
fourth-round humanity, by the wave of human

« THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 183

life, that is to say, on its fourth journey round
the circle of the worlds, there may be present
among us some few persons, few in relation to
the total number, who, properly speaking, be
long to the fifth round. Now, in the sense of
the term at present employed, it must not be
supposed that by any miraculous process any
individual unit has actually traveled round the
whole chain of worlds once more often than his
compeers. Under the explanations just given
as to the way the tide-wave of humanity pro
gresses, it will be seen that this is impossible.
Humanity has not yet paid its fifth visit even
to the planet next in advance of our own. But
individual monads may outstrip their compan
ions as regards their individual development,
and so become exactly as mankind generally will
be when the fifth round has been fully evolved.
And this may be accomplished in two ways :
A man born as an ordinary fourth-round man
may, by processes of occult training, convert
himself into a man having all the attributes of
a fifth-round man, and so become what we may
call an artificial fifth rounder. But indepen
dently of all exertions made by man in his pres
ent incarnation, a man may also be born a fifth
rounder, though in the midst of fourth-round
humanity by virtue of the total number of his
previous incarnations.

184 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

If x stands for the normal number of incarna
tions which in* the course of Nature a monad
must go through during a round period on one
planet, and y for the margin of extra incarna
tions into which by a strong desire for phys
ical life he may force himself during such a
period, then, as a matter of fact, 24£ (x -f- y)
may exceed 28 x ; that is to say, in 3^ rounds
a monad may have accomplished as many in
carnations as an ordinary monad would have
accomplished in four complete rounds. In less
than 3£ rounds the result could not have been
attained, so that it is only now that we have
passed the half-way point of evolution on this
half-way planet that the fifth rounders are be
ginning to drop in.

It is not possible in the nature of things that
a monad can do more than outstrip his com
panions by more than one round. This consid
eration, notwithstanding Buddha was a sixth-
round man ; but this fact has to do with a great
mystery outside the limits of the present calcu
lation. Enough for the moment to say that
the evolution of a Buddha has to do with some
thing more than mere incarnations within the
limits of one planetary chain.

Since large numbers of lives have been recog
nized in the above calculations as following one
another in the successive incarnations of an

THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 185

individual monad, it is important here, with
the view of averting misconceptions, to point
out that the periods of time over which these
incarnations range are so great that vast inter
vals separate them, numerous as they are. As
stated above, we cannot just now give the act
ual duration of the round periods. Nor, indeed,
could any figures be quoted as indicating the
duration of all round periods equally, for these
vary in length within very wide limits. But
here is a simple fact which has been definitely
stated on the highest occult authority we are
concerned with. The present race of human
ity, the present fifth race of the fourth-round
period, began to evolve about one million of
years ago. Now it is not yet finished ; but
supposing that a million years had constituted
the complete life of the race,1 how would it
have been divided up for each individual
monad ? In a race there must be rather more
than 100, and there can hardly be 120, incarna
tions for an individual monad. But say even
there have been already 120 incarnations for

1 The complete life of a race is certainly much longer than
this; but when we get to figures of this kind we are on very deli
cate ground, for precise periods are very profound secrets, for rea
sons uninitiated students ("lay chelas," as the adepts now sav,
coining a new designation to meet a new condition of things) can
only imperfectly divine. Calculations like those given above mav
be trusted literally as far as they go, but must not rashly be made
the basis of others.

186 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

monads in the present race already, and say
that the average life of each incarnation was a
century ; even then we should only have 12,000
years out of the million spent in physical ex
istence against 988,000 years spent in the sub
jective sphere, or there would be an average of
more than 8,000 years between each incarna
tion. Certainly these intervening periods are
of very variable length, but they can hardly
even contract to anything less than 1,500 years,
— leaving out of account, of course, the case of
adepts who have placed themselves quite out
side the operation of the ordinary law, — and
1,500 years, if not an impossibly short, would
be a very brief, interval between two rebirths.

These calculations must be qualified by one
or two considerations, however. The cases of
children dying in infancy are quite unlike those
of persons who attain full maturity, and for
obvious reasons, that the explanations now al
ready given will suggest. A child dying be
fore it has lived long enough to begin to be
responsible for its actions has generated no
fresh Karma. The spiritual monad leaves that
child's body in just the same state in which it
entered it after its last death in Devachan. It
has had no opportunity of playing on its new
instrument, which has been broken before even
it was tuned. A re-incarnation of the monad,

THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 187

therefore, may take place immediately, on the
line of its old attraction. But the monad so
re-incarnated is not to be spiritually identified
in any way with the dead child. So, in the
same way, with a monad getting into the body
of a born idiot. The instrument cannot be
tuned, so it cannot play on that any more than
on the child's body in the first few years of
childhood. But both these cases are manifest
exceptions that do not alter the broad rule
above laid down for all persons attaining ma
turity, and living their earth lives for good or
evil.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY.

THE course of Nature provides, as the reader
will now have seen, for the indefinite prog
ress towards higher phases of existence of all
human entities. But no less will it have been
seen that by endowing these entities, as they
advance, with ever-increasing faculties and by
constantly enlarging the scope of their activity,
Nature also furnishes each human entity with
more and more decisive opportunities of choos
ing between good and evil. In the earlier
rounds of humanity this privilege of selection
is not fully developed, and responsibility of ac
tion is correspondingly incomplete. The ear
lier rounds of humanity, in fact, do not invest
the Ego with spiritual responsibility at all, in
the larger sense of the term which we are now
approaching. The Devachanic periods which
follow each objective existence in turn dispose
fully of its merits and demerits, and the most
deplorable personality which the Ego during the
first half of its evolution can possibly develop

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 189

is merely dropped out of the account as regards
the larger undertaking, while the erring per
sonality itself pays its relatively brief penalty,
and troubles Nature no more. But the second
half of the great evolutionary period is carried
on on different principles. The phases of exist
ence which are now coming into view cannot
be entered upon by the Ego without positive
merits of its own appropriate to the new devel
opments in prospect ; it is not enough that the
now fully responsible and highly gifted being
which man becomes at the great turning-point
in his career should float idly on the stream of
progress ; he must begin to swim, if he wishes
to push his way forward.

Debarred by the complexity of the subject
from dealing with all its features simultane
ously, our survey of Nature has so far contem
plated the seven rounds of human development,
which constitute the whole planetary undertak
ing with which we are concerned, as a continu
ous series throughout which it is the natural
destiny of humanity in general to pass. But it
will be remembered that humanity in the sixth
round has been spoken of so highly developed
that the sublime attributes and faculties of the
highest adeptship are the common appanage of
all ; while in the seventh round the race has
almost emerged from humanity into divinity.

190 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Now every human being in this stage of devel
opment will still be identified by an uninter
rupted connection with all the personalities
which have been strung upon that thread of
life from the beginning of the great evolution
ary process. Is it conceivable that the charac
ter of such personalities is of no consequence in
the long run, and that two God-like beings
might stand side by side in the seventh round,
developed, the one from a long series of blame
less and serviceable existences, the other from
an equally long series of evil and groveling
lives? That surely could not come to pass,
and we have to ask now, How do we find the
congruities of Nature preserved compatibly
with the appointed evolution of humanity to
the higher forms of existence which crown the
edifice ?

Just as childhood is irresponsible for its acts,
the earlier races of humanity are irresponsible
for theirs ; but there comes the period of full
growth, when the complete development of the
faculties which enable the individual man to
choose between good and evil, in the single life
with which he is for the moment concerned, en
ables the continuous Ego also to make its final
selection. That period — that enormous period,
for Nature is in no hurry to catch its creatures
in a trap in such a matter as this — is barely

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 191

yet beginning, and a complete round period
around the seven worlds will have to be gone
through before it is over. Until the middle of
the fifth period is passed on this earth, the great
question — to be or not to be for the future —
is not irrevocably settled. We are coming
now into the possession of the faculties which
render man a fully responsible being, but we
have yet to employ those faculties during the
maturity of our Ego-hood in the manner which
shall determine the vast consequences hereafter.

It is during the first half of the fifth round
that the struggle principally takes place. Till
then, the ordinary course of life may be a good
or a bad preparation for the struggle, but can
not fairly be described as the struggle itself.
And now we have to examine the nature of the
struggle, so far merely spoken of as the selec
tion between good and evil. That is in no
way an inaccurate, but it is an incomplete, defi
nition.

The ever-recurrins and ever-threatened con-

O

flict between intellect and spirituality is the
phenomenon to be now examined. The com
monplace conceptions which these two words
denote must of course be expanded to some
extent before the occult conception is realized ;
for European habits of thinking are rather apt
to set up in the mind an ignoble image of spir-

192 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ituality, as an attribute rather of the character
than the mind itself, — a pale good y-goodi ness,
born of an attachment to religious ceremonial
and of devout aspirations, no matter to what
whimsical notions of Heaven and Divinity in
which the " spiritually-minded " person may
have been brought up. Spirituality, in the
occult sense, has little or nothing to do with
feeling devout ; it has to do with the capacity
of the mind for assimilating knowledge at the
fountain-head of knowledge itself — of absolute
knowledge — instead of by the circuitous and
laborious process of ratiocination.

The development of pure intellect, the rati-
ocinative faculty, has been the business of Eu
ropean nations for so long, and in this depart
ment of human progress they have achieved
such magnificent triumphs, that nothing in oc
cult philosophy will be less acceptable to Euro
peans themselves at first, and while the ideas at
stake are imperfectly grasped, than the first
aspect of the occult theory concerning intellect
and spirituality ; but this does not arise so
much from the undue tendency of occult science
to depreciate intellect as from the undue ten
dency of modern Western speculation to depre
ciate spirituality. Broadly speaking, so far
Western philosophy has had no opportunity oi
appreciating spirituality ; it has not been made

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 193

acquainted with the range of the inner faculties
of man ; it has merely groped blindly in the
direction of a belief that such inner faculties
existed ; and Kant himself, the greatest modern
exponent of that idea, does little more than
contend that there is such a faculty as intuition,
— if we only knew how to work with it.

The process of working with it is occult sci
ence in its highest aspect, the cultivation of
spirituality. The cultivation of mere power
over the forces of Nature, the investigation of
some of her subtler secrets as regards the inner
principles controlling physical results, is occult
science in its lowest aspect, and into that lower
region of its activity mere physical science may,
or even must, gradually run up. But the ac
quisition by mere intellect — physical science
in excelsis — of privileges which are the proper
appanage of spirituality is one of the dangers
of that struggle which decides the ultimate
destiny of the human Ego. For there is one
thing which intellectual processes do not help
mankind to realize, and that is the nature and
supreme excellence of spiritual existence. On
the contrary, intellect arises out of physical
causes, the perfection of the physical brain,
and tends only to physical results, the perfec
tion of material welfare. Although, as a con
cession to " weak brethren ' and " religion,"

13

194 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

on which it looks with good-humored contempt,
modern intellect does not condemn spirituality,
it certainly treats the physical human life as the
only serious ^business with which grave men, or
even earnest philanthropists, can concern them
selves. But obviously, if spiritual existence,
vivid subjective consciousness, really does go on
for periods greater than the periods of intellec
tual physical existence in the ratio, as we have
seen in discussing the Devachanic condition, of
80 to 1 at least, then surely man's subjective
existence is more important than his physical
existence, and intellect in error, when alt its
efforts are bent on the amelioration of the phys
ical existence.

These considerations show how the choice be
tween good and evil — which has been made
by the human Ego in the course of the great
struggle between intellect and spirituality — is
not a mere choice between ideas so plainly con
trasted as wickedness and virtue. It is not so
rough a question as that, — whether man be
wicked or virtuous, — which must really at the
final critical turning-point decide whether he
shall continue to live and develop into higher
phases of existence, or cease to live altogether.
The truth of the matter is (if it is not impru
dent at this stage of our progress to brush the
surface of a new mystery) that the question, to

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 195

be or not to be, is not settled by reference to
the question whether a man be wicked or vir
tuous at all. It will plainly be seen eventually
that there must be evil spirituality as well as
good spirituality. So that the g;-eat question
of continued existence turns altogether and of
necessity on the question of spirituality, as com
pared with physicality. The point is not so
much "shall*, man live ; is he good enough to be
permitted to live any longer? " as " can the man
live any longer in the higher levels of existence
into which humanity must at last evolve?'
Has he qualified himself to live by the cultiva
tion of the durable portion of his nature ? If
not, he has got to the end of his tether. The
destiny which must befall him is annihilation, —
not necessarily suffering in a conscious exist
ence, but that dissolution that must befall the
soul which has wholly assimilated itself to
matter. Into the eighth sphere of pure matter
that Ego must descend which is finally con
victed of unfitness to go any further in the up
ward spiral path around the planetary chain.

It need not be hurriedly supposed that occult
philosophy considers vice and virtue of no con
sequence to human spiritual destinies, because
it does not discover in Nature that these char
acteristics determine ultimate progress in evo
lution. No system is so pitilessly inflexible in

196 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

its morality as the system which occult philos*
ophy explores and expounds. But that which
vice and virtue of themselves determine is
happiness and misery, not the final problem of
continued existence, beyond that immeasurably
distant period, when in the progress of evolu
tion man has got to begin being something more
than man, and cannot go on along the path of
progress with the help only of the relatively
lower human attributes. It is true again that
one can hardly imagine virtue in any decided
degree to fail in engendering, in due time, the
required higher attributes ; but we should not
be scientifically accurate in speaking of it as the
cause of progress, in ultimate stages of eleva
tion, though it may provoke the development
of that which is the cause of progress.

This consideration — that ultimate progress
is determined by spirituality irrespective of its
moral coloring — is the great meaning of the oc
cult doctrine that " to be immortal in good one
must identify one's self with God ; to be immor
tal in evil, with Satan. These are the two poles
of the world of souls ; between these two poles
vegetate and die without remembrance the use
less portion of mankind." 1 The enigma, like all
occult formulas, has a lesser application (fitting
the microcosm as well as the macrocosm), and
i Eliphas Levi.

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 197

m its lesser significance refers to Devachan
or Avitchi, and the blank destiny of colorless
personalities ; but in its more important bear
ing it relates to the final sorting out of human
ity at the middle of the great fifth round, the
annihilation of the utterly unspiritual Egos and
the passage onward of the others to be immor
tal in good or immortal in evil. Precisely the
same meaning attaches to the passage in Reve
lation (iii. 15, 16) : " I would thou wert cold
or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm,
and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out
of my mouth."

Spirituality, then, is not devout aspiration;
it is the highest kind of intellection, that which
takes cognizance of the workings of Nature by
direct assimilation of the mind with her higher
principles. The objection which physical intel
ligence will bring against this view is that the
mind can cognize nothing except by observation
of phenomena and reasoning thereon. That is
the mistake, — it can ; and the existence of oc
cult science is the highest proof thereof. But
there are hints pointing in the direction of such
proof all around us if we have but the patience
to examine their true bearings. It is idle to
say, in face, merely for one tiling, of the phe
nomena of clairvoyance — crude and imperfect
as those have been which have pushed them-

198 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

selves on the attention of the world — that
there are no other avenues to consciousness but
those of the five senses. Certainly in the ordi
nary world the clairvoyant faculty is an exceed
ingly rare one, but it indicates the existence in
mar. of a potential faculty, the nature of which,
as inferred from its slightest manifestations,
must obviously be capable in its highest devel
opment of leading to a direct assimilation of
knowledge independently of observation.

One of the most embarrassing difficulties that
beset the present attempt to translate the es
oteric doctrine into plain language is due really
to the fact that spiritual perceptiveness, apart
from all ordinary processes by which knowledge
is acquired, is a great and grand possibility of
human nature. It is by that method in the
regular course of occult training that adepts im
part instruction to their pupils. They awaken
the dormant sense in the pupil, and through
this they imbue his mind with a knowledge
that such and such a doctrine is the real truth.
The whole scheme of evolution, which the fore
going chapters have portrayed, infiltrates into
the regular chela's mind by reason of the fact
that he is made to see the process taking place
by clairvoyant vision. There are no words
used in his instruction at all. And adepts
themselves, to whom the facts and processes of

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 199

Nature are familiar as our five fingers to us,
find it difficult to explain in a treatise which
they cannot illustrate for us, by producing men
tal pictures in our dormant sixth sense, the com
plex anatomy of the planetary system.

Certainly it is not to be expected that man
kind as yet should be generally conscious of
possessing the sixth sense, for the day of its ac
tivity has not yet come. It has been already
stated that each round in turn is devoted to the
perfection in man of the corresponding princi
ple in its numerical order, and to its prepara
tion for assimilation with the next. The earlier
rounds have been described as concerned with
man in a shadowy, loosely organized, unintelli
gent form. The first principle of all, the body,
was developed, but it was merely growing used
to vitality, and was unlike anything we can
now picture to ourselves. The fourth round,
in which we are now engaged, is the round in
which the fourth principle, will, desire, is fully
developed, and in which it is engaged in assim
ilating itself with the fifth principle, reason, in
telligence. In the fifth round, the completely
developed reason, intellect,, or soul, in which
the Ego then resides, must assimilate itself to
the sixth principle, spirituality, or give up the
business of existence altogether.

All readers of Buddhist literature are famil-

200 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

iar with the constant references made there to
the Arhat's union of his soul with 'God. This,
in other words, is the premature development
of his sixth principle. He forces himself right
up through all the obstacles which impede such
an operation in the case of a fourth-round man,
into that stage of evolution which awaits the

O

rest of humanity — or rather so much of hu
manity as may reach it in the ordinary course
of Nature — in the latter part of the fifth round.
And in doing this, it will be observed, he tides
himself right over the great period of danger, —
the middle of the fifth round. That is the stu
pendous achievement of the adept as regards
his own personal interests. He has reached the
further shore of the sea in which so many of
mankind will perish. He waits there in a con
tentment which people cannot even realize
without some glimmerings of spirituality — of
the sixth sense — themselves for the arrival
there of his future companions. He does not
wait in his physical body, let me hasten to add,
to avoid misconstruction, but when at last priv
ileged to resign this, in a spiritual condition,
which it would be foolish to attempt to describe,
while even the Devachanic states of ordinary
humanity are themselves almost beyond the
reach of imaginations untrained in spiritual
science.

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 201

But, returning to the ordinary course of hu
manity and the growth into sixth-round people
of men and women, who do not become adepts
at any premature stage of their career, it will
be observed that this is the ordinary course of
Nature in one sense of the expression ; but so
also is it the ordinary course of Nature for
every grain of corn that is developed to fall
into appropriate soil, and grow np into an ear
of corn itself. All the same a great many
grains do nothing of the sort, and a great many
human Egos will never pass through the trials
of the fifth round. The final effort of Nature
in evolving man is to evolve from him a being
unmeasurably higher to be a conscious agent,
and what is ordinarily meant by a creative
principle in Nature herself ultimately. The
first achievement is to evolve free-will, and the
next to perpetuate that free-will by inducing
it to unite itself with the final purpose of Na
ture, which is good. In the course of such
an operation it is inevitable that a great deal
of the free-will evolved should turn to evil,
and after producing temporary suffering be dis
persed and annihilated. More than this, the
final purpose can only be achieved by a profuse
expenditure of material ; and just as this goes
on in the lower stages of evolution, where a
thousand seeds are thrown off by a vegetable

202 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

for every one that ultimately fructifies into a
new plant, so are the god-like germs of Will,
sown one in each man's breast, in abundance
like the seeds blown about in the wind. Is the
justice of Nature to be impugned by reason of
the fact that many of these germs will perish ?
Such an idea could only rise in a mind that
will not realize the room there is in Nature for
the growth of every germ which chooses to
grow, and to the extent it chooses to grow, be
that extent great or small. If it seems to any
one horrible that an "immortal soul" should
perish, under any circumstances, that impres
sion can only be due to the pernicious habit of
regarding everything as eternity, which is not
this microscopic life. There is room in the
subjective spheres and time in the catenary
manvantara, before we even approach the
Dhyan Chohan, or god-like period, for more
than the ordinary brain has ever yet conceived
of immortality. Every good deed and elevated
impulse that every man or woman ever did or
felt must reverberate through seons of spirit
ual existence, whether the human entity con
cerned proves able or not to expand into the
sublime and stupendous development of the
seventh round. And it is out of the causes
generated in one of our brief lives on earth
that exoteric speculation conceives itself capa>

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 203

ble of constructing eternal results ! Out of
such a seven or eight hundredth part of our
objective life on earth during the present stay
here of the evolutionary life-wave, we are to
expect Nature to discern sufficient reason for
deciding upon our whole subsequent career. In
truth, Nature will make such a large return for
a comparatively small expenditure of human
will-power in the right direction that, extrav
agant as the expectation just stated may ap
pear, and extravagant as it is applied to or
dinary lives, one brief existence may sometimes
suffice to anticipate the growth of milliards of
years. The adept may, in the one earth-life,1
achieve so much advancement that his sub
sequent growth is certain, and merely a matter
of time ; but then the seed germ which pro
duces an adept in our life, must be very per
fect to begin with, and the early conditions of
its growth favorable, and withal the effort on
the part of the man himself, life-long and far
more concentrated, more intense, more arduous,
than it is possible for the uninitiated outsider
to realize. In ordinary cases, the life which is
divided between material enjoyment and spir
itual aspiration — however sincere and beau
tiful the latter — can only be productive of

1 In practice, my impression is that this is rarely achieved in
one earth-life ; approached rather in two or three artificial incarna
tions.

204 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

a correspondingly duplex result, of a spiritual
reward in Devachan, of a new birth on earth.
The manner in which the adept gets above
the necessity of such a new birth is perfectly
scientific and simple, be it observed, though
it sounds like a theological mystery when ex
pounded in exoteric writings by reference to
Karma and Skandhas, Trishna, and Tanha,
and so forth. The next earth-life is as much
a consequence of affinities engendered by the
fifth principle, the continuous human soul, as
the Devachanic experiences which come first
are the growth of the thoughts and aspirations
of an elevated character, which the person con
cerned has created during life. That is to say,
the affinities engendered in ordinary cases are
partly material, partly spiritual. Therefore
they start the soul on its entrance into the
world of effects with a double set of attractions
inhering in it; one set producing the subjective
consequences of its Devachanic life, the other
set asserting themselves at the close of that
life, and carrying the soul back again into re
incarnation. But if the person during his ob
jective life absolutely develops no affinities for
material existence, starts his soul at death with
all its attractions tending one way in the direc
tion of spirituality, and none at all drawing it
back to objective life, it does not come back;

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 205

it mounts into a condition of spirituality, cor
responding to the intensity of the attractions
or affinities in that direction, and the other
thread of connection is cut off.

Now this explanation does not entirely cover
the whole position, because the adept himself,
no matter how high, does return to incarna
tion eventually, after the rest of mankind have
passed across the great dividing period in the
middle of the fifth round. Until the exaltation
of Planetary Spirithood is readied, the highest
human soul must have a certain affinity for
earth still, though not the earth-life of phys
ical enjoyments and passions that we are go
ing through. But the important point to re
alize in regard to the spiritual consequences of
earthly life is that, in so large a majority of
cases that the abnormal few need not be talked
about, the sense of justice in regard to the
destiny of good men is amply satisfied by the
course of Nature step by step as time advances.
The spirit-life is ever at hand to receive, re
fresh, and restore the soul after the struggles,
achievements, or sufferings of incarnation. And
more than this, reserving the question about
eternity, Nature, in the inteivyclic periods at
the apex of each round, provides for all man
kind, except those unfortunate failures who
have persistently adhered to the path of evil,

206 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

great intervals of spiritual blessedness, far
longer and more exalted in their character
than the Devachanic periods of each separate
life. Nature, in fact, is inconceivably liberal
and patient to each and all her candidates for
the final examination during their long prep
aration for this. Nor is one failure to pass
even this final examination absolutely fatal.
The failures may try again, if they are not
utterly disgraceful failures, but they must wait
for the next opportunity.

A complete explanation of the circumstances
under which such waiting is accomplished
would not come into the scheme of this trea
tise ; but it must not be supposed that candi
dates for progress, self-convicted of unfitness to
proceed at the critical period of the fifth round,
fall necessarily into the sphere of annihilation.
For that attraction to assert itself, the Ego must
have developed a positive attraction for matter,
a positive repulsion for spirituality, which is
overwhelming in its force. In the absence of
such affinities, and in the absence also of such
affinities as would suffice to tide the Ego over
the great gulf, the destiny which meets the
mere failures of Nature is, as regards the pres
ent planetary manwantara, to die, as Eliphas
Levi puts it, without remembrance. They
hav3 lived their life, and had their share of

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 207

Heaven, but they are not capable of ascending
the tremendous altitudes of spiritual progress
then confronting them. But they are qualified
for further incarnation and life on the planes of
existence to which they are accustomed. They
will wait, therefore, in the negative spiritual
state they have attained till those planes of ex
istence are again in activity in the next plan
etary manwantara. The duration of such wait
ing is, of course, beyond the reach of imagina
tion altogether, and the precise nature of the
existence which is now contemplated is no less
unrealizable ; but the broad pathway through
that strange region of dreamy semi-animation
must be taken note of in order that the sym
metry and completeness of the whole evolution
ary scheme may be perceived.

And with this last contingency provided for,
the whole scheme does lie before the reader in
its main outlines with tolerable completeness.
We have seen the one life, the spirit, animat
ing matter in it lowest forms first, and evoking
growth by slow degrees into higher forms. In
dividualizing itself at last in man, it works up
through inferior and irresponsible incarnations
until it has penetrated the higher principles,
and evolved a true human soul, which is thence
forth the master of its own fate, though guarded
in the beginning by natural provisions which

208 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

debar it from premature shipwreck, which stim
ulate and refresh it on its course. But the ulti
mate destiny offered to that soul is to develop
not only into a being capable of taking care of
itself, but into a being capable of taking care
also of others, of presiding over and directing,
within what may be called constitutional limits,
the operations of Nature herself. Clearly be
fore the soul can have earned the right to that
promotion, it must have been tried by having
conceded to it full control over its own affairs.
That full control necessarily conveys the power
to shipwreck itself. The safeguards put round
the Ego in its youth — its inability to get into
higher or lower states than those of intermun-
dane Devachan and Avitchi — fall from it in
its maturity. It is potent, then, over its own
destinies, not only in regard to the development
of transitory joy and suffering, but in regard to
the stupendous opportunities in both directions
which existence opens out before it. It may
seize on the higher opportunities in two ways ;
it may throw up the struggle in two ways ; it
may attain sublime spirituality for good or sub
lime spirituality for evil ; it may ally itself to
physically for (not evil but for) utter annihila
tion ; or, on the other hand, for (not good but
for) the negative result of beginning the educa
tional processes of incarnation all over again.

CHAPTER IX.
BUDDHA.

THE historical Buddha, as known to the cus
todians of the Esoteric Doctrine, is a personage
whose birth is not invested with the quaint
marvels popular story has crowded round it.
Nor was his progress to adeptship traced by the
literal occurrence of the supernatural struggles
depicted in symbolic legend. On the other
hand, the incarnation, which may outwardly be
described as the birth of Buddha, is certainly
not regarded by occult science as an event like
any other birth, nor the spiritual development
through which Buddha passed during his earth-
life a mere process of intellectual evolution,
like the mental history of any other philoso
pher. The mistake which ordinary European
writers make in dealing with a problem of this
sort lies in their inclination to treat exoteric
legend either as a record of a miracle about
which no more need be said, or as pure myth,
putting merely a fantastic decoration on a re
markable life. This, it is assumed, however

14

210 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

remarkable, must have been lived according to
the theories of Nature at present accepted by
the nineteenth century. The account which
has now been given in the foregoing pages may
prepare the way for a statement as to what the
Esoteric Doctrine teaches concerning the real
Buddha, who was born, as modern investigation
has quite correctly ascertained, 643 years be
fore the Christian era, at Kapila-Vastu near
Benares.

Exoteric conceptions, knowing nothing of the
laws which govern the operations of Nature in
her higher departments, can only explain an
abnormal dignity attaching to some particular
birth by supposing that the physical body of
the person concerned was generated in a mirac
ulous manner. Hence the popular notion about
Buddha, that his incarnation in this world was
due to an immaculate conception. Occult sci
ence knows nothing of any process for the pro
duction of a physical human child other than
that appointed by physical laws ; but it does
know a good deal concerning the limits within
which the progressive " one life," or ''spiritual
monad," or continuous thread of a series of in
carnations, may select definite child-bodies as
their human tenements. By the operation of
Karma, in the case of ordinary mankind, this
selection is made, unconsciously as far as the

BUDDHA. 211

antecedent, spiritual Ego emerging from De-
vachan is concerned. But in those abnormal
cases where the one life has already forced it
self into the sixth principle — that is to say,
where a man has become an adept, and has the
power of guiding his own spiritual Ego, in full
consciousness as to what he is about, after he
has quitted the body in which he won adept-
ship, either temporarily or permanently — it is
quite within his power to select his own next
incarnation. During life, even, he gets above
the Devachanic attraction. He becomes one of
the conscious directing powers of the planetary
system to which he belongs ; and great as this
mystery of selected re-incarnation may be, it is
not by any means restricted in its application
to such extraordinary events as the birth of a
Buddha. It is a phenomenon frequently repro
duced by the higher adepts to this day, and
while a great deal recounted in popular Ori
ental mythology is either purely fictitious or
entirely symbolical, the re-incarnation of the
Dalai and Teshu Lamas in Tibet, at which
travelers only laugh for want of the knowledge
that might enable them to sift fact from fancy,
is a sober scientific achievement. In such cases
the adept states beforehand in what child, when
and where to be born, he is going to re-incar
nate, and he very rarely fails. We say very

212 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

rarely, because there are some accidents of phys
ical nature which cannot be entirely guarded
against ; and it is not absolutely certain that,
with all the foresight even an adept may bring
to bear upon the matter, the child he may choose
to become, in his re-incarnated state, may attain
physical maturity successfully. And, mean
while, in the body, the adept is relatively help
less. Out of the body he is just what he has
been ever since he became an adept ; but as
regards the new body he has chosen to inhabit,
he must let it grow up in the ordinary course of
Nature, and educate it by ordinary processes,
and initiate it by the regular occult method
into adeptship, before he has got a body fully
ready again for occult work on the physical
plane. All these processes are immensely sim
plified, it is true, by the peculiar spiritual force
working within ; but at first, in the child's body,
the adept soul is certainly cramped and embar
rassed, and, as ordinary imagination might sug
gest, very uncomfortable and ill at ease. The
situation would be very much misunderstood if
the reader were to imagine that re-incarnation
of the kind described is a privilege which adepts
avail themselves of with pleasure.

Buddha's birth was a mystery of the kind
described, and by the light of what has been
said it will be easy to go over the popular story

BUDDHA. 213

of his miraculous origin, and trace the symbolic
references to the facts of the situation in some
even of the most grotesque fables. None, for
example, can look less promising as an allu
sion to anything like a scientific fact than the
statement that Buddha entered the side of his
mother as a young white elephant. But the
white elephant is simply the symbol of adept-
ship, — something considered to be a rare and
beautiful specimen of its kind. So with other
ante-natal legends pointing to the fact that the
future child's body had been chosen as the hab
itation of a great spirit already endowed with
superlative wisdom and goodness. Indra and
Brahma came to do homage to the child at his
birth ; that is to say, the powers of Nature
were already in submission to the Spirit within
him. The thirty-two signs of a Buddha, which
legends describe by means of a ludicrous phys
ical symbolism, are merely the various powers
of adeptship.

The selection of the body known as Siddhar-
tha, and afterwards as Gautama, son of Sud-
dhodana, of Kapila-Vastu, as the human tene
ment of the enlightened human spirit, who had
submitted to incarnation for the sake of teach
ing mankind, was not one of those rare failures
spoken of above ; on the contrary, it was a
signally successful choice in all respects, and

214 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

nothing interfered with the accomplishment
of adeptship by the Buddha in his new body.
The popular narrative of his ascetic struggles
and temptations, and of his final attainment
of Buddhahood under the Bo-tree, is nothing
more, of course, than the exoteric version of his
initiation.

From that period onward, his work was of a
dual nature ; he had to reform and revive the
morals of the populace and the science of the
adepts, — for adeptship itself is subject to cyclic
changes, and in need of periodical impulses.
The explanation of this branch of the subject,
in plain terms, will not alone be important for
its own sake, but will be interesting to all stu
dents of exoteric Buddhism, as elucidating some
of the puzzling complications of the more ab
struse " Northern doctrine."

A Buddha visits the earth for each of the
seven races of the great planetary period. The
Buddha with whom we are occupied was the
fourth of the series, and that is why he stands
fourth in the list quoted by Mr. Rhys Davids,
from Burnouf, — quoted as an illustration of
the way the Northern doctrine has been, as Mr.
Davids supposes, inflated by metaphysical sub
tleties and absurdities crowded round the sim
ple morality which sums up Buddhism as pre
sented to the populace. The fifth, or Maitreya

BUDDHA. 215

Buddha, will come after the final disappear
ance of the fifth race, and when the sixth race
will already have been established on earth
for some hundreds of thousands of years. The
sixth will come at the beginning of the seventh
race, and the seventh towards the close of that
race.

This arrangement will seem, at the first
glance, out of harmony with the general design
of human evolution. Here we are in the mid
dle of the fifth race, and yet it is the fourth
Buddha who has been identified with this race,
and the fifth will not come till the fifth race is
practically extinct. The explanation is to be
found, however, in the great outlines of the
esoteric cosmogony. At the beginning of each
great planetary period, when obscuration comes
to an end, and the human tide-wave in its prog
ress round the chain of worlds arrives at the
shore of a globe where no humanity has existed
for milliards of years, a teacher is required from
the first for the new crop of mankind about to
spring up. Remember that the preliminary
evolution of the mineral, vegetable, and animal
kingdoms has been accomplished in preparation
for the new round period. With the first infu
sion of the life-current into the " missing link "
species the first race of the new series will begin
to evolve. It is then that the Being, who may

216 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

be considered the Buddha of the first race, ap
pears. The planetary spirit, or Dhyan Cho-
han, who is — or, to avoid the suggestion of an
erroneous idea by the use of a singular verb,
let us defy grammar and say, who are — Bud
dha in all his or their developments, incarnates
among the young, innocent, teachable forerun
ners of the new humanity, and impresses the
first broad principles of right and wrong and
the first truths of the esoteric doctrine on a suf
ficient number of receptive minds to insure the
continued reverberation of the ideas so im
planted through successive generations of men
in the millions of years to come, before the first
race shall have completed its course. It is this
advent in the beginning of the round period of
a Divine Being in human form that starts the
ineradicable conception of the anthropomorphic
God in all exoteric religions.

The first Buddha of the series in which Gau
tama Buddha stands fourth is thus the second
incarnation of Avaloketiswara, — the mystic
name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans, or
planetary spirits, belonging to our planetary
chain ; and though Gautama is thus the fourth
incarnation of enlightenment by exoteric reck
oning, he is really the fifth of the true series,
and thus properly belonging to our fifth race.

Avaloketiswara, as just stated, is the mystic

BUDDHA. 217

name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans ; the
proper meaning of the word is manifested wis
dom, just as Addi-Buddha and Amitabha both
mean abstract wisdom.

The doctrine, as quoted by Mr. Davids, that
" every earthly mortal Buddha has his pure and
glorious counterpart in the mystic world, free
from the debasing conditions of this material
life, or rather that the Buddha under material
conditions is only an appearance, the reflection,
or emanation, or type of a Dhyani Buddha," is
perfectly correct. The number of Dhyani Bud-
dhas, or Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits,
perfected human spirits of former world periods,
is infinite, but only five are practically identified
in exoteric and seven in esoteric teaching ; and
this identification, be it remembered, is a man
ner of speaking which must not be interpreted
too literally, for there is a unity in the sublime
spirit-life in question that leaves no room for
the isolation of individuality. All this will be
seen to harmonize perfectly with the revelations
concerning Nature embodied in previous chap
ters, and need not in any way be attributed to
mystic imaginings. The Dhyani Buddhas, or
Dhyan Chohans, are the perfected humanity of
previous Manwantaric epochs, and their collec
tive intelligence is described by the name " Addi-
Buddha," which Mr. Rhys Davids is mistaken

218 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

in treating as a comparatively recent invention
of the Northern Buddhish. Addi-Buddha means
primordial wisdom, and is mentioned in the
oldest Sanskrit books. For example, in the phil
osophical dissertation on the " Mandukya Upan-
ishad," by Gowdapatha, a Sanskrit author con
temporary with Buddha himself, the expression
is freely used and expounded in exact accord
ance with the present statement. A friend of
mine in India, a Brahmin pundit of first-rate
attainments as a Sanskrit scholar, has shown
me a copy of this book, which has never vet,
that he knows of, been translated into English,
and has pointed out a sentence bearing on the
present question, giving me the following trans
lation : " Prakriti itself, in fact, is Addi-Buddha,
and all the Dharmas have been existing from
eternity." Gowdapatha is a philosophical wri
ter respected by all Hindu and Buddhist sects
alike, and widely known. He was the guru, or
spiritual teacher of the first Sankaracharya, of
whom I shall have to speak more at length
very shortly.

Adeptship, when Buddha incarnated, was not
the condensed, compact hierarchy that it has
since become under his influence. There has
never been an age of the world without its
adepts ; but they have sometimes been scat
tered throughout the world ; they have some-

BUDDHA. 219

times been isolated in separate seclusions ; they
have gravitated now to this country, now to
that ; and finally, be it remembered, their
knowledge and power has not always been
inspired with the elevated and severe morality
which Buddha infused into its latest and high
est organization. The reform of the occult
world by his instrumentality was, in fact, the
result of his great sacrifice ; of the self-denial
which induced him to reject the blessed condi
tion of Nirvana to which, after his earth-life as
Buddha, he was fully entitled, and undertake
the burden of renewed incarnations in order to
carry out more thoroughly the task he had
taken in hand, and confer a correspondingly
increased benefit on mankind. Buddha re-in
carnated himself, next after his existence as
Gautama Buddha, in the person of the great
teacher of whom but little is said in exoteric
works on Buddhism, but without a considera
tion of whose life it would be impossible to
get a correct conception of the position in the
Eastern world of esoteric science, — namely,
Sankaracharya. The latter part of this name,
it may be explained — acharya — merely means
teacher. The whole name as a title is perpet
uated to this day under curious circumstances,
but the modern bearers of it are not in the
direct line of Buddhist spiritual incarnations.

220 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Sankaracharya appeared in India — no atten
tion being paid to his birth, which appears to
have taken place on the Malabar coast — about
sixty years after Gautama Buddha's death.
Esoteric teaching is to the effect that Sankara
charya simply was Buddha in all respects, in a
new body. This view will not be acceptable to
uninitiated Hindu authorities, who attribute a
later date to Sankaracharya's appearance, and
regard him as a wholly independent teacher,
even inimical to Buddhism, but none the less
is the statement just made the real opinion of
initiates in esoteric science, whether these call
themselves Buddhists or Hindus. I have re
ceived the information I am now giving from a
Brahmin Adwaiti, of Southern India, — not
directly from my Tibetan instructor, — and all
initiated Brahmins, he assures me, would say
the same. Some of the later incarnations of
Buddha are described differently as overshad-
owings by the spirit of Buddha, but in the per
son of Sankaracharya he reappeared on earth.
The object he had in view was to fill up some
gaps and repair certain errors in his own pre
vious teaching ; for there is no contention in
esotoric Buddhism that even a Buddha can be
absolutely infallible at every moment of his
career.

The position was as follows : Up to the time

BUDDHA. 221

of Buddha, the Brahmins of India had jeal
ously reserved occult knowledge as the appan
age of their own caste. Exceptions were oc
casionally made in favor of Tshatryas, but the
rule was exclusive in a very high degree. This
rule Buddha broke down, admitting all castes
equally to the path of adeptship. The change
may have been perfectly right in principle, but
it paved the way for a great deal of trouble,
and as the Brahmins conceived for the degrada
tion of occult knowledge itself ; that is to say,
its transfer to unworthy hands, — not unworthy
merely because of caste inferiority, but because
of the moral inferiority which they conceived
to be introduced into the occult fraternity, to
gether with brothers of low birth. The Brah
min contention would not by any means be
that because a man should be a Brahmin it fol
lowed that he was necessarily virtuous and
trustworthy ; but the argument would be : It is
supremely necessary to keep out all but the vir
tuous and trustworthy from the secrets and
powers of initiation. To that end it is neces
sary not only to set up all the ordeals, proba
tions, and tests we can think of, but also to
take no candidates except from the class which,
on the whole, by reason of its hereditary advan
tages, is likely to be the best nursery of fit can
didates.

222 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Later experience is held on all hands now to
have gone far towards vindicating the Brah
min apprehension, and the next incarnation of
Buddha, after that in the person of Sankara-
charya, was a practical admission of this ; but
meanwhile, in the person of Sankaracharya,
Buddha was engaged in smoothing over, before
hand, the sectarian strife in India which be saw
impending. The active opposition of the Brah
mins against Buddhism began in Asoka's time,
when the great efforts made by that ruler to
spread Buddhism provoked an apprehension on
their part in reference to their social and polit
ical ascendency. It must be remembered that
initiates are not wholly free in all cases from
the prejudices of their own individualities.
They possess some such god-like attributes that
outsiders, when they first begin to understand
something of these, are apt to divest them, in
imagination, even too completely of human
frailties. Initiation and occult knowledge held
in common is certainly a bond of union among
adepts of all nationalities, which is far stronger
than any other bond. But it has been found
on more occasions than one to fail in obliterat
ing all other distinctions. Thus the Buddhist
and Brahmin initiates of the period referred to
were by no means of one mind on all questions,
and the Brahmins very decidedly disapproved

BUDDHA. 223

c/ the Buddhist reformation in its exoteric as
pects. Chandragupta, Asoka's grandfather, was
an upstart, and the family were Sudras. This
was enough to render his Buddhist policy unat
tractive to the representatives of the orthodox
Brahmin faith. The struggle assumed a very
embittered form, though ordinary history gives
us few or no particulars. The party of primi
tive Buddhism was entirely worsted, and the
Brahmin ascendency completely reestablished
in the time of Vikramaditya, about 80 B. C.
But Sankaracharya had traveled all over India
in advance of the great struggle, and had estab
lished various mathams, or schools of philoso
phy, in several important centres. He was
only engaged in this task for a few years, but
the influence of his teaching has been so stu
pendous that its very magnitude disguises the
change wrought. He brought exoteric Hindu
ism into practical harmony with the esoteric
" wisdom, religion," and left the people amus
ing themselves still with their ancient mytholo
gies, but leaning on philosophical guides who
were esoteric Buddhists to all intents and pur
poses, though in reconciliation with all that
was ineradicable in Brahmanism. The great
fault of previous exoteric Hinduism lay in its
attachment to vain ceremonial and its adhesion
to idolatrous conceptions of the divinities of the

224 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Hindu pantheon. Sankaracharya emphasized,
by his commentaries on the Upanishads, and by
his original writings, the necessity of pursuing
gnyanam in order to obtain moksJia ; that is
to say, the importance of the secret knowledge
to spiritual progress, and the consummation
thereof. He was the founder of the Vedantin
system, — the proper meaning of Vedanta being
the final end or crown of knowledge, — though
the sanctions of that system are derived by
him from the writings of Vyasa, the author of
the u Mahabharata," the " Puranas," and the
" Brahmasutras." I make these statements,
the reader will understand, not on the basis of
any researches of my own, — which I am not
Oriental scholar enough to attempt, — but on the
authority of a Brahmin initiate who is himself a
first-rate Sanskrit scholar as well as an occultist.
The Vedantin school at present is almost co
extensive with Hinduism, making allowance, of
course, for the existence of some special sects
like the Sikhs, the Vallabacharyas, or Mahara
jah sect, of very unfair fame, and may be di
vided into three great divisions, — the Adwai-
tees, the Vishishta Adwaitees, and the Dwaitees.
The outline of the Adwaitee doctrine is that
brahmum or purush, the universal spirit, acts
only through prakriti, matter ; that everything
takes place in this way through the inherent

BUDDHA. 225

energy of matter. Brahmum, or Parabrahm, is
thus a passive, incomprehensible, unconscious
principle, but the essence, one life, or energy
of the universe. In this way the doctrine is
identical with the transcendental materialism of
the adept esoteric Buddhist philosophy. The
name Adwaitee signifies not dual, and has
reference partly to the non- duality or unity
of universal spirit, or Buddhist one life, as
distinguished from the notion of its operation
through anthropomorphic emanations ; partly
to the unity of the universal and the human
spirit. As a natural consequence of this doc
trine, the Adwaitees infer the Buddhist doctrine
of Karma, regarding the future destiny of man
as altogether depending on the causes he him
self engenders.

The Vishishta Adwaitees modify these views
by the interpolation of Vishnu as a conscious
deity, the primary emanation of Parabrahm,
Vishnu being regarded as a personal god, capa
ble of intervening in the course of human des
tiny. They do not regard yog, or spiritual
training, as the proper avenue to spiritual
achievement, but conceive this to be possible
chiefly by means of Bhakti, or devoutness.
Roughly stated in the phraseology of European
theology, the Adwaitee may thus be said to be
lieve only in salvation by works, the Vishishta

15

226 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Advvaitee in salvation by grace. The Dwaitee
differs but little from the Vishishta Adwaitee,
merely affirming, by the designation he as
sumes, with increased emphasis, the duality of
the human spirit and the highest principle of
the universe, and including many ceremonial
observances as an essential part of Bhakti.

But all these differences of view, it must be
borne in mind, have to do merely with the ex
oteric variations on the fundamental idea, intro
duced by different teachers with varying im
pressions as to the capacity of the populace for
assimilating transcendental ideas. All lead
ers of Vedantin thought look up to Sankara-
charya and the Mathams he established with
the greatest possible reverence, and their inner
faith runs up in all cases into the one esoteric
doctrine. In fact, the initiates of all schools in
India interlace with one another. Except as
regards nomenclature, the whole system of cos
mogony as held by the Buddhist- Arhats, and as
set forth in this volume, is equally held by in
itiated Brahmins, and has been equally held
by them since before Buddha's birth. Whence
did they obtain it? the reader may ask. Their
answer would be, From the Planetary Spirit, or
Dhyan Chohan, who first visited this planet at
the dawn of the human race in the present
round period, — more millions of years ago than

BUDDHA, 227

I like to mention on the basis of conjecture,
while the real exact number is withheld.

Sankaracharya founded four principal Math-
ams : one at Sringari, in Southern India, which
has always remained the most important ; one
at Juggernath, in Orissa ; one at Dwaraka, in
Kathiawar ; and one at Gungotri, on the slopes
of the Himalayas in the North. The chief of
the Sringari temple has always borne the desig
nation Sankaracharya, in addition to some in
dividual name. From these four centres others
have been established, and Mathams now exist
all over India, exercising the utmost possible
influence on Hinduism.

I have said that Buddha, by his third in
carnation, recognized the fact that he had, in
the excessive confidence of his loving trust in
the perfectibility of humanity, opened the doors
of the occult sanctuary too widely. His third
appearance was in the person of Tsong-ka-pa,
the great Tibetan adept reformer of the four
teenth century. In this personality he was
exclusively concerned with the affairs of the
adept fraternity, by that time collecting chiefly
in Tibet.

From time immemorial there had been a cer
tain secret region in Tibet, which to this day
is quite unknown to and unapproachable by
any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to

228 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

the ordinary people of the country as to any
others, in which adepts have always congre
gated. But the country generally was not in
Buddha's time, as it has since become, the
chosen habitation of the great brotherhood.
Much more than they are at present were the
Mahatmas in former times distributed about
the world. The progress of civilization, en
gendering the magnetism they find so trying,
had, however, by the date with which we are
now dealing — the fourteenth century — al
ready given rise to a very general movement
towards Tibet on the part of the previously
dissociated occultists. Far more widely than
was held to be consistent with the safety of
mankind was occult knowledge and power then
found to be disseminated. To the task of put
ting it under the control of a rigid system of
rule and law did Tsong-ka-pa address himself.

Without reestablishing the system on the
previous unreasonable basis of caste exclusive-
ness, he elaborated a code of rules for the guid
ance of the adepts, the effect of which was to
weed out of the occult body all but those who
sought occult knowledge in a spirit of the most
sublime devotion to the highest moral prin
ciples.

An article in the " Theosophist " for March,
1882, on " Re-incarnations in Tibet," for the com-

BUDDHA. 229

plete trustworthiness of which in all its mystic
bearings I have the highest assurance, gives a
great deal of important information about the
branch of the subject with which we are now
engaged, and the relations between esoteric Bud
dhism and Tibet, which cannot be examined too
closely by any one who desires an exhaustive
comprehension of Buddhism in its real signifi
cation.

" The regular system," we read, " of the
Lamaic incarnations of ' Sangyas ' (or Buddha)
began with Tsong-kha-pa. This reformer is
not the incarnation of one of the five celestial
Dhyans, or heavenly Buddhas, as is generally
supposed, said to have been created by Sakya
Muni after he had risen to Nirvana, but that of
Amita, one of the Chinese names for Buddha.
The records preserved in the Gon-pa (lamasery)
of Tda-shi Hlum-po (spelt by the English Teshu
Lumbo) show that Sangyas incarnated himself
in Tsong-kha-pa, in consequence of the great
degradation his doctrines had fallen into. Until
then there had been no other incarnations than
those of the five celestial Buddhas and of their
Buddhisatvas, each of the former having cre
ated (read overshadowed with his spiritual wis
dom) five of the last named. ... It was be
cause, among many other reforms, Tsong-kha-pa
forbade necromancy (which is practiced to this

230 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

day, with the most disgusting rites, by the
Bhons, — the aborigines of Tibet, with whom
the Red Caps, or Shammars, had always fra
ternized) that the latter resisted his authority.
This act was followed by a split between the
two sects. Separating entirely from the Gya-
lukpas, the Dugpas (Red Caps), from the first
in a great minority, settled in various parts of
Tibet, chiefly its borderlands, and principally
in Nepaul and Bhootan. But, while they re
tained a sort of independence at the monastery
of Sakia-Djong, the Tibetan residence of their
spiritual (?) chief, Gong-sso Rimbo-chay, the
Bhootanese have been from their beginning the
tributaries and vassals of the Dalai Lamas.

"The Tda-shi Lamas were always more
powerful and more highly considered than the
Dalai Lamas. The latter are the creation of
the Tda-shi Lama, Nabang-lob-sang, the sixth
incarnation of Tsong-kha-pa, himself an incar
nation of Amitabha, or Buddha."

Several writers on Buddhism have enter
tained a theory, which Mr. Clements Mark-
ham formulates very fully in his " Narrative of
the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet," that
whereas the original scriptures of Buddhism
were taken to Ceylon by the son of Asoka, the
Buddhism, which found its way into Tibet
from India and China, was gradually overlaid

BUDDHA. 231

with a mass of dogma and metaphysical spec
ulation. And Professor Max M tiller says :
"The most important element in the Buddhist
reform has always been its social and moral
code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral
code, taken by itself, is one of the most perfect
which the world has ever known ; and it was
this blessing that the introduction of Buddhism
brought into Tibet."

" The blessing," says the authoritative article
in the " Theosophist," from which I have just
been quoting, " has remained and spread all
over the country, there being no kinder, purer-
minded, more simple or sin-fearing nation than
the Tibetans. But for all that, the popular la-
maism, when compared with the real esoteric
or Arahat Buddhism of Tibet, offers a contrast
as great as the snow trodden along a road in
the valley, to the pure and undefiled mass
which glitters on the top of a high mountain
peak."

The fact is that Ceylon is saturated with
exoteric, and Tibet with esoteric, Buddhism.
Ceylon concerns itself merely or mainly with
the morals, Tibet, or rather the adepts of Tibet,
vvitli the science, of Buddhism.

These explanations constitute but a sketch of
the whole position. I do not possess the argu
ments nor the literary leisure which would be

232 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

required for its amplification into a finished pic
ture of the relations which really subsist between
the inner principles of Hinduism and those of
Buddhism. And I am quite alive to the pos
sibility that many learned and painstaking stu
dents of the subject will have formed, as the
consequences of prolonged and erudite research,
conclusions with which the explanations I am
now enabled to give may seem at first sight to
conflict. But none the less are these expla
nations directly gathered from authorities to
whom the subject is no less familiar in its schol
arly than in its esoteric aspect. And their
inner knowledge throws a light upon the whole
position which wholly exempts them from the
danger of misconstruing texts and mistaking
the bearings of obscure symbology. To know
when Gautama Buddha was born, what is re
corded of his teaching, and what popular leg
ends have gathered round his biography is to
know next to nothing of the real Buddha, so
much greater than either the historical moral
teacher or the fantastic demi-god of tradition.
And it is only when we have comprehended the
link between Buddhism and Brahmanism that
the greatness of the esoteric doctrine rises into
its true proportions.

CHAPTER X.

NIRVANA.

A COMPLETE assimilation of esoteric teach
ing up to the point we have now reached will
enable us to approach the consideration of the
subject which exoteric writers on Buddhism
have generally treated as the doctrinal starting-
point of that religion.

Hitherto, for want of any better method of
seeking out the true meaning of Nirvana, Bud
dhist scholars have generally picked the word
to pieces, and examined its roots and fragments.
One might as hopefully seek to ascertain the
smell of a flower by dissecting the paper on
which its picture was painted. It is difficult
for minds schooled in the intellectual processes
of physical research — as all our Western nine
teenth-century minds are, directly or indirectly
— to comprehend the first spiritual state above
this life, that of Devachan. Such conditions of
existence are but partly for the understanding ;
a higher faculty must be employed to realize
them ; and all the more is it impossible to force

234 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

their meaning upon another mind by words. It
is by first awakening that higher faculty in his
pupil, and then putting the pupil in a position
to observe for himself, that the regular occult
teacher proceeds in such a matter.

Now there are the usual seven states of Dev-
achan, suited to the different degrees of spirit
ual enlightenment which the various candidates
for that condition may obtain ; there are rupa
and arupa locas in Devachan, — that is to say,
states which take (subjective) consciousness of
form, and states which transcend these again.
And yet the highest Devachanic state in arupa
loca is not to be compared to that wonderful
condition of pure spirituality which is spoken of
as Nirvana.

In the ordinary course of Nature during a
round, when the spiritual monad has accom
plished the tremendous journey from the first
planet to the seventh, and has finished for the
time being its existence there, — finished all its
multifarious existences there, with their respec
tive periods of Devachan between each, — the
Ego passes into a spiritual condition different
from the Devachanic state, in which, for pe
riods of inconceivable duration, it rests before
resuming its circuit of the worlds. That condi
tion may be regarded as the Devachan of its
Devachanic states, — a sort of review thereof, — •

NIRVANA. 235

a superior state to those reviewed, just as the
Devachanic state belonging to any one exist
ence on earth is a superior state to that of the
half-developed spiritual aspirations or impulses
of affection of the earth-life. That period —
that intercyclic period of extraordinary exalta
tion, as compared to any that have gone before,
as compared even with the subjective conditions
of the planets in the ascending arc, so greatly
superior to our own as these are — is spoken
of in esoteric science as a state of partial Nir
vana. Carrying on imagination through im
measurable vistas of the future, we must next
conceive ourselves approaching the period which
would correspond to the intercyclic period of
the seventh round of humanity, in which men
have become as gods. The very last most ele
vated and glorious of the objective lives having
been completed, the perfected spiritual being
reaches a condition in which a complete recol
lection of all lives lived at any time in the past
returns to him. He can look back over the
curious masquerade of objective existences, as
it will seem to him then, over the minutest de
tails of any of these (Mirth-lives among the
number through which he has passed, and can
take cognizance of them and of all things with
which they were in any way associated; for in
regard to this planetary chain he has reached

236 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

omniscience. This supreme development of
individuality is the great reward which Nature
reserves not only for those who secure it pre
maturely, so to speak, by the relatively brief
but desperate and terrible struggles which lead
to adeptship, but also for all who by the dis
tinct preponderance of good over evil in the
character of the whole series of their incar
nations have passed through the valley of the
shadow of death in the middle of the fifth
round, and have worked their way up to it iu
the sixth and seventh rounds.

This sublimely blessed state is spoken of in
esoteric science as the threshold of Nirvana.

Is it worth while to go any further in specu
lation as to what follows ? One may be told
that no state of individual consciousness, even
though but a phase of feeling already identified
in a large measure with the general conscious
ness on that level of existence, can be equal in
spiritual elevation to absolute consciousness in
which all sense of individuality is merged in the
whole. We may use such phrases as intellect
ual counters, but for no ordinary mind — dom
inated by its physical brain and brain-born in
tellect — can they have a living signification.

All that words can convey is that Nirvana is
a sublime state of conscious rest in omniscience,
It would be ludicrous, after all that has gone

NIRVANA. 237

before, to turn to the various discussions which
have been carried on by students of exoteric
Buddhism as to whether Nirvana does or does
not mean annihilation. Worldly similes fall
short of indicating the feeling with which the
graduates of esoteric science regard such a ques
tion. Does the last penalty of the law mean
the highest honor of the peerage ? Is a wooden
spoon the emblem of the most illustrious pre
eminence in learning ? Such questions as these
but faintly symbolize the extravagance of the
question whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism
to be equivalent to annihilation. And in some,
to us inconceivable, way the state of para-Nir
vana is spoken of as immeasurably higher than
that of Nirvana. I do not pretend myself to
attach any meaning to the statement, but it
may serve to show to what a very transcenden
tal realm of thought the subject belongs.

A great deal of confusion of mind respecting
Nirvana has arisen from statements made con
cerning Buddha. He is said to have attained
Nirvana while on earth ; he is also said to have
foregone Nirvana in order to submit to renewed
incarnations for the good of humanity. The
two statements are quite reconcilable. As a
great adept, Buddha naturally attained to that
which is the great achievement of adeptship on
earth, — the passing of his own Ego-spirit into

238 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

the ineffable condition of Nirvana. Let it not
be supposed that for any adept such a passage
is one that can be lightly undertaken. Only
stray hints about the nature of this great mys
tery have reached me, but putting these to
gether I believe I am right in saying that the
achievement in question is one which only some
of the high initiates are qualified to attempt,
which exacts a total suspension of animation in
the body for periods of time compared to which
the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary
science are insignificant, the protection of the
physical frame from natural decay during this
period by means which the resources of occult
science are strained to accomplish ; and withal
it is a process involving a double risk to the
continued earthly life of the person who un
dertakes it. One of these risks is the doubt
whether, when once Nirvana is attained, the
Ego will be willing to return. That the return
will be a terrible effort and sacrifice is certain,
and will only be prompted by the most devoted
attachment on the part of the spiritual traveler
to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction.
The second great risk is that, allowing the sense
of duty to predominate over the temptation to
stay, — a temptation, be it remembered, that is
not weakened by the notion that any conceivable
penalty can attach to it, — even then it is al-

NIRVANA. 239

ways doubtful whether the traveler will be able
to return. In spite of all this, however, there
have been many other adepts besides Buddha
who have made the great passage, and for
whom, those about them at such times have
said, the return to their prison of ignoble flesh
— though so noble ex hypothesi compared to
most such tenements — has left them paralyzed
with depression for weeks. To begin the weary
round of physical life again, to stoop to earth
after having been in Nirvana, is too dreadful
a collapse.

Buddha's renunciation was in some inexpli
cable manner greater, again, because he not
merely returned from Nirvana for duty's sake,
to finish the earth-life in which he was engaged
as Gautama Buddha, but when all the claims
of duty had been fully satisfied, and his right
of passage into Nirvana, for incalculable aeons
entirely earned under the most enlarged view
of his earthly mission, he gave up that reward,
or rather postponed it for an indefinite period,
to undertake a supererogatory series of incarna
tions, for the sake of humanity at large. How
is humanity being benefited by this renuncia
tion ? it may be asked. But the question can
only be suggested in reality by that deep-seated
habit, we have most of us acquired, of estimat
ing benefit by a physical standard, and even

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241

thing so hopelessly up in the :\\r flint it will
never concern any of us who are living now.
Hut there are seasons of good and bad h..
for \\heat and barley, and so also for the do-
siivd growth of spirituality amongst men : and
in Kurope. at all events, going l\v the experi
ence of forim periods of devel
opment corresponding to that of our own now,
present uprush of intelligence in the
direction of physical and material progreai 18
not likely to bring on a soasor . barvttll
for }^ f tbe otho.r kind. For the mo
ment the best ehanee of doing good in eonn-
wbero the nprnsh refern^d to is most
d is heM to lie in the possibility thai
the importance of spirituality max eome t(^ be
\ed by intt^lleet. even in advanee of be-
. It-, if the attention of that keen though
unsympathetic tribunal can but be secured.
Any success in that direction to which these
explanations may conduce will justify the >
of those — but a minority --among the esoteric
gu-irdians of humanity who ha\e i-onceived that

bh while to have them made.
S x >ana is truly t-he ke\note d
Hmldhism. as of the hitherto rather misdirected
Studies of external scholars. The groat end of
• hole st npendous evolution of humaniu is
to cultivate human souls so that the\ shall be
18

242 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ultimately fit for that as yet inconceivable con
dition. The great triumph of the present race
of planetary spirits who have reached that con
dition themselves will be to draw thither as
many more Egos as possible. We are far as
yet from the era at which we may be in serious
danger of disqualifying ourselves definitively
for such progress, but it is not too soon even
now to begin the great process of qualification ;
all the more as the Karma, which will prop
agate itself through successive lives in that
direction, will carry its own reward with it, so
that an enlightened pursuit of our highest in
terests in the very remote future will coincide
with the pursuit of our immediate welfare in
the next Devachanic period, and the next re
birth.

Will it be argued that if the cultivation of
spirituality is the great purpose to be followed,
it matters little whether men pursue it along
one religious pathway or another ? This is the
mistake which, as explained in a former chap
ter, Buddha as Sankaracharya set himself es
pecially to combat, — namely, the early Hindu
belief that mokslia can be attained by bhakti
irrespective of gnyanam ; that is, that salva
tion is obtainable by devout practices irrespec
tive of knowledge of eternal truth. The sort
of salvation we are talking about now is not

NIRVANA. 243

escape from a penalty, to be achieved by cajol
ing a celestial potentate ; it is a positive and
not a negative achievement, — the ascent into
regions of spiritual elevation so exalted that
the candidate aiming at them is claiming that
which we ordinarily describe as omniscience.
Surely it is plain, from the way Nature habit
ually works, that under no circumstances will
a time ever come when a person, merely by
reason of having been good, will suddenly be
come wise. The supreme goodness and ivisdom
of the sixth-round man, who, once becoming
that, will assimilate by degrees the attributes
of divinity itself, can only be grown by degrees
themselves ; and goodness alone, associated as
we so often find it with the most grotesque re
ligious beliefs, cannot conduct a man to more
than Devachanic periods of devout but unin
telligent rapture, and in the end, if similar con
ditions are reproduced through many existences,
to some painless extinction of individuality at
the great crisis.

It is by a steady pursuit of and desire for
real spiritual truth, not by an idle, however
well-meaning acquiescence in the fashionable
dogmas of the nenrest church, that men launch
their souls into the subjective state, prepared
to imbibe real knowledge from the latent om
niscience of their own sixth principles, and to

244 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

re-incarnate in due time with impulses in the
same direction. Nothing can produce more
disastrous effects on human progress as regards
the destiny of individuals than the very preva
lent notion that one religion, followed out in a
pious spirit, is as good as another, and that if
such and such doctrines are perhaps absurd
when you look into them, the great majority of
good people will never think of their absurdity,
but will recite them in a blamelessly devoted
attitude of mind. One religion is by no means
as good as another, even if all were productive
of equally blameless lives. But I prefer to
avoid all criticism of specific faiths, leaving this
volume a simple and inoffensive statement of
the real inner doctrines of the one great re
ligion of the world which — presenting as it
does in its external aspects a bloodless and in
nocent record — has thus been really produc
tive of blameless lives throughout its whole
existence. Moreover, it would not be by a ser
vile acceptance even of its doctrines that the
development of true spirituality is to be culti
vated. It is by the disposition to seek truth, to
test and examine all which presents itself as
claiming belief, that the great result is to be
brought about. In the East, such a resolution
in the highest degree leads to chelaship, to the
pursuit of truth, knowledge, by the develop

NIRVANA. 245

ment of inner faculties by means of which it
may be cognized with certainty. In the West,
the realm of intellect, as the world is mapped
out at present, truth unfortunately can only be
pursued and hunted out with the help of many
words and much wrangling and disputation.
But at all events it may be hunted, and, if it is
not finally captured, the chase on the part of
the hunters will have engendered instincts that
will propagate themselves and lead to results
hereafter.

CHAPTER XL

THE UNIVERSE.

IN all Oriental literature bearing on the con
stitution of all the cosmos, frequent reference
is made to the days and the nights of Brahma ;
the inbreathings and the outbreathings of the
creative principle, the periods of manvantara1
and the periods of pralaya. This idea runs
into various Eastern mythologies, but in its
symbolical aspects we need not follow it here.
The process in Nature to which it refers is of
course the alternate succession of activity and
repose that is observable at every step of the
great ascent from the infinitely small to the in
finitely great. Man has a manvantara and pra
laya every four-and-twenty hours, his periods
of waking and sleeping ; vegetation follows the
same rule from year to year as it subsides and
revives with the seasons. The world too has its

1 As transliterated into English, this word may be written either
manwantara or manvantara ; and the proper pronunciation is
something between the two, with the accent on the second sylla
ble.

THE UNIVERSE. 247

manvantaras and pralayaa, when the tide-wave
of humanity approaches ife shore, runs through
the evolution of its seven' races, and ebbs away
again ; and such a manvantara has been treated
by most exoteric religions as the whole cycle of
eternity.

The major manvantara of our planetary
chain is that which comes to an end when the
last Dhyan Chohan of the seventh round of
perfected humanity passes into Nirvana. And
the expression has thus to be regarded as one
of considerable elasticity. It may be said in
deed to have infinite elasticity, and that is one
explanation of the confusion which has reigned
in all treatises on Eastern religions in their pop
ular aspects. All the root- words transferred to
popular literature from the secret doctrine have
a seven-fold significance, at least for the initiate,
while the uninitiated reader, naturally suppos
ing that one word means one thing, and trying
always to clear up its meaning by collating its
various applications, and striking an average,
gots into the most hopeless embarrassment.

The planetary chain with which we are con
cerned is not the only one which has our sun
as its centre. As there are other planets be
sides the Earth in our chain, so there are other
chains besides this in our solar system. There
are seven such, and there conios a time when

248 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

all these go into pralaya together. This is
spoken of as a solar pralaya, and within the
interval between two such pralayas the vast
solar manvantara covers seven pralayas and
manvantaras of our — and each other — plan
etary chain. Thought is baffled, say even the
adepts, in speculating as to how many of our
solar pralayas must come before the great cos
mic night in which the whole universe, in its
collective enormity, obeys what is manifestly
the universal law of activity and repose, and
with all its myriad systems passes itself into
pralaya. But even that tremendous result,
says esoteric science, must surely come.

After the pralaya of a single planetary chain
there is no necessity for a recommencement of
evolutionary activity absolutely de novo. There
is only a resumption of arrested activity. The
vegetable and animal kingdoms, which at the
end of the last corresponding manvantara had
reached only a partial development, are not
destroyed. Their life or vital energy passes
through a night or period of rest ; they also
have, so to speak, a Nirvana of their own, as
why should they not, these foetal and infant en
tities ? They are all like ourselves, begotten of
the one element. As we have our Dhyan Cho-
hans, so have they, in their several kingdoms,
elemental guardians, and are ns well taken care

THE UNIVERSE. 249

of in the mass as humanity is in the mass. The
one element not only fills space and is space,
but interpenetrates every atom of cosmic mat
ter.

When, however, the hour of the solar pralaya
strikes, though the process of man's advance on
his last seventh round is precisely the same as
usual, each planet, instead of merely passing
out of the visible into the invisible, as he quits
it in turn, is annihilated. With the beginning
of the seventli round of the seventh planetary
chain manvantara, every kingdom having now
reached its last cycle, there remains on each
planet, after the exit of man, merely the may a
of once living and existing forms. With every
step he takes on the descending and ascending
arcs, as lie moves on from globe to globe the
planet left behind becomes an empty chrysa-
loidal case. At his departure there is an out
flow from every kingdom of its entities. Wait
ing to pass into higher forms in due time, they
are nevertheless liberated, and to the day of the
next evolution they will rest in their lethargic
sleep in space, until brought into life again at
the new solar manvantara. The old elementals
will rest till they are called on to become in
their turn the bodies of mineral, vegetable, and
animal entities on another and a higher chain of
globes on their way to become human entities,

250 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

while the germinal entities of the lowest forms
— and at that time there will remain but few
of such — will hang in space, like drops of
water suddenly turned into icicles. They will
thaw at the first hot breath of the new solar
manvantara, and form the soul of the future
globes. The slow development of the vegeta
ble kingdom, up to the period we are now deal
ing with, will have been provided for by the
longer interplanetary rest of man. When the
solar pralaya comes, the whole purified human
ity merges into Nirvana, and from that inter-
solar Nirvana will be reborn in the higher sys
tems. The strings of worlds are destroyed,
and vanish like a shadow from the wall when
the light is extinguished. " We have every
indication," say the adepts, " that at this very
moment such a solar pralaya is taking place,
while there are two minor ones ending some
where."

At the beginning of the solar manvantara
the hitherto subjective elements of the material
worlds, now scattered in cosmic dust, receiving
their impulse from the new Dhyan Chohans of
the new solar system (the highest of the old
ones having gone higher) will form into pri
mordial ripples of life, and, separating into dif
ferentiating centres of activity, combine in a
graduated scale of seven stages of evolution.

THE UNIVERSE. 251

Like every other orb of space, our earth has, be
fore obtaining its ultimate materiality, to pass
through a gamut of seven stages of density.
Nothing in this world now can give us an idea
of what an ultimate stage of materiality is like.
The French astronomer Flammarion, in a book
called " La Resurrection et la Fin des Mondes,"
has approached a conception of this ultimate
materiality. The facts are, I am informed,
with slight modifications, much as he surmises.
In consequence of what he treats as secular re
frigeration, but which more truly is old age
and loss of vital power, the solidification and
desiccation of the earth at last reaches a point
when the whole globe becomes a relaxed con
glomerate. Its period of child-bearing has gone
by ; its progeny are all nurtured ; its term of
life is finished. Hence its constituent masses
cease to obey those laws of cohesion and aggre
gation which held them together. And becom
ing like a corpse, which, abandoned to the work
of destruction, leaves each molecule composing
it free to separate itself from the body, and
obey in future the sway of new influences, "the
attraction of the moon," suggests M. Flamma
rion, " would itself undertake the task of demo
lition by producing a tidal wave of earth parti
cles instead of an aqueous tide." This last idea
must not be regarded as countenanced by oo

252 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

cult science except so far as it may serve to
illustrate the loss of molecular cohesion in the
material of the earth.

Occult physics pass fairly into the region of
metaphysics, if we seek to obtain some indica
tion of the way in which evolution recommences
after a universal pralaya.

The one eternal, imperishable thing in the
universe, which universal pralayas themselves
pass over without destroying, is that which
may be regarded indifferently as space, dura
tion, matter, or motion ; not as something hav
ing these four attributes, but as something
which is these four things at once, and always.
And evolution takes its rise in the atomic po
larity which motion engenders. In cosmogony
the positive and the negative, or the active and
passive, forces correspond to the male and fe
male principles. The spiritual efflux enters
into the veil of cosmic matter ; the active is
attracted by the passive principle, and if we
may here assist imagination by having recourse
to old occult symbology, the great Nag, the
serpent emblem of eternity, attracts its tail to
its mouth, forming thereby the circle of eter
nity, or rather cycles in eternity. The one
and chief attribute of the universal spiritual
principle, the unconscious but ever active life-
giver, is to expand and shed ; that of the uni'

THE UNIVERSE. 253

versal material principle is to gather in and
fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when
separate, they become consciousness and life
when brought together. The word Brahma
comes from the Sanskrit root brih, to expand,
grow, or fructify, esoteric cosmogony being but
the vivifying expansive force of Nature in its
eternal revolution. No one expression can have
contributed more to mislead the human mind
in basic speculation concerning the origin of
things than the word " creation." Talk of cre
ation and we are continually butting against the
facts. But once realize that our planet and our
selves are no more creations than an iceberg, but
states of being for a given time, — that their
present appearance, geological and anthropolog
ical, are transitory and but a condition concom
itant of that stage of evolution at which they
have arrived, — and the way has been prepared
for correct thinking. Then we are enabled to
see what is meant by the one and only princi
ple or element in the universe, and by the treat
ment of that element as androgynous ; also by
the proclamation of Hindu philosophy that all
things are but maya, transitory states, except
the one element which rests during the maha-
pralayas only, — the nights of Brahma.

Perhaps we have now plunged deeply enough
into the fathomless mystery of the great First

254 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

Cause. It is no paradox to say that simply
by reason of ignorance do ordinary theologians
think they know so much about God. And it
is no exaggeration to say that the wondrously
endowed representatives of occult science, whose
mortal nature has been so far elevated and
purified that their perceptions range over other
worlds and other states of existence, and com
mune directly with beings as much greater
than ordinary mankind as man is greater than
the insects of the field, — it is the mere truth,
that they never occupy themselves at all with
any conception remotely resembling the God of
churches and creeds. Within the limits of the
solar system, the mortal adept knows, of his
own knowledge, that all things are accounted
for by law, working on matter in its diverse
forms, plus the guiding and modifying influence
of the highest intelligences associated with the
solar system, the Dhyan Chohans, the perfected
humanity of the last preceding manvantara.
These Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits, on
whose nature it is almost fruitless to ponder
until one can at least realize the nature of dis
embodied existence in one's own case, impart
to the reawakening worlds at the end of a
planetary chain pralaya such impulses that ev
olution feels them throughout its whole prog
ress. The limits of Nature's great law restrain

THE UNIVERSE. 255

their action. They cannot say, Let there be
paradise throughout space, let all men be born
supremely wise and good ; they can only work
through the principle of evolution, and they
cannot deny to any man who is to be invested
with the potentiality of development himself
into a Dhyan Chohan the right to do evil if
he prefers that to good. Nor can they prevent
evil, if done, from producing suffering. Ob
jective life is the soil in which the life-germs
are planted ; spiritual existence (the expression
being used, remember, in contrast merely to
grossly material existence) is the flower to be
ultimately obtained. But the human germ is
something more than a flower-seed ; it has lib
erty of choice in regard to growing up or grow
ing down, and it could not be developed with
out such liberty being exercised by the plant.
This is the necessity of evil. But within the
limits that logical necessity prescribes, the
Dhyan Chohan impresses his conceptions upon
the evolutionary tide, and comprehends the ori
gin of all that he beholds.

Surely as we ponder in this way over the
magnitude of the cyclic evolution with which
esoteric science is in this way engaged, it seems
reasonable to postpone considerations as to the
origin of the whole cosmos. The ordinary man
in this earth-life, with certainly some hundred

256 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

many earth-lives to come, and then very mucli
many important inter-incarnation periods (more
important, that is, as regards duration and the
prospect of happiness or sorrow) also in pros
pect, may surely be most wisely occupied with
the inquiries whose issue will affect practical
results than with speculation in which he is
practically quite uninterested. Of course from
the point of view of religious speculation rest
ing on no positive knowledge of anything be
yond this life, nothing can be more important
or more highly practical than conjectures as to
the attributes and probable intentions of the
personal, terrible Jehovah, pictured as an om
nipotent tribunal into whose presence the soul
at its death is to be introduced for judgment.
But scientific knowledge of spiritual things
throws back the day of judgment into a very
dim perspective, the intervening period being
filled with activity of all kinds. Moreover, it
shows mankind that certainly, for millions and
millions of centuries to come, it will not be con
fronted with any judge at all, other than that
all-pervading judge, that seventh principle, or
universal spirit, which exists everywhere, and,
operating on matter, provokes the existence of
man himself, and the world in which he lives,
and the future conditions towards which he is
pressing. The seventh principle, undefinable,

THE UNIVERSE. 257

incomprehensible for us at our present stages
of enlightenment, is of course the only God
recognized by esoteric knowledge, and no per
sonification of this can be otherwise than sym
bolical.

And yet in truth esoteric knowledge, giving
life and reality to ancient symbolism in one
direction as often as it conflicts with modern
dogma in the other, shows us how far from
absolutely fabulous are even the most anthro
pomorphic notions of Deity associated by ex
oteric tradition with the beginning of the world.
The planetary spirit, actually incarnated among
men in the first round, was the prototype of
personal Deity in all subsequent developments
of the idea. The mistake made by uninstructed
men in dealing with the idea is merely one of
degree. The personal God of an insignificant
minor manvantara has been taken for the Cre
ator of the whole cosmos, — a most natural mis
take for people forced, by knowing no more of
human destiny than was included in one ob
jective incarnation, to suppose that all beyond
was a homogeneous spiritual future. The God
of this life, of course, for them, was the God of
all lives and worlds and periods.

The reader will not misunderstand me, I
trust, to mean that esoteric science regards the
planetary spirit of the first round as a god.
17

258 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

As I say, it is concerned with the working of
Nature in an immeasurable space, from an im
measurable past, and all through immeasurable
future. The enormous areas of time and space
in which our solar system operates is explor-
able by the mortal adepts of esoteric science.
Within those limits they know all that takes
place and how it takes place, and they know
that everything is accounted for by the con
structive will of the collective host of the
planetary spirits, operating under the law of ev
olution that pervades all Nature. They com
mune with these planetary spirits, and learn
from them that the law of this is the law of
other solar systems as well, into the regions of
which the perceptive faculties of the planetary
spirits can plunge, as the perceptive faculties
of the adepts themselves can plunge into the
life of other planets of this chain. The law
of alternating activity and repose is operating
universally ; for the whole cosmos, even though
at unthinkable intervals, pralaya must succeed
manvantara, and manvantara pralaya.

Will, any one ask, To what end does this
eternal succession work? It is better to con
fine the question to a single system, and ask, To
what end does the original nebula arrange itself
in planetary vortices of evolution, and develop
worlds in which the universal spirit, reverber*

THE UNIVERSE. 259

ating through matter, produces form and life
and those higher states of matter in which that
which we call subjective or spiritual existence
is provided for ? Surely it is end enough to sat
isfy any reasonable mind that such sublimely
perfected beings as the planetary spirits them
selves come thus into existence, and live a con
scious life of supreme knowledge and felicity
through vistas of time which are equivalent to
all we can imagine of eternity. Into this un
utterable greatness every living thing has the
opportunity of passing ultimately. The spirit
which is in every animated form, and which
has even worked up into these from forms
we are generally in the habit of calling inan
imate, will slowly but certainly progress on
wards until the working of its untiring influence
in matter has evolved a human soul. It does
not follow that the plants and animals around
us have any principle evolved in them as yet
which will assume a human form in the course
of the present manvantara; but though the
course of an incomplete revolution may be sus
pended by a period of natural repose, it is not
rendered abortive. Eventually every spiritual
monad, itself a sinless unconscious principle,
will work through conscious forms on lower
levels, until these, throwing off one after an
other higher and higher forms, will produce that

260 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

in which the God-like consciousness may be
fully evoked. Certainly it is not by reason of
the grandeur of any human conceptions as to
what would be an adequate reason for the ex
istence of the universe that such a consumma
tion can appear an insufficient purpose, not even
if the final destiny of the planetary spirit him
self, after periods to which his development
from the mineral forms of primeval worlds is but
a childhood in the recollection of the man, is to
merge his glorified individuality into that sum
total of all consciousness, which esoteric meta
physics treat as absolute consciousness, which
is non-consciousness. These paradoxical expres
sions are simply counters representing ideas that
the human mind is not qualified to apprehend,
and it is waste of time to haggle over them.

These considerations supply the key to eso
teric Buddhism, a more direct outcome of the
universal esoteric doctrine than any other pop
ular religion ; for the effort in its construction
has been to make men love virtue for its own
sake and for its good effect on their future
incarnations, not to keep them in subjection
to any priestly system or dogma by terrifying
their fancy with the doctrine of a personal
judge waiting to try them for more than their
lives at their death. Mr. Lillie is mistaken,
admirable as his intention has been, and sym-

THE UNIVERSE. 261

pathetic as his mind evidently is with the beau
tiful morality and aspiration of Buddhism, in
deducing from its temple ritual the notion of a
personal God. No such conception enters into
the great esoteric doctrine of Nature, of which
this volume has furnished an imperfect sketch.
Nor even in reference to the farthest regions of
the immensity beyond our own planetary sys
tem does the adept exponent of the esoteric
doctrine tolerate the adoption of an agnostic
attitude. It will not suffice for him to say,
"As far as the elevated senses of planetary
spirits, whose cognition extends to the outer
most limits of the starry heavens, — as far as
their vision can extend Nature is self-sufficing ;
as to what may lie beyond we offer no hypoth
esis." What the adept really says on this head
is, " The universe is boundless, and it is a stul
tification of thought to talk of any hypothesis
setting in beyond the boundless, — on the other
side of the limits of the limitless."

Tliat which antedates every manifestation of
the universe, and would lie beyond the limit of
manifestation, if such limit could ever be found,
is that which underlies the manifested universe
within our own purview, — matter animated
by motion, its parabrahm, or spirit. Matter,
space, motion, and duration constitute one and
the same eternal substance of the universe.

262 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

There is nothing else eternal absolutely. That
is the first state of matter, itself perfectly un-
cognizable by physical senses, which deal with
manifested matter, another state altogether.
But though thus, in one sense of the word, ma
terialistic, the esoteric doctrine, as any reader
of the foregoing explanations will have seen, is
as far from resembling the gross narrow-minded
conception of Nature, which ordinarily goes by
the name of materialism, as the north pole
looks away from the south. It stoops to ma
terialism, as it were, to link its methods with
the logic of that system, and ascends to the
highest realms of idealism to embrace and ex
pound the most exalted aspirations of spirit.
As it cannot be too frequently or earnestly re
peated, it is the union of science with Religion,
— the bridge by which the most acute and cau
tious pursuers of experimental knowledge may
cross over to the most enthusiastic devotee, by
means of which the most enthusiastic devotee
may return to earth and yet keep heaven still
around him.

CHAPTER XII.
THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED.

LONG familiarity with the esoteric doctrine
will alone give rise to a full perception of the
manner in which it harmonizes with facts of
Nature such as we are all in a position to ob
serve. But something may be done to indi
cate the correspondences that may be traced
between the whole body of teaching now set
forth and the phenomena of the world around
us.

Beginning with the two great perplexities of
ordinary philosophy, — the conflict between free
will and predestination and the origin of evil, —
it will surely be recognized that the system
of Nature now explained enables us to deal
with those problems more boldly than they have
ever yet been handled. Till now the most pru
dent thinkers have been least disposed to pro
fess that either by the aid of metaphysics or
religion could the mystery of free-will and
predestination be unraveled. The tendency of
thought has been to relegate the whole enigma

264 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

to the region of the unknowable. And strange
to say this has been done contentedly by peo
ple who have been none the less contented to
accept as more than a provisional hypothesis
the religious doctrines which thus remained in
capable of reconciliation with some of their
own most obvious consequences. The omnis
cience of a personal Creator, ranging over the
future as well as the past, left man no room to
exercise the independent authority over his
own destinies, which nevertheless it was ab
solutely necessary to allow him to exercise in
order that the policy of punishing or rewarding
him for his acts in life could be recognized as
anything but the most grotesque injustice. One
great English philosopher, frankly facing the
embarrassment, declared in a famous posthu
mous essay that by reason of these considera
tions it was impossible that God could be all-
good and all-potent. People were free to in
vest him logically with one or other of these
attributes, but not with both. The argument
was treated with the respect due to the great
reputation of its author, arid put aside with the
discretion due to respect for orthodox tenets.

But the esoteric doctrine comes to our rescue
in this emergency. First of all it honestly takes
into account the insignificant size of this world
compared to the universe. This is a fact of

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 265

Nature, which the early Christian church feared
with a true instinct, and treated with the
cruelty of terror. The truth was denied, and
its authors were tortured for many centuries.
Established at last beyond even the authority
of papal negations, the church resorted to the
"desperate expedient," to quote Mr. Rhys
Davids' phrase, of pretending that it did not
matter.

The pretense till now has been more success
ful than its authors could have hoped. When
they dreaded astronomical discovery, they were
crediting the world at large with more remorse
less logic than it ultimately showed any in
clination to employ. People have been found
willing, as a rule, to do that which I have de
scribed esoteric Buddhism as not requiring us
to do, — to keep their science and their relig
ion in separate water-tight compartments. So
long and so thoroughly has this principle been
worked upon that it has finally ceased to be
an argument against the credibility of a relig
ious dogma to point out that it is impossible.
But when we establish a connection between
our hitherto divided reservoirs and require
them to stand at the same level, we cannot
fail to^see how the insignificance of the earth's
magnitude diminishes in a corresponding pro
portion the plausibility of theories that require

266 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

us to regard the details of our own lives as
part of the general stock of a universal Crea
tor's omniscience. On the contrary, it is un
reasonable to suppose that the creatures inhab
iting one of the smaller planets of one of the
smaller suns in the ocean of the universe, where
suns are but water-drops in the sea, are exempt
in any way from the general principle of gov
ernment by law. But that principle cannot co
exist with government by caprice, which is an
essential condition of such predestination as
conventional discussions of the problems before
us associate with the use of the word. For,
be it observed that the predestination which
conflicts with free-will is not the predestina
tion of races, but individual predestination,
associated with the ideas of divine grace or
wrath. The predestination of races, under laws
analogous to those ^hich control the general
tendency of any multitude of independent
chances, is perfectly compatible with individual
free-will, and thus it is that the esoteric doc
trine reconciles the long-standing contradiction
of Nature. Man has control over his own des
tiny within constitutional limits, so to speak ;
he is perfectly free to make use of his natural
rights as far as they go, and they go practically
to infinity as far as he, the individual unit, is
concerned. But the average human action,

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 267

under given conditions, taking a vast multiplic
ity of units into account, provides for the un
failing evolution of the cycles which constitute
their collective destiny.

Individual predestination, it is true, may be
asserted, not as a religious dogma having to do
with divine grace or wrath, but on purely met
aphysical grounds ; that is to say, it may be
argued that each human creature is fundamen
tally, in infancy, subject to the same influence
by similar circumstances, and that an adult life
is thus merely the product or impression of all
the circumstances which have influenced such a
life from the beginning, so that if those circum
stances were known the moral and intellectual
result would be known. By this train of reason
ing it can be made to appear that the circum
stances of each man's life may be theoretically
knowable by a sufficiently searching intelli
gence ; that hereditary tendencies, for example,
are but products of antecedent circumstances
entering into any given calculation as a pertur
bation, but not the less calculable on that ac
count. This contention, however, is no less in
direct conflict with the consciousness of human
ity than the religious dogma of individual pre
destination. The sense of free-will is a factor
in the process which cannot be ignored, and the
free-will of which we are thus sensible is not a

268 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

mere automatic impulse, like the twitching of a
dead frog's leg. The ordinary religious dogma
and the ordinary metaphysical argument both
require us to regard it in that light ; but the
esoteric doctrine restores it to its true dignity,
and shows us the scope of its activity, the lim
its of its sovereignty. It is sovereign over the
individual career, but impotent in presence of
the cyclic law, which even so positive a philos
opher as Draper detects in human history, —
brief as the period is which he is enabled to ob
serve. And none the less does that collateral
quicksand of thought which J. S. Mill discerned
alongside the contradictions of theology — the
great question whether speculation must work
with the all-good or all-potent hypothesis —
find its explanation in the system now dis
closed. Those great beings, the perfected efflo
rescence of former humanity, who, though far
from constituting a supreme God, reign never
theless in a divine way over the destinies of our
world, are not only not omnipotent, but, great
as they are, are restricted as regards their ac
tion by comparatively narrow limits. It would
seem as if, when the stage is, so to speak, pre
pared afresh for a new drama of life, they are
able to introduce some improvements into the
action, derived from their own experience in
the drama with which they were concerned,

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 269

but are only capable, as regards the main con
struction of the piece, of repeating that which
has been represented before. They can do on
a large scale what a gardener can do with dah
lias on a small one ; he can evolve considerable
improvements in form and color, but his flow
ers, however carefully tended, will be dahlias
still.

Is it nothing, one may ask in passing, in sup
port of the acceptability of the esoteric doctrine,
that natural analogies support it at every turn ?
As it is below, so it is above, wrote the early
occult philosophers ; the microcosm is a mirror
of the macrocosm. All Nature lying within
the sphere of our physical observation verifies
the rule, so far as that limited area can exhibit
any principles. The structure of lower animals
is reproduced with modifications in higher ani
mals, and in man ; the fine fibres of the leaf
ramify like the branches of the tree, and the
microscope follows such ramifications, repeated
beyond the range of the naked eye. The dust-
laden currents of rain-water by the roadside
deposit therein " sedimentary rocks " in the
puddles they develop, just as the rivers do in
the lakes and the great waters of the world over
the sea-bed. The geological work of a pond
and that of an ocean differ merely in their
scale, and it is only in scale that the esoteric

270 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

doctrine shows the sublimest laws of Nature
differing, in their jurisdiction over the man
and their jurisdiction over the planetary family.
As the children of each human generation are
tended in infancy by their parents, and grow
up to tend another generation in their turn, so
in the whole humanity of the great manvantaric
periods the men of one generation grow to be
the Dhyan Chohans of the next, and then yield
their places in the ultimate progress of time to
their descendants, and pass themselves to higher
conditions of existence.

Not less decisively than it answers the ques
tion about free-will does the esoteric doctrine
deal with the existence of evil. This subject
has been discussed in its place in the preceding
chapter on the Progress of Humanity, but the
esoteric doctrine, it will be seen, grapples with
the great problem more closely than by the
mere enunciation of the way human free-will,
which it is the purpose of Nature to grow, and
cultivate into Dhyan Chohanship, must by the
hypothesis be free to develop evil itself if it
likes. So much for the broad principle in oper
ation ; but the way it works is traceable in the
present teaching as clearly as the principle it
self. It works through physical Karma, and
could not but work that way except by a sus
pension of the invariable law that causes can.

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 271

not but produce effects. The objective man
born into the physical world is just as much
the creation of the person he last animated as
the subjective man who has in the interim been
living the Devachanic existence. The evil that
men do lives after them, in a more literal sense
even than Shakespeare intended by those words.
It may be asked, How can the moral guilt of a
man in one life cause him to be born blind or
crippled at a different period of the world's his
tory several thousand years later, of parents
with whom he has had, through his former life,
no lack of physical connection whatever ? But
the difficulty is met by considering the opera
tion of affinities more easily than may be im
agined at the first glance. The blind or crip
pled child, as regards his physical frame1, may
have been the potentiality rather than the prod
uct of local circumstances. But he would not
have come into existence unless there had been
a spiritual monad pressing forward for incarna
tion, and bearing with it a fifth principle (so
much of a fifth principle as is persistent, of
course) precisely adapted by its Karma to in
habit that potential body. Given these circum
stances, and the imperfectly organized child is
conceived and brought into the world, to be a
cause of trouble to himself and others — an
effect becoming a cause in its turn — and a liv

272 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

ing enigma for philosophers endeavoring to ex
plain the origin of evil.

The same explanation applies, with modifica
tions, to a vast range of cases that might be
cited to illustrate the problem of evil in the
world. Incidentally, moreover, it covers a ques
tion connected with the operation of the Karmio
law that can hardly be called a difficulty, as
the answer would probably be suggested by the
bearings of the doctrine itself, but is none the
less entitled to notice. The selective assimi
lation of Karma-laden spirits with parentage
which corresponds to their necessities or deserts
is the obvious explanation which reconciles
rebirth with atavism and heredity. The child
born may seem to reproduce the moral and
mental peculiarities of parents or ancestors as
well as their physical likeness, and the fact
suggests the notion that his soul is as much an
offshoot of the family tree as his physical frame.
It is unnecessary to enlarge here on the multi
farious embarrassments by which that theory
would be surrounded, on the extravagance of
supposing that a soul thus thrown off, like a
spark from an anvil, without any spiritual past
behind it, can have a spiritual future before it.
The soul, which was thus merely a function of
the body, would certainly come to an end with
the dissolution of that out of which it arose

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 273

The esoteric doctrine, however, as regards trans
mitted characteristics, will afford a complete
explanation of that phenomenon, as well as all
others connected with human life. The family
into which he is born is to the re-incarnating
spirit what a new planet is to the whole tide
of humanity on a round along the manvantaric
chain. It has been built up by a process of
evolution working on a line transverse to that
of humanity's approach ; but it is fit for human
ity to inhabit when the time comes. So with
the re- incarnating spirit: it presses forward
into the objective world, the influences which
have retained it in the Devachanic state having
been exhausted, and it touches the spring of
Nature, so to speak, provoking the development
of a child which without such an impulse would
merely have been a potentiality, not an actual
development, but in whose parentage it finds
— of course unconsciously by the blind opera
tion of its affinities — the exact conditions of
renewed life for which it has prepared itself
during its last existence. Certainly we must
never forget the presence of exceptions in all
broad rules of Nature. In the present case
it may sometimes happen that mere accident
causes an injury to a child at birth. Thus a
crippled frame may come to be bestowed on a
spirit whose Karma has by no means earned
18

274 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

that penalty, and so with a great variety of ac
cidents. But of these all that need be said is
that Nature is not at all embarrassed by her
accidents ; she has ample time to repair them.
The undeserved suffering of one life is amply
redressed under the operation of the Karmic
law in the next or the next. There is plenty
of time for making the account even, and the
adepts declare, I believe, that, as a matter of
fact, in the long run undeserved suffering oper
ates as good luck rather than otherwise, thereby
deriving from a purely scientific observation
of facts a doctrine which religion has benevo
lently invented sometimes for the consolation of
the afflicted.

While the esoteric doctrine affords in this
way an unexpected solution of the most per
plexing phenomena of life, it does this at no
sacrifice in any direction of the attributes we
may fairly expect of a true religious science.
Foremost among the claims we may make on
such a system is that it shall contemplate
no injustice, either in the direction of wrong
done to the deserving, or of benefits bestowed
on the undeserving ; and the justice of its oper
ation must be discernible in great things and
small alike. The legal maxim, de minimis non
curat lex, is means of escape for human fallibil*
ity from the consequences of its own imperfeo

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 275

tions. There is no such thing as indifference
to small things in chemistry or mechanics.
Nature in physical operations responds with ex
actitude to small causes as certainly as to great,
and we may feel instinctively sure that in her
spiritual operations also she has no clumsy habit
of treating trifles as of no consequence, of ig
noring small debts in consideration of paying
big ones, like a trader of doubtful integrity con
tent to respect obligations which are serious
enough to be enforced by law. Now the minor
acts of life, good and bad alike, are of necessity
ignored under any system which makes the final
question at stake, admission to or exclusion
from a uniform or approximately uniform con
dition of blessedness. Even as regards that
merit and demerit which is solely concerned
with spiritual consequences, no accurate re
sponse could be made by Nature except by
means of that infinitely graduated condition
of spiritual existence described by the esoteric
doctrine as the Devachanic state. But the
complexity to be dealt with is more serious than
even the various conditions of Devachanic ex
istence can meet. No system of consequences
ensuing to mankind after the life now under
observation can be recognized as adapted sci
entifically to the emergency, unless it responds
to the sense of justice, in regard to the multi-

276 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

farious acts and habits of life generally, includ
ing those which merely relate to physical ex
istence, and are not deeply colored by right or
wrong.

Now, it is only by a return to physical exist
ence that people can possibly be conceived to
reap with precise accuracy the harvest of the
minor causes they may have generated, when
last in objective life. Thus, on a careful exam
ination of the matter, the Karmic law, so unat
tractive to Buddhist students, hitherto, in its
exoteric shape, — and no wonder, — will be seen
not only to reconcile itself to the sense of justice,
but to constitute the only imaginable method
of natural action that would do this. The con
tinued individuality running through successive
Karmic re-births once realized, and the corre
sponding chain of personal existences interca
lated between each borne in mind, the exquisite
symmetry of the whole system is in no way
impaired by that feature which seems obnoxious
to criticism at the first glance, — the successive
baths of oblivion, through which the re-incar
nating spirit has to pass. On the contrary,
that oblivion itself is in truth the only condition
on which objective life could fairly be started
afresh. Few earth-lives are entirely free from
shadows, the recollection of which would darken
a renewed lease of life for the former personal-

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 277

ity. And if it is alleged that the forgetfulness
in each life of the last involves waste of experi
ence and effort and intellectual acquirements,
painfully or laboriously obtained, that objection
can only be raised in forgetfulness of the Deva
chanic life, in which, far from being wasted,
such efforts and acquirements are the seeds
from which the whole magnificent harvest of
spiritual results will be raised. In the same
way, the longer the esoteric doctrine occupies
the mind the more clearly it is seen that every
objection brought against it meets with a ready
reply, and only seems an objection from the
point of view of imperfect knowledge.

Passing from abstract considerations to oth
ers partly interwoven with practical matters,
we may compare the esoteric doctrine with the
observable facts of Nature in several ways with
the view of directly checking its teachings. A
spiritual science which has successfully divined
the absolute truth must accurately fit the facts
of earth whenever it impinges on earth. A
religious dogma in flagrant opposition to that
which is manifestly truth in respect of geology
and astronomy may find churches and congre
gations content to nurse it, but is not worth
serious philosophical consideration. How then
does the esoteric doctrine square with geology
and astronomy ?

278 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

It is not too much to say that it constitutes
the only religious system that blends itself ea
sily with the physical truths discovered by mod
ern research in those branches of science. It
not only blends itself with, in the sense of tol
erating, the nebula hypothesis and the stratifi
cation of rocks ; it rushes into the arms of these
facts, so to speak, and could not get on without
them. It could not get on without the great
discoveries of modern biology ; as a system rec
ommending itself to notice in a scientific age it
could ill afford to dispense with the latest ac
quisitions of physical geography, and it may
offer a word of thanks even to Professor Tyndall
for some of his experiments on light, for he
seems on one occasion, as he describes the phe
nomenon without knowing what he is describ
ing, in "Fragments of Science," to have pro
voked conditions within a glass tube which en
abled him for a short time to see the elementals.

The stratification of the earth's crust is, of
course, a plain and visible record of the inter
racial cataclysms. Physical science is emerging
from the habits of timidity, which its insolent
oppression by religious bigotry for fifteen cen
turies engendered, but it is still a little shy in
its relations with dogma, from the mere force
of habit. In that way, geology has been con«
tent to say, such and such continents, as then

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 279

shell-beds testify, must have been more than
once submerged below and elevated above the
surface of the ocean. It has not yet grown used
to the free application of its own materials to
speculation, which trenches upon religious ter
ritory. But surely if geology were required to
interpret all its facts into a consistent history
of the earth, throwing in the most plausible
hypotheses it could invent to fill up gaps in its
knowledge, it would already construct a history
for mankind which in its broad outlines would
not be unlike that sketched out in the chap
ter on the Great World Periods ; and the fur
ther geological discovery progresses, our esoteric
teachers assure us, the more closely will the
correspondence of the doctrine and the bony
traces of the past be recognized. Already we
find experts from the Challenger vouching for
the existence of Atlantis, though the subject be
longs to a class of problems unattractive to the
scientific world generally, so that the considera
tions in favor of the lost continent are not yet
generally appreciated. Already thoughtful ge
ologists are quite ready to recognize that in
regard to the forces which have fashioned the
earth this, the period within the range of his
toric traces, may be a period of comparative
inertia and slow change ; that cataclysmal met
amorphoses may have been added formerly to

280 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

those of gradual subsidence, upheaval, and de
nudation. It is only a step or two to the ree«
ognition as a fact of what no one could any
longer find fault with as a hypothesis : that
great continental upheavals and submergences
take place alternately ; that the whole map of
the world is not only thrown occasionally into
new shapes, like the pictures of a kaleidoscope
as its colored fragments fall into new arrange
ments, but subject to systematically recurrent
changes, which restore former arrangements at
enormous intervals of time.

Pending further discoveries, however, it will,
perhaps, be admitted that we have a sufficient
block of geological knowledge already in our
possession to fortify the cosmogony of the eso
teric doctrine. That the doctrine should have
been withheld from the world generally as long
as no such knowledge had paved the way for
its reception can hardly be considered indis
creet for the part of its custodians. Whether
the present generation will attach sufficient im
portance to its correspondence with what has
been ascertained of Nature in other ways re
mains to be seen.

These correspondences may, of course, be
traced in biology as decisively as in geology.
The broad Darwinian theory of the Descent of
Man from the animal kingdom is not the only

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 281

support afforded by this branch of science to
the esoteric doctrine. The detailed observa
tions now carried out in embryology are espe
cially interesting for the light they throw on
more than one department of this doctrine.
Thus the now familiar truth that the succes
sive stages of ante-natal human development
correspond to the progress of human evolution
through different forms of animal life is noth
ing less than a revelation, in its analogical bear
ings. It does not merely fortify the evolution
ary hypothesis itself ; it affords a remarkable
illustration of the way Nature works in the
evolution of new races of men at the beginning
of the great round periods. When a child has
to be developed from a germ which is so simple
in its constitution that it is typical less of the
animal — less even of the vegetable — than of
the mineral kingdom, the familiar scale of evo
lution is run over, so to speak, with a rapid
touch. The ideas of progress which may have
taken countless ages to work out in a connected
chain for the first time are once for all firmly
lodged in Nature's memory, and thenceforth
they can be quickly recalled in order, in a few
months. So with the new evolution of human
ity on each planet as the human tide- wave of
life advances. In the first round the process is
exceedingly slow, and does not advance far.

282 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

The ideas of Nature are themselves under ev
olution. But when the process has been ac
complished once it can be quickly repeated.
In the later rounds, the life impulse runs up
the gamut of evolution with a facility only
conceivable by help of the illustration which
embryology affords. This is the explanation
of the way the character of each round differs
from its predecessor. The evolutionary work
which has been once accomplished is soon re
peated ; then the round performs its own evo
lution at a very different rate, as the child, once
perfected up to the human type, performs its
own individual growth but slowly, in proportion
to the earlier stages of its initial development.

No elaborate comparison of exoteric Bud
dhism, with the views of Nature which have now
been set forth — briefly, indeed, considering
their scope and importance, but comprehensive
ly enough to furnish the reader with a general
idea of the system in its whole enormous range
— will be required from me. With the help of
the information now communicated, more ex
perienced students of Buddhist literature will be
better able to apply to the enigmas that it may
contain the keys which will unlock their mean
ing. The gaps in the public records of Bud
dha's teaching will be filled up readily enough
now, and it will be plain why they were left.

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 283

For example, in Mr. Rhys Davids' book I find
this : " Buddhism does not attempt to solve the
problem of the primary origin of all things ; "
and quoting from Hardy's "Manual of Bud
dhism," he goes on, " When Malunka asked the
Buddha whether the existence of the world is
eternal or not eternal, he made him no reply ;
but the reason of this was that it was considered
by the teacher as an inquiry that tended to no
profit." In reality the subject was manifestly
passed over because it could not be dealt with
by a plain yes or no, without putting the in
quirer upon a false scent ; while to put him on
the true scent would have required a complete
exposition of the whole doctrine about the ev
olution of the planetary chain, an explanation
of that for which the community Buddha was
dealing with was not intellectually ripe. To
infer from his silence that he regarded the in
quiry itself as tending to no profit is a mistake
which may naturally enough have been made
in the absence of any collateral knowledge, but
none can be more complete in reality. No re
ligious system that ever publicly employed it
self on the problem of the origin of all things
has, as will now be seen, done more than scratch
the surface of that speculation, in comparison
with the exhaustive researches of the esoteric
science of which Buddha was no less prominent

284 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

an exponent than he was a prominent teacher
of morals for the populace.

The positive conclusions as to what Bud
dhism does teach — carefully as he has worked
them out — are no less inaccurately set forth
by Mr. Rhys Davids than the negative conclu
sion just quoted. It was inevitable that all
such conclusions should hitherto be inaccurate.
I quote an example, not to disparage the careful
study of which it is the fruit, but to show how
the light now shed over the whole subject pen
etrates every cranny and puts an entirely new
complexion on all its features : —

" Buddhism takes as its ultimate fact the ex
istence of the material world, and of conscious
beings living within it ; and it holds that every
thing is subject to the law of cause and ef
fect, and that everything is constantly, though
imperceptibly, changing. There is no place
where this law does not operate ; no heaven
or hell, therefore, in the ordinary sense. There
are worlds where angels live, whose existence
is more or less material according as their pre
vious lives were more or less holy ; but the
angels die, and the worlds they inhabit pass
away. There are places of torment, where the
evil actions of men or angels produce unhappy
beings; but when the active power of the evil
that produced them is exhausted, they will

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 285

vanish, and the worlds they inhabit are not
eternal. The whole Kosmos — earth and heav
ens and hells — is always tending to renova
tion or destruction, is always in a course of
change, a series of revolutions or of cycles, of
which the beginning and the end alike are
unknowable and unknown. To this universal
law of composition and dissolution men and
gods form no exception ; the unity of forces
which constitutes a sentient being must sooner
or later be dissolved, and it is only through
ignorance and delusion that such a being in
dulges in the dream that it is a separable and
self-existent entity."

Now certainly this passage might be taken to
show how the popular notions of Buddhist phi
losophy are manifestly thrown off from the real
esoteric philosophy. Most assuredly that phi
losophy no more finds in the universe than in
the belief of any truly enlightened thinker, Asi
atic or European, the unchangeable and eter
nal heaven and hell of monkish legend ; and
uthe worlds where angels live," and so on, —
the vividly real though subjective strata of the
Devachanic state, — are found in Nature truly
enough. So with all the rest of the popular
Buddhist conceptions just passed in review.
But in their popular form they are the nearest
caricatures of the corresponding items of eso-

286 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

teric knowledge. Thus the notion about indi
viduality being a delusion, and the ultimate
dissolution as such of the sentient being, is
perfectly unintelligible without fuller explana
tions concerning the multitudinous geons of in
dividual life, in as yet, to us, inconceivable but
ever-progressive conditions of spiritual exalta
tion, which come before that unutterably remote
mergence into the non-individualized condition.
That condition certainly must be somewhere in
futurity, but its nature is something which no
uninitiated philosopher, at any rate, has ever
yet comprehended by so much as the faintest
glimmering guess. As with the idea of Nir
vana, so with this about the delusion of indi
viduality, writers on Buddhist doctrine derived
from exoteric sources have most unfortunately
found themselves entangled with some of the
remote elements of the great doctrine, under
the impression that they were dealing with
Buddhist views of conditions immediately suc
ceeding this life. The statement, which is al
most absurd, thus put out of its proper place in
the whole doctrine, may be felt not only as no
longer an outrage on the understanding, but
as a sublime truth when restored to its proper
place in relation to other truths. The ultimate
mergence of the perfected man-god, or Dhyan
Chohan, in the absolute consciousness of para-

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 287

nirvana has nothing to do, let me add, with
the " heresy of individuality," which relates to
physical personalities. To this subject I recur
a little later on.

Justly enough, Mr. Rhys Davids says, in ref
erence to the epitome of Buddhist doctrine
quoted above : " Such teachings are by no
means peculiar to Buddhism, and similar ideas
lie at the foundation of earlier Indian philoso
phies." (Certainly by reason of the fact that
Buddhism as concerned with doctrine was ear
lier Indian philosophy itself.) " They are to
be found, indeed, in other systems widely sepa
rated from them in time and place ; and Bud
dhism, in dealing with the truth which they
contain, might have given a more decisive and
more lasting utterance if it had not also bor
rowed a belief in the curious doctrine of trans
migration, — a doctrine which seems to have
arisen independently, if not simultaneous!}', in
the valley of the Ganges and the valley of the
Nile. The word transmigration lias been used,
however, in different times and at different
places for theories similar, indeed, but very dif
ferent ; and Buddhism, in adopting the general
idea from post-Vedic Brahmanism, so modified
it as to originate, in fact, a new hypothesis.
The new hypothesis, like the old one, related to
life in past and future births, and contributed

288 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

nothing to the removal here, in this life, of the
evil it was supposed to explain."

The present volume should have dissipated
the misapprehensions on which these remarks
rest. Buddhism does not believe in anything
resembling the passage backwards and forwards
between animal and human forms, which most
people conceive to be meant by the principle of
transmigration. The transmigration of Bud
dhism is the transmigration of Darwinian evo
lution scientifically developed, or rather exhaust
ively explored, in both directions. Buddhist
writings certainly contain allusions to former
births, in which even the Buddha himself was
now one and now another kind of animal. But
these had reference to the remote course of pre
human evolution, of which his fully opened
vision gave him a retrospect. Never in any
authentic Buddhist writings will any support
be found for the notion that any human crea
ture, once having attained manhood, falls back
into the animal kingdom. Again, while noth
ing, indeed, could be more ineffectual as an ex
planation of the origin of evil than such a cari
cature of transmigration as would contemplate
such a return, the progressive re-births of human
Egos into objective existence, coupled with the
operation of physical Karma and the inevitable
play of free-will within the limits of its privi-

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 289

lege, do explain the origin of evil, finally and
completely. The effort of Nature being to grow
a new harvest of Dhyan Chohans whenever a
planetary system is evolved, the incidental de
velopment of transitory evil is an unavoidable
consequence under the operation of the forces
or processes just mentioned, themselves una
voidable stages in the stupendous enterprise
set on foot.

At the same time the reader who will now
take up Mr. Rhys Davids' book and examine
the long passage on this subject, and on the
skandhas, will realize how utterly hopeless a
task it was to attempt the deduction of any ra
tional theory of the origin of evil from the exo
teric materials there made use of. Nor was it
possible for these materials to suggest the true
explanation of the passage immediately after
wards, quoted from the Bnihnmjala Sutra : —

44 After showing how the unfounded belief
in the eternal existence of God or gods arose,
Gautama goes on to discuss the question of the
soul, and points out thirty-two beliefs concern
ing it, which he declares to be wrong. These
are shortly as follows : 4 Upon what principle,
or on what ground, do these mendicants and
Brahmans hold the doctrine of future existence?
They teach that the soul is material, or is im
material, or is both or neither ; that it will
19

290 ESOTERTC BUDDHISM.

have one or many modes of consciousness ; that
its perceptions will be few or boundless ; that
it will be in a state of joy or of misery, or of
neither. These are the sixteen heresies, teach
ing a conscious existence after death. Then
there are eight heresies teaching that the soul,
material or immaterial, or both or neither, finite
or infinite, or both or neither, has one uncon
scious existence after death. And, finally, eight
others which teach that the soul, in the same
eight ways, exists after death in a state of be
ing neither conscious nor unconscious.' ' Men
dicants,' concludes the sermon, 4 that which
binds the teacher to existence (viz., tanha,
thirst), is cut off, but his body still remains.
While his body shall remain, he will be seen
by gods and men, but after the termination of
life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither
gods nor men will see him.' Would it be pos
sible in a more complete and categorical man
ner to deny that there is any soul, — anything
of any kind which continues to exist in any
manner after death ? "

Certainly, for exoteric students, such a pas
sage as this could not but seem in flagrant con
tradiction with those teachings of Buddhism
which deal with the successive passages of the
same individuality through several incarnations,
and which thus along another line of thought

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 291

may seem to assume the existence of a trans
missible soul as plainly as the passage quoted
denies it. Without a comprehension of the
seven principles of man, no separate utterances
on the various aspects of this question of im
mortality could possibly be reconciled. But
the key now given leaves the apparent contra
diction devoid of all embarrassment. In the
passage last quoted Buddha is speaking of the
astral personality, while the immortality recog
nized by the esoteric doctrine is that of the
spiritual individuality. The explanation has
been fully given in the chapter on Devachan,
and in the passages quoted there from Colonel
Olcott's " Buddhist Catechism." It is only
since fragments of the great revelation this vol
ume contains have been given out during the
last two years in the " Theosophist " that the
important distinction between personality and
individuality, as applied to the question of hu
man immortality, has settled into an intelligible
shape, but there are plentiful allusions in former
occult writing, which may now be appealed to
in proof of the fact that former writers were
fully alive to the doctrine itself. Turning to the
most recent of the occult books, in which the
veil of obscurity was still left to wrap the doc
trine from careless observation, though it was
strained in many places almost to transparency,

292 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

we might take any one of a dozen passages to
illustrate the point before us. Here is one : —

" The philosophers who explained the fall
into generation their own way viewed spirit as
something wholly distinct from the soul. They
allowed its presence in the astral capsule only
so far as the spiritual emanations or rays of the
4 shining one ' were concerned. Man and soul
had to conquer their immortality by ascending
toward the unity, with which, if successful,
they were finally linked, and into which they
were absorbed, so to say. The individualiza-
tion of man after death depended on the spirit,
not on his body and soul. Although the word
1 personality,' in the sense in which it is usually
understood, is an absurdity if applied literally
to our immortal essence, still the latter is a dis
tinct entity, immortal and eternal per se ; and
as in the case of criminals beyond redemption,
when the shining thread which links the spirit
to the soul from the moment of the birth of a
child is violently snapped, and the disembodied
entity is left to share the fate of the lower ani
mals, to dissolve into ether and have its indi
viduality annihilated, — even then the spirit
remains a distinct being." J

No one can read this — scarcely any part, in
deed, of the chapter from which it is taken —>

1 Jsis Unveiled, vol. i. p. 315.

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. . 293

without perceiving, by the light of the expla
nations given in the present volume, that the
esoteric doctrine now fully given out was per
fectly familiar to the writer, though I have been
privileged to put it for the first time into plain
and unmistakable language.

It takes some mental effort to realize the
difference between personality and individual
ity, but the craving for the continuity of per
sonal existence, for the full recollection always
of those transitory oircu instances of our present
physical life which make up the personality,
is manifestly no more than a passing weakness
of the flesh. For many people it will perhaps
remain irrational to say that any person now
living, with his recollections bounded by the
years of his childhood, is the same individual as
some one of quite a different nationality and
epoch who lived thousands of years ago, or the
same that will reappear after a similar lapse of
time under some entirely new conditions in the
future. But the feeling " I am I" is the same
through the three lives and through all the
hundreds; for that feeling is more deeply seated
than the feeling "I am John Smith, so high, so
heavy, with such and such property and rela
tions ." Is it inconceivable, as a notion in the
mind, that John Smith, inheriting the gift of
Tithonus, changing his name from time to time,

294 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

marrying afresh every other generation or so,
losing property here, coming into possession of
property there, and getting interested as time
went on in a great variety of different pursuits,
— is it inconceivable that such a person in a
few thousand years should forget all circum
stances connected with the present life of John
Smith, just as if the incidents of that life for
him had never taken place? And yet the Ego
would be the same. If this is conceivable in
the imagination, what can be inconceivable in
the individual continuity of an intermittent life,
interrupted and renewed at regular intervals,
and varied with passages through a purer con
dition of existence. \

No less than it clears up the apparent con
flict between the identity of successive individ
ualities and the "heresy" of individuality will
the esoteric doctrine be seen to put the " in
comprehensible mystery of Karma, which Mr.
Rhys Davids disposes of so summarily, on a
perfectly intelligible and scientific basis. Of
this he says that because Buddhism " does not
acknowledge a soul "it has to resort to the des
perate expedient of a mystery to bridge over
the gulf between one life and another some
where else, — the doctrine, namely, of Karma.
And he condemns the idea as u a non-exist
ent fiction of the brain." Irritated as he feels

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 295

with what he regards as the absurdity of the
doctrine, he yet applies patience and great men
tal ingenuity in the effort to evolve something
that shall feel like a rational metaphysical con
ception out of the tangled utterances concern
ing Karma of the Buddhist scriptures. He
writes: —

"Karma, from a Buddhist point of view,
avoids the superstitious extreme, on the one
hand, of those who believe in the separate ex
istence of some, entity called the soul ; and the
irreligious extreme, on the other, of those who
do not believe in moral justice and retribu
tion. Buddhism claims to have looked through
the word soul for the fact it purports to cover,
and to have found no fact at all, but only one
or other of twenty different delusions which
blind the eyes of men. Nevertheless, Buddhism
is convinced that if a man reaps sorrow, dis
appointment, pain, he himself, and no other,
must at some time have sown folly, error, sin ;
and if not in this life, then in some former
birth. Where, then, in the latter case, is the
identity between him who sows and him who
reaps ? In that which alone remains when a
man dies, and the constituent parts of the seji-
tient being are dissolved, in the result, namely,
of his action, speech, and thought, in his good
or evil Karma (literally his doing), which doe*

296 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

not die. We are familiar with the doctrine,
' Whatever a man soweth that shall he also
reap,' and can therefore enter into the Bud
dhist feeling that whatever a man reaps that he
must also have sown ; we are familiar with the
doctrine of the indestructibility of force, and
can therefore understand the Buddhist dogma
(however it may contravene our Christian no
tions) that no exterior power can destroy the
fruit of a man's deeds, that they must work out
their full effect to the pleasant or the bitter end.
But the peculiarity of Buddhism lies in this:
that the result of what a man is or does is held
not to be dissipated, as it were, into many sepa
rate streams, but to be concentrated together in
the formation of one new sentient being, — new,
that is, in its constituent parts and powers, but
the same in its essence, its being, its doing, its
Karma."

Nothing could be more ingenious as an at
tempt to invent for Buddhism an explanation
of its "mystery" on the assumption that the
authors of the mystery threw it up originally
as a " desperate expedient " to cover their re
treat from an untenable position. But in re
ality the doctrine of Karma has a far simpler
history and does not need so subtle an interpre*
tation. Like many other phenomena of Nature
having to do with futurity, it was declared by

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 297

Buddha an incomprehensible mystery, and ques
tions concerning it were thus put aside; but
he did not mean that because it was incompre
hensible for the populace it was incomprehen
sible, or any mysteiy at all, for the initiates
in the esoteric doctrine. It was impossible to
explain it without reference to the esoteric
doctrine; but the outlines of that science once
grasped, Karma, like so much else, becomes a
comparatively simple matter, — a mystery only
in the sense in which also the affinity of sul
phuric acid for copper and its superior affinity
for iron are also mysteries. Certainly esoteric
science for its " lay chelas " at all events, like
chemical science for its lay chelas, — all stu
dents, that is to say, of its mere physical phe
nomena, — leaves some mysteries unfathomed in
the background. I am not prepared to explain
by what precise molecular changes the higher
affinities which constitute Karma are stored up
in the permanent elements of the fifth principle.
But no more is ordinary science qualified to say
what it is in a molecule of oxygen which in
duces it to desert the molecule of hydrogen
with which it was in alliance in the raindrop,
and attach itself to a molecule of the iron of a
railing on which it fulls. But the speck of
rust is engendered, and a scientific explanation
of that occurrence is held to have been given

298 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

when its affinities are ascertained and appealed
to.

So with Karma, the fifth principle takes up
the affinities of its good and evil deeds in its
passage through life, passes with them into
Devachan, where those which are suitable to
the atmosphere, so to speak, of that state, fruc
tify and blossom in prodigious abundance, and
then passes on, with such as have not yet ex
hausted their energy, into the objective world
once more. And as certainly as the molecule
of oxygen brought into the presence of a
hundred other molecules will fly to that with
which it has the most affinity, so will the
Karma-laden spiritual monad fly to that incar
nation with which its mysterious attractions
link it. Nor is there in that process any crea
tion of a new sentient being, except in the
sense that the new bodily structure evolved is
a new instrument of sensation. That which in
habits it, that which feels joy or sorrow, is the
old Ego, — walled off by forgetfulness from its
last set of adventures on earth, it is true, but
reaping their fruit nevertheless, — the same " I
am I " as before.

" Strange it is," Mr. Rhys Davids thinks,
that " all this " — the explanation of Buddhist
philosophy which esoteric materials have ena
bled him to give — " sliould have seemed not

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 299

unattractive, these 2,300 years and more, to
many despairing and earnest hearts ; that they
should have trusted themselves to the so seem
ing stately bridge which Buddhism has tried to
build over the river of the mysteries and sor
rows of life. . . . They have failed to see that
the very keystone itself, the link between one
life and another, is a mere word, — this won
derful hypothesis, this airy nothing, this im
aginary cause beyond the reach of reason, —
the individualized and individualizing grace
of Karma."

It would have been strange indeed if Bud
dhism had been built on such a frail foundation;
but its apparent frailty has been simply due to
the fact that its mighty fabric of knowledge
has hitherto been veiled from view. Now that
the inner doctrine has been unveiled it will be
seen how little it depends for any item of its
belief on shadowy subtleties of metaphysics.
So far as these have clustered round Buddhism
they have merely been constructed by external
interpreters of stray doctrinal hints that could
not be entirely left out of the simple system of
morals prescribed for the populace.

In that which really constitutes Buddhism
we find a sublime simplicity, like that of Na
ture herself, — one law running into infinite
ramifications ; complexities of detail, it is true,

300 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.

as Nature herself is infinitely complex in her
manifestations, however unchangeably uniform
in her purposes, but always the immutable doc
trine of causes and their effects, which in turn
become causes again in an endless cyclic pro
gression.

APPENDIX.

NOTE TO CHAPTER I.

THE further we advance in occult study, the more ex
alted in many ways become our conceptions of the Ma-
hatmas. The complete comprehension of the manner in
which these persons become differentiated from human
kind at large, is not to be achieved by the help of mere
intellectual effort. There are aspects of the adept nature
which have to do with the extraordinary development of
the higher principles in man, which cannot be realized by
the application of the lower. But while crude concep
tions in the beginning thus fall very short of reaching the
real level of the facts, a curious complication of the prob
lem arises in this way. Our first idea of an adept who
has achieved the power of penetrating the tremendous
secrets of spiritual nature, is modelled on our conception
of a very highly gifted man of science on our own plane.
We are apt to think of him as once an adept always an
adept, — as a very exalted human being, who must neces
sarily bring into play in all the relations of his life the
attributes that attach to him as a Maliatma. In this way,
while — as above pointed out — we shall certainly fail, do
all we can, to do justice in our thoughts to his attributes
as a Mahatma, we may very easily run to the opposite
extreme in our thinking about him in his ordinary human

302 APPENDIX.

aspect, and thus land ourselves in many perplexities, as
we acquire a partial familiarity with the characteristics of
the occult world. It is just because the highest attributes
of adeptship have to do with principles in human nature
which quite transcend the limits of physical existence,
that the adept of Mahatma can only be such in the high
est acceptation of the word, when he is, as the phrase
goes, "out of the body," or at all events thrown by spe
cial efforts of his will into an abnormal condition. When
he is not called upon to make such efforts or to pass en
tirely beyond the limitations of this fleshly prison, he is
much more like an ordinary man than experience of
him in some of his aspects would lead his disciples to
believe.

A correct appreciation of this state of things explains
the apparent contradiction involved in the position of the
occult pupil towards his masters, as compared with some
of the declarations that the master himself will frequently
put forward. For example, the Mahatmas are persistent
in asserting that they are not infallible, that they are
men, like the rest of us, perhaps with a somewhat more
enlarged comprehension of nature than the generality of
mankind, but still liable to err both in the direction of
practical business with which they may be concerned, and
in their estimate of the characters of other men, or the
capacity of candidates for occult development. But how
are we to reconcile statements of this nature with the
fundamental principle at the bottom of all occult research
which enjoins the neophyte to put his trust in the teaching
and guidance of his master absolutely and without re
serve ? The solution of the difficulty is found in the state
of things above referred to. While the adept may be a
man quite surprisingly liable to err sometimes in the ma
nipulation of worldly business, just as with ourselves some

APPENDIX. 303

of the greatest men of genius are liable to make mis
takes in their daily life that matter-of-fact people could
never commit, on the other hand, directly a Mahatma
comes to deal with the higher mysteries of spiritual sci
ence, he does so by virtue of the exercise of his Mahatma-
attributes, and in dealing with these can hardly be recog
nized as liable to err.

This consideration enables us to feel that the trust
worthiness of the teachings derived from such a source
as those which have inspired the present volume, is alto
gether above the reach of small incidents which in the
progress of our experience may seem to claim a revision
of that enthusiastic confidence in the supreme wisdom of
the adepts which the first approaches to occult study will
generally evoke.

Not that such enthusiasm or reverence will really be
diminished on the part of any occult chela as his compre
hension of the world he is entering expands. The man
who in one of his aspects is a Mahatma, may rather be
brought within the limits of affectionate human regard,
than deprived of his claims to reverence, by the consid
eration that in his ordinary life he is not so utterly lifted
above the commonplace run of human feeling as some
of his Nirvanic experiences might lead us to believe that
he would be.

If we keep constantly in mind that an adept is only
truly an adept when exercising adept functions, but that
when exercising these he may soar into spiritual rapport
with that which is, in regard at all events to the limita
tions of our solar system, all that we practically mean
by omniscience, we shall then be guarded from many of
the mistakes that the embarrassments of the subject
might create.

Intricacies concerning the nature of the adept may be

304 APPENDIX.

noticed here, which will hardly be quite intelligible with
out reference to some later chapters of this book, but
which have so important a bearing on all attempts to un
derstand what adeptship is really like that it may be con
venient to deal with them at once. The dual nature of
the Mahatma is so complete that some of his influence or
wisdom on the higher planes of nature may actually be
drawn upon by those in peculiar psychic relations with
him, without the Manhatma-man being at the moment
even conscious that such an appeal has been made to him.^
In this way it becomes open to us to speculate OH the
possibility that the relation between the spiritual Ma
hatma and the Mahatma-man may sometimes be rather
in the nature of what is sometimes spoken of in esoteric
writing as an overshadowing than as an incarnation in the
complete sense of the word.

Furthermore as another independent complication of
the matter we reach this fact, that each Mahatma is not
merely a human Ego in a very exalted state, but belongs,
so to speak, to some specific department in the great econ
omy of nature. Every adept must belong to one or other
of seven great types of adeptship ; but although we may
almost certainly infer that correspondences might be
traced between these various types and the seven princi
ples of man, I should shrink myself from attempting a
complete elucidation of this hypothesis. It will be enough
to apply the idea to what we know vaguely of the occult
organization in its higher regions. For some time past it
has been affirmed in esoteric writing that there are five
great Chohans or superior Mahatmas presiding over the
whole body of the adept fraternity. When the foregoing
chapter of this book was written, I was under the impres
sion that one supreme chief on a different level again
zeroised authority over these five Chohans, but it now

APPENDIX. 305

appears to me that this personage may rather be regarded
as a sixth Chohan, himself the head of the sixth type of
Mahatmas, and this conjecture leads at once to the fur
ther inference that there must be a seventh Chohan to
complete the correspondences which we thus discern. But
just as the seventh principle in nature or in man is a con
ception of the most intangible order, eluding the grasp of
any intellectual thinking, and only describable in shadowy
phrases of metaphysical non-significance, so we may be
quite sure that the seventh Chohan is very unapproach
able by untrained imaginations. But even he no doubt
plays a part in what may be called the higher economy
of spiritual nature, and that there is such a personage vis
ible occasionally to some of the other Mahatmas I take to
be the case. But speculation concerning him is valuable
chiefly as helping to give consistency to the idea above
thrown out, according to which the Mahatmas may be
comprehended in their true aspect as necessary phe
nomena of nature without whom the evolution of hu
manity could hardly be imagined as advancing, not as
merely exceptional men who have attained great spiritual
exaltation.

NOTE TO CHAPTER II.

Some objection has been raised to the method in which
the Esoteric Doctrine is presented to the reader in this
book, on the ground that it is materialistic. I doubt if in
any other way the ideas to be dealt with could so well be
brought within the grasp of the mind, but it is easy, when
they once are grasped, to translate them into terms of
idealism. The higher principles will be the better suscep-
90

306 APPENDIX.

tible of treatment as so many different states of the Ego,
when the attributes of these states have been separately
considered as principles undergoing evolution. But it
may be useful to dwell for a while on the view of the hu
man constitution according to which the consciousness of
the entity migrates successively through the stages of de
velopment, which the different principles represent.

In the highest evolution we need concern ourselves with
at present — that of the perfected Mahatma — it is some
times asserted in occult teaching that the consciousness of
the Ego has acquired the power of residing altogether in
the sixth principle. But it would be a gross view of the
subject, and erroneous, to suppose that the Mahatma has
on that account shaken off altogether, like a discarded
sheath or sheaths, the fourth and fifth principles, in which
his consciousness may have been seated during an ear
lier stage of his evolution. The entity which was the
fourth or fifth principle before, has come now to be dif
ferent in its attributes, and to be entirely divorced from
certain tendencies or dispositions, and is therefore a sixth
principle. The change can be spoken of in more general
terms as an emancipation of the adept's nature from the
enthralments of his lower self, from desires of the ordi
nary earth-life — even from the limitations of the affec
tions ; for the Ego, which is entirely conscious in his sixth
principle, has realized the unity of the true Egos of all
mankind on the higher plane, and can no longer be drawn
by bonds of sympathy to any one more than to any other.
He has attained that love of humanity as a whole which
transcends the love of the Maya or illusion which consti
tutes the separate human creature for the limited being
on the lower levels of evolution. He has not lost his
fourth and fifth principles, — these have themselves at
tained Mahatrnaship ; just as the animal soul of the lower

APPENDIX. 307

kingdom, in reaching humanity, has blossomed into the
fifth state. That consideration helps us to realize more
accurately the passage of ordinary human beings through
the long series of incarnations of the human plane. Once
fairly on that plane of existence, the consciousness of the
primitive man gradually envelops the attributes of the
fifth principle. But the Ego at first remains a centre of
thought-activity working chiefly with impulses and desires
of the fourth stage of evolution. Flashes of the higher
human reason illumine it fitfully at first, but by degrees
the more intellectual man grows into the fuller possession
of this. The impulses of human reason assert themselves
more and more strongly. The invigorated mind becomes
the predominant force in the life. Consciousness is trans
ferred to the fifth principle, oscillating, however, between
the tendencies of the lower and higher nature for a long
while, — that is to say, over vast periods of evolution and
many hundred lives, — and thus gradually purifying and
exalting the Ego. All this while the Ego is thus a unity
in one aspect of the matter, and its sixth principle but a
potentiality of ultimate development. As regards the
seventh principle, that is the true Unknowable, the su
preme controlling cause of all things, which is the same
for one man as for every man, the same for humanity as
for the animal kingdom, the same for the physical as for
the astral or devachanic or nirvanic planes of existence :
no one man has got a seventh principle, in the higher
conception of the subject ; we ai*e all in the same un
fathomable way overshadowed by the seventh principle of
the cosmos.

How does this view of the subject harmonize with the
statement in the foregoing chapter, that in a certain sense
the principles are separable, and that the sixth even can
be imagined as divorcing itself from its next lower neigh-

308 APPENDIX.

bor, and, by reincarnation, as growing a new fifth prin
ciple by contact with a human organism ? There is no
incompatibility in the spirit of the two views. The sev
enth principle is one and indivisible in all Nature, but
there is a mysterious persistence through it of certain life-
impulses, which thus constitute threads on which succes
sive existences may be strung. Such a life-impulse does
not expire even in the extraordinary case supposed, in
which an Ego, projected upon it and developed along it
up to a certain point, falls away from it altogether and as
a complete whole. I am not in a position to dogmatize
with precision as to what happens in such a case, but the
subsequent incarnations of the spirit along that line of
impulse are clearly of the original sequence ; and thus, in
the materialistic treatment of the idea, it may be said,
with as much approach to accuracy as language will allow
in either mode, that the sixth principle of the fallen entity
in such a case separates itself from the original fifth, and
reincarnates on its own account.

But with these abnormal processes it is unnecessary to
occupy ourselves to any great extent. The normal evo
lution is the problem we have first to solve ; and while
the consideration of the seven principles as such is, to my
own mind, the most instructive method by which the prob
lem can be dealt with, it is well to remember always that
the Ego is a unity progressing through various spheres or
states of being, undergoing change and growth and purifi
cation all through the course of its evolution, — that it is
a consciousness seated in this, or that, or the other, of the
potential attributes of a human entity.

APPENDIX. 309

NOTE TO CHAPTER III.

An expression occurs in this chapter which does not
recommend itself to the somewhat fuller conceptions I
have been able to form of the subject since this book was
written. It is stated that " the spiritual monads — the
individual atoms of that immense life-impulse of which
so much has been said — do not fully complete their min
eral existence on globe A, then complete it on globe B,
and so on. They pass several times round the whole cir
cle as minerals, and then again several times round as
vegetables, &c." Now it is intelligible to me that I was
permitted to use this form of expression in the first in
stance because the main purpose in view was to elucidate
the way in which the human entity was gradually evolved
from processes of Nature going on in the first instance
in lower kingdoms. But in truth at a later stage of the
inquiry it becomes manifest that the vast process of which
the evolution of humanity and all which that leads up to
is the crowning act, the descent of spirit into matter, does
not bring about a differentiation of individualities until a
much later stage than is contemplated in the passage just
quoted. In the mineral worlds on which the higher forms
of plant and animal life have not yet been established,
there is no such thing, as yet, as an individual spiritual
monad, unless indeed by virtue of some inconceivable
unity — inconceivable, but subject to treatment as a the
ory none the less — in the life-impulses which are destined
to give rise to the later chains of highly organized exist
ence. Just as in a preceding note we assumed the unity
of such a life-impulse in the case of a perverted human
Ego falling away as a whole from the current of evolu
tion on which it was launched, so we may assume the same

310 APPENDIX.

unity backwards to the earliest beginnings of the plane
tary chain. But this can be no more than a protective
hypothesis, reserving us the right to investigate some mys
teries later on that we need not go into at present. For
a general appreciation of the subject it is better to regard
the first infusion, as it were, of spirit into matter as pro
voking a homogeneous manifestation. The specific forms
of the mineral kingdom, the crystals and differentiated
rocks, are but bubbles in the seething mass assuming par
tially individualized forms for a time, and rushing again
into the general substance of the growing cosmos, not yet
true individualities. Nor even in the vegetable kingdom
does individuality set in. The vegetable establishes or
ganic matter in physical manifestation, and prepares the
way for the higher evolution of the animal kingdom. In
this, for the first time, but only in the higher regions of
this, is true individuality evoked. Therefore it is not till
we begin in imagination to contemplate the passage of the
great life-impulse round the planetary chain on the level
of animal incarnation, that it would be strictly justifiable
to speak of the spiritual monads as travelling round the
circle as a plurality, to which the word " they " would
properly apply.

It is evidently not with the intention of encouraging
any close study of evolution on the very grand scale with
which we are dealing here, that the adept authors of the
doctrine set forth in this volume have opened the subject
of the planetary chain. As far as humanity is concerned,
the period during which this earth will be occupied by our
race is more than long enough to absorb all our specula
tive energy. The magnitude of the evolutionary process
to be accomplished during that period is more than enough
to tax to the utmost the capacities of an ordinary imagi
nation. But it is extremely advantageous for students of

APPENDIX. 811

the occult doctrine to realize the plurality of worlds in
our system once for all — their intimate relations with,
their interdependence on each other — before concentrat
ing attention on the evolution of this single planet. For
in many respects the evolution of a single planet follows
a routine, as it will be found directly, that bears an ana
logical resemblance to the routine affecting the entire se
ries of planets to which it belongs. The older writings
on occult science, of the obscurely worded order, some
times refer to successive states of one world, as if suc
cessive worlds were meant, and vice versa. Confusion
thus arises in the reader's mind, and according to the bent
of his own inclination he clings to various interpretations
of the misty language. The obscurity disappears when
we realize that in the actual facts of Nature we have to
recognize both courses of change. Each planet, while in
habited by humanity, goes through metamorphoses of a
highly important and impressive character, the effect of
which may in each case be almost regarded as equivalent
to the reconstitution of the world. But none the less, if
the whole group of such changes is treated as a unity,
does it form one of a higher series of changes. The sev
eral worlds of the chain are objective realities, and not
symbols of change in one single, variable world. Further
remarks on this head will fall into their place more nat
urally at the close of a later chapter.

NOTE TO CHAPTERS V., VI.

There is no part of the present volume which I now
regard as in so much urgent need of amplification as chap-

312 APPENDIX.

ters V. and VI. The Kama loca stage of existence, and
that higher region or state of Devachan, to which it is but
the antechamber, were, designedly I take it, left by our
teachers in the first instance in partial obscurity, in order
that the whole scheme of evolution might be the better
understood. The spiritual state which immediately fol
lows our present physical life is a department of Nature,
the study of which is almost unhealthily attractive for
every one who once realizes that some contact with it —
some processes of experiment with its conditions — are pos
sible even during this life. Already we can to a certain ex
tent discern the phenomena of that state of existence into
which a human creature passes at the death of the body.
The experience of spiritualism has supplied us with facts
concerning it in very great abundance. These facts are
but too highly suggestive of theories and inferences which
seem to reach the ultimate limits of speculation, and noth
ing but the bracing mental discipline of esoteric study in
its broadest aspect will protect any mind addressed to the
consideration of these facts from conclusions which that
study shows to be necessarily erroneous. For this reason,
theosophical inquirers have nothing to regret as far as
their own progress in spiritual science is at stake, in the
circumstances which have hitherto induced them to be
rather neglectful of the problems that have to do with
the state of existence next following our own. It is im
possible to exaggerate the intellectual advantages to be
derived from studying the broad design of Nature through
out those vast realms of the future which only the perfect
clairvoyance of the adepts can penetrate, before going
into details regarding that spiritual foreground, which is
partially accessible to less powerful vision, but liable, on
a first acquaintance, to be mistaken for the whole expanse
of the future.*

APPENDIX. 313

The earlier processes, however, through which the soul
passes at death, may be described at this date somewhat
more fully than they are defined in the foregoing chapter.
The nature of the struggle that takes place in Kama loca
between the upper and lower duads may now, I believe,
be apprehended more clearly than at first. That struggle
appears to be a very protracted and variegated process,
and to constitute, — not, as some of us may have conjec
tured at first, an automatic or unconscious assertion of
affinities or forces quite ready to determine the future of
the spiritual monad at the period of death, — but a phase
of existence which may be, and in the vast majority of
cases is more than likely to be, continued over a consider
able series of years. And during this phase of existence
it is quite possible for departed human entities to mani
fest themselves to still living persons through the agency
of spiritual mediumship, in a way which may go far to
wards accounting for, if it does not altogether vindicate,
the impressions that spiritualists derive from such com
munications.

But we must not conclude too hastily that the human
soul going through the struggle or evolution of Kama loca
is in all respects what the first glance at the position, as
thus defined, may seem to suggest. First of all, we must
beware of too grossly materializing our conception of the
struggle, by thinking of it as a mechanical separation of
principles. There is a mechanical separation involved in
the discard of lower principles when the consciousness of
the Ego is firmly seated in the higher. Thus at death
the body is mechanically discarded by the soul, which in
union, perhaps (with intermediate principles), may act
ually be seen by some clairvoyants of a high order to
quit the tenement it no longer needs. And a very sim
ilar process may ultimately take place in Kama loca it-

314 APPENDIX.

self, in regard to the matter of the astral principles. But
postponing this consideration for a few moments, it is im
portant to avoid supposing that the struggle of Kama loca
does itself constitute this ultimate division of principles,
or second death upon the astral plane.

The struggle of Kama loca is in fact the life of the en
tity in that phase of existence. As quite correctly stated
in the text of the foregoing chapter, the evolution taking
place during that phase of existence is not concerned with
the responsible choice between good and evil which goes
on during physical life. Kama loca is a portion of the
great world of effects, — not a sphere in which causes are
generated (except under peculiar circumstances). The
Kama loca entity, therefore, is not truly master of his
own acts ; he is rather the sport of his own already estab
lished affinities. But these are all the while asserting
themselves, or exhausting themselves, by degrees, and the
Kama loca entity has an existence of vivid consciousness
of one sort or another the whole time. Now a moment's
reflection will show that those affinities, which are gath
ering strength and asserting themselves, have to do with
the spiritual aspirations of the life last experienced, while
those which are exhausting themselves have to do with
its material tastes, emotions, and proclivities. The Kama
loca entity, be it remembered, is on his way to Devachan,
or, in other words, is growing into that state which is the
Devachanic state, and the process of growth is accom
plished by action and reaction, by ebb and flow, like al
most every other in Nature, — by a species of oscillation
between the conflicting attractions of matter and spirit.
Thus the Ego advances towards Heaven, so to speak, or
recedes towards earth, during his Kama loca existence,
and it is just this tendency to oscillate between the two
poles of thought or condition that brings him back occa
sionally within the sphere of the life he has just quitted.

APPENDIX. 315

It is not by any means at once that his ardent sympa
thies with that life are dissipated. His sympathies with
the higher aspects of that life, be it remembered, are not
even on their way to dissipation. For instance, in what is
here referred to as earthly affinity, we need not include the
exercise of affection, which is a function of Devachanic
existence in a preeminent degree. But perhaps even in
regard to his affections there may be earthly and spiritual
aspects of these, and the contemplation of them, with the
circumstances and surroundings of the earth-life, may
often have to do with the recession towards earth-life of
the Kama loca entity referred to above.

Of course it will be apparent at once that the inter
course which the practice of spiritualism sets up between
such Kama-loca entities as are here in view, and the
friends they have left on earth, must go on during those
periods of the soul's existence in which earth memories
engage its attention ; and there are two considerations
of a very important nature which arise out of this re
flection.

1st. While its attention is thus directed, it is turned
away from the spiritual progress on which it is engaged
during its oscillations in the other direction. It may fairly
well remember, and in conversation refer to, the spiritual
aspirations of the life on earth, but its new spiritual ex
periences appear to be of an order that cannot be trans
lated back into terms of the ordinary physical intellect,
and, besides that, to be not within the command of the
faculties which are in operation in the soul during its oc
cupation with old-earth memories. The position might be
roughly symbolized, but only to a very imperfect extent,
by the case of a poor emigrant, whom we may imagine
prospering in his new country, getting educated there,
concerning himself with its public affairs and discoveries,

316 APPENDIX.

philanthropy, and so on. He may keep up an interchange
of letters with his relations at home, but he will find it
difficult to keep them au courant with all that has come to
be occupying his thoughts. The illustration will only fully
apply to our present purpose, however, if we think of the
emigrant as subject to a psychological law which draws a
veil over his understanding when he sits down to write to
his former friends, and restores him during that time to
his former mental condition. He would then be less and
less able to write about the old topics as time went on, for
they would not only be below the level of those to the con
sideration of which his real mental activities had risen,
but would to a great extent have faded from his memory.
His letters would be a source of surprise to their recip
ients, who would say to themselves that it was certainly
so-and-so who was writing, but that he had grown very
dull and stupid compared to what he used to be before he
went abroad.

2dly. It must be borne in mind that a very well-known
law of physiology, according to which faculties are invig
orated by use and atrophied by neglect, applies on the as
tral as well as on the physical plane. The soul in Kama-
loca, which acquires the habit of fixing its attention on
the memories of the life it has quitted, will strengthen
and harden those tendencies which are at war with its
higher impulses. The more frequently it is appealed to
by the affection of friends still in the body to avail itself
of the opportunities furnished by mediumship for mani
festing its existence on the physical plane, the more vehe
ment will be the impulses which draw it back to physical
life, and the more serious the retardation of its spiritual
progress. This consideration appears to involve the most
influential motive which leads the representatives of The-
osophical teaching to discountenance and disapprove of

APPENDIX. 317

all attempts to hold communication with departed souls
by means of the spiritual seance. The more such com
munications are genuine the more detrimental they are to
the inhabitants of Kama loca concerned with them. In
the present state of our knowledge it is difficult to deter
mine with confidence the extent to which the Kama loca
entities are thus injured. And we may be tempted to be
lieve that in some cases the great satisfaction derived by
the living persons who communicate, may outweigh the
injury so inflicted on the departed soul. This satisfac
tion, however, will only be keen in proportion to the fail
ure of the still living friend to realize the circumstances
under which the communication takes place. At first, it
is true, very shortly after death, the still vivid and com
plete memories of earth-life may enable the Kama loca
entity to manifest himself as a personage very fairly like
his deceased self, but from the moment of death the
change in the direction of his evolution sets in. He will,
as manifesting on the physical plane, betray no fresh fer
mentation of thought in his mind. He will never, in that
manifestation, be any wiser, or higher in the scale of Na
ture, than he was when he died ; on the contrary, he must
become less and less intelligent, and apparently less in
structed than formerly, as time goes on. He will never
do himself justice in communication with the friends left
behind, and his failure in this respect will grow more and
more painful by degrees.

Yet another consideration operates to throw a very
doubtful light on the wisdom or propriety of gratifying a
desire for intercourse with deceased friends. We may
say, never mind the gradually fading interest of the friend
who has gone before, in the earth left behind ; while there
is anything of his or her old self left to manifest itself to
us, it will be a delight to communicate even with that.

318 APPENDIX.

And we may argue that if the beloved person is delayed
a little on his way to Heaven by talking with us, he or she
would be willing to make that sacrifice for our sake. The
point overlooked here is, that on the astral, just as on the
physical plane, it is a very easy thing to set up a bad
habit. The soul in Kama loca once slaking a thirst for
earthly intercourse at the wells of mediumship will have
a strong impulse to fall back again and again on that in
dulgence. We may be doing a great deal more than di
verting the soul's attention from its own proper business
by holding spiritualistic relations with it. We may be
doing it serious and almost permanent injury. 1 am not
affirming that this would invariably or generally be the
case, but a severe view of the ethics of the subject must
recognize the dangerous possibilities involved in the course
of action under review. On the other hand, however, it
is plain that cases may arise in which the desire for com
munication chiefly asserts itself from the other side : that
is to say, in which the departed soul is laden with some
unsatisfied desire — pointing possibly towards the fulfil
ment of some neglected duty on earth — the attention to
which, on the part of still living friends, may have an ef
fect quite the reverse of that attending the mere encour
agement of the Kama loca entity in the resumption of its
old earthly interests. In such cases the living friends
may, by falling in with its desire to communicate, be the
means, indirectly, of smoothing the path of the spiritual
progress. Here again, however, we must be on our guard
against the delusive aspect of appearances. A wish man
ifested by an inhabitant of Kama loca may riot always be
the expression of an idea then operative in his mind. It
may be the echo of an old, perhaps of a very old, desire,
then for the first time finding a channel for its outward
expression. In this way, although it would be reasonable

APPENDIX. 319

to treat as important an intelligible wish conveyed to us
from Kama loca by a person only lately deceased, it would
be prudent to regard with great suspicion such a wish ema
nating from the shade of a person who had been dead a
long time, and whose general demeanor as a shade did not
seem to convey the notion that he retained any vivid con
sciousness of his old personality.

The recognition of all these facts and possibilities of
Kama loca will, I think, afford theosophists a satisfactory
explanation of a good many experiences connected with
spiritualism which the first exposition of the Esoteric Doc
trine, as bearing on this matter, left in much obscurity.

It will be readily perceived that as the soul slowly
clears itself in Kama loca of the affinities which retard
its Devachanic development, the aspect it turns towards
the earth is more and more enfeebled, and it is inevitable
that there must always be in Kama loca an enormous
number of entities nearly ripe for a complete mergence in
Devachan, who on that very account appear to an earthly
observer in a state of advanced decrepitude. These will
have sunk, as regards the activity of their lower astral
principles, into the condition of the altogether vague and
unintelligible entities, which, following the example of
older occult writers, I have referred to as " shells " in the
text of this chapter. The designation, however, is not
altogether a happy one. It might have been better to
have followed another precedent, and to have called them
"shades," but either way their condition would be the
same. All the vivid consciousness inhering, as they left
the earth, in the principles appropriately related to the
activities of physical life, has been transferred to the
higher principles which do not manifest at se*ances. Their
memory of earth-life has almost become extinct. Their
lower principles are in such cases only reawakened by the

320 APPENDIX.

influences of the mediumistic current into which they may
be drawn, and they become then little more than astral
looking-glasses, in which the thoughts of the medium or
sitters at the stance are reflected. If we can imagine the
colors on a painted canvas sinking by degrees into the
substance of the material, and at last reemerging in their
pristine brilliancy on the other side, we shall be conceiv
ing a process which might not have destroyed the picture,
but which would leave a gallery in which it took place a
dreary scene of brown and meaningless backs, and that is
very much what the Kama loca entities become before
they ultimately shed the very material on which their first
astral consciousness operated, and pass into the wholly
purified Devachanic condition.

But this is not the whole of the story which teaches us
to regard manifestations coming from Kama loca with dis
trust. Our present comprehension of the subject enables
us to realize that when the time arrives for that second
death on the astral plane, which releases the purified Ego
from Kama loca altogether and sends it onward to the
Devachanic state — something is left behind in Kama
loca which corresponds to the dead body bequeathed to
the earth when the soul takes its first flight from physical
existence. A dead astral body is in fact left behind in
Kama loca, and there is certainly no impropriety in ap
plying the epithet " shell " to that residuum. The true
shell in that state disintegrates in Kama loca before very
long, just as the true body left to the legitimate processes
of Nature on earth would soon decay and blend its ele
ments with the general reservoirs of matter of the order
to which they belong. But until that disintegration is ac
complished, the shell which the real Ego has altogether
abandoned may even in that state be mistaken sometimes
at spiritual seances for a living entity. It remains for a

APPENDIX. 321

time an astral looking-glass, in which mediums may see
their own thoughts reflected, and take these back, fully
believing them to come from an external source. These
phenomena in the truest sense of the term are galvanized
astral corpses ; none the less so, because until they are
actually disintegrated a certain subtle connection will sub
sist between them and the true Devachanic spirit ; just
as such a subtle communication subsists in the first in
stance between the Kama loca entity and the dead body
left on earth. That last - mentioned communication is
kept up by the finally-diffused material of the original
third principle, or linga sharira, and a study of this branch
of the subject will, I believe, lead us up to a better com
prehension than we possess at present of the circum
stances under which materializations are sometimes ac
complished at spiritual seances. But without going into
that digression now, it is enough to recognize that the
analogy may help to show how, between the Devachanic
entity and the discarded shell in Kama loca a similar con
nection may continue for a while, acting, while it lasts, as
a drag on the higher spirit, but perhaps as an after-glow
of sunset on the shell. It would surely be distressing,
however, in the highest degree, to any living friend of the
person concerned, to get, through clairvoyance, or in any
other way, sight or cognition of such a shell, and to be led
into mistaking it for the true entity.

The comparatively clear view of Kama loca which we
are now enabled to take, may help us to employ terms re
lating to its phenomena with more precision than we have
hitherto been able to attain. I think if we adopt one new
expression, " astral soul," as applying to the entities in
Kama loca who have recently quitted earth-life, or who
for other reasons still retain, in the aspect they turn back
towards earth, a large share of the intellectual attributes
21

322 APPENDIX.

that distinguished them on earth, we shall then find the
other terms in use already, adequate to meet our remain
ing emergencies. Indeed, we may then get rid entirely
of the inconvenient term " elementary," liable to be con
fused with elemental, and singularly inappropriate to the
beings it describes. I would suggest that the astral soul
as it sinks (regarded from our point of view) into intel
lectual decrepitude, should be spcken of in its faded con
dition as a shade, and that the term shell should be re
served for the true shells or astral dead bodies which the
Devachanic spirit has finally quitted.

We are naturally led in studying the law of spiritual
growth in Kama loca to inquire how long a time may
probably elapse before the transfer of consciousness from
the lower to the higher principles of the astral soul may
be regarded as complete ; and as usual, when we come to
figures relating to the higher processes of Nature, the an
swer is very elastic. But I believe the esoteric teachers
of the East declare that as regards the average run of
humanity — for what may be called, in a spiritual sense,
the great middle classes of humanity — it is unusual that
a Kama loca entity will be in a position to manifest as such
for more than twenty-five to thirty years. But 011 each
side of this average the figures may run up very consid
erably. That is to say, a very ignoble and besotted hu
man creature may hang about in Kama loca for a much
longer time for want of any higher principles sufficiently
developed to take up his consciousness at all, and at the
other end of the scale the very intellectual and mentally-
active soul may remain for very long periods in Kama loca
(in the absence of spiritual affinities in corresponding
force), by reason of the great persistence of forces and
causes generated on the higher plane of effects, though
mental activity could hardly be divorced in this way frora

APPENDIX. 323

spirituality except in cases where it was exclusively asso
ciated with worldly ambition. Again, while Kama loca
periods may thus be prolonged beyond the average from
various causes, they may sink to almost infinitesimal brev
ity when the spirituality of a person dying at a ripe old
age, and at the close of a life which has legitimately ful
filled its purpose, is already far advanced.

There is one other important possibility connected with
manifestations reaching us by the usual channels of com
munication with Kama loca, which it is desirable to notice
here, although from its nature the realization of such a
possibility cannot be frequent. No recent students of
theosophy can expect to know as yet very much about the
conditions of existence .which await adepts who relinquish
the use of physical bodies on earth. The higher possi
bilities open to them appear to me quite beyond the
reach of intellectual appreciation. No man is clever
enough, by virtue of the mere cleverness seated in a liv
ing brain, to understand Nirvana ;jbut it would appear
that adepts in some cases elect to pursue a course lying
midway between re-incarnation and the passage into Nir
vana, and in the higher regions of Devachan ; that is to
say, in the arupa state of Devachan may await the slow
advance of human evolution towards the exalted condi
tion they have thus attained. Now an adept who had
thus become a Devachanic spirit of the most elevated type
would not be cut off by the conditions of his Devachanic
state — as would be the case with a natural Devachanic
spirit passing through that state on his way to re-incarna
tion — from manifesting his influence on earth. His
would certainly not be an influence which would make
itself felt by the instrumentality of any physical signs to
mixed audiences, but it is not impossible that a medium
of the highest type — who would more properly be called

324 APPENDIX.

a seer — might be thus influenced. By such an Adept
spirit, some great men in the world's history may from
time to time have been overshadowed and inspired, con
sciously or unconsciously as the case may have been.

The disintegration of shells in Kama loca will inevi
tably suggest to any one who endeavors to comprehend
the process at all, that there must be in Nature some
general reservoirs of the matter appropriate to that sphere
of existence, corresponding to the physical earth and its
surrounding elements, into which our own bodies are
resigned at death. The grand mysteries on which this
consideration impinges will claim a far more exhaustive
investigation than we have yet been enabled to under
take ; but one broad idea connected with them may use
fully be put forward without further delay. The state
of Kama loca is one which has its corresponding orders
of matter in manifestation round it. I will not here at
tempt to go into the metaphysics of the problem, which
might even lead us to discard the notion that astral mat
ter need be any less real and tangible than that which
appeals to our physical senses. It is enough for the
present to explain that the propinquity of Kama loca to
the earth, which is so readily made apparent by spirit
ualistic experience, is explained by Oriental teaching to
arise from this fact, — that Kama loca is just as much
in and of the earth as, during our lives, our astral soul is
in and of the living man. The stage of Kama loca, in
fact, the great realm of matter in the appropriate state
which constitutes Kama loca and is perceptible to the
senses of astral entities, as also to those of many clair
voyants, is the fourth principle of the earth, just as the
Kama-rupa is the fourth principle of man. For the earth
has its seven principles like the human creatures who in
habit it. Thus, the Devachanic state corresponds to the

APPENDIX. 325

fifth principle of the earth, and Nirvana to the sixth
principle.

NOTE TO CHAPTER VII.

Later information and study — the comparison, that is
to say, of the various branches of the doctrine, and the col
location of other statements with those in Chapter VII —
show the difficulty of applying figures to the Esoteric Doc
trines in a very striking light. Figures may be quite trust
worthy as representing broad averages, and yet very
misleading when applied to special cases. Devachanic
periods vary for different people within such very wide
limits that any rule laid down in the matter must be sub
ject to a bewildering cloud of exceptions. To begin with,
the average mentioned above has no doubt been computed
with reference to fully matured adults. Between the quite
young child who has no Devachanic period at all and the
adult who accomplishes an average period we have to take
note of persons dying in youth, who have accumulated
Karma, and who must therefore pass through the usual
stages of spiritual development, but for whom the brief
lives they have spent have not produced causes which take
very long to work themselves out. Such persons would
return to incarnation after a sojourn in the world of effects
of corresponding brevity. Again there are such things as
artificial incarnations accomplished by the direct interven
tion of the Mahatmas when a chela who may not yet have
acquired anything resembling the power of controlling the
matter himself, is brought back into incarnation almost
immediately after his previous physical death, without
having been suffered to float into the current of natural

326 APPENDIX.

causes at all. Of course in such cases it may be said that
the claims the person concerned has established on the
Mahatmas are themselves natural causes of a kind, the
intervention of the Mahatmas, who are quite beyond the
liability of acting capriciously in such a matter, being so
much fruit of effort in the preceding life, so much Karma.
But still either way such cases would be equally with
drawn from the operation of the general average rule.

Clearly it is impossible when the complicated facts of an
entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained
mind for the first time, to put them forward with all
their appropriate qualifications, compensations and abnor
mal developments visible from the beginning. We must
be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the
exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with
occult study, in connection with which the traditional
methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impress
ing every fresh idea on the memory, by provoking the
perplexity it at last relieves. In relation to another mat
ter dealt with in the preceding pages, an important ex
ception in Nature has thus, it seems to me now, been left
out of account. The description I have given of the prog
ress of the human tide-wave is quite coherent as it stands,
but since the publication of the original edition of this
book some criticism was directed, in India, to a compari
son between my version of the story and certain passages
in other writings, known to emanate from a Mahatma.
A discrepancy between the two statements was pointed out,
the other version assuming the possibility that a monad
actually might have travelled round the seven planets once
more often than the compeers among whom he might
ultimately find himself on this earth. My account of the
obscurations appears to render this contingency impossi
ble. The clue to the mystery appears to lie outside the

APPENDIX. 327

domain of those facts concerning which the adepts are
willing to speak freely; and the reader must clearly un
derstand that the explanation I am about to offer is the
fruit of my own speculation and comparison of different
parts of the doctrine — not authentic information received
from the author of my general teaching.

The fact appears to be that the obscurations are so far
complete as to present all the phenomena above described
in regard to each planet they affect as a whole. But ex
ceptional phenomena, for which we must be ever on the
alert, come into play even in this matter. The great
bulk of humanity is driven on from one planet to the next
by the great cyclic impulse when its time comes for such a
transition, but the planet it quits is not utterly denuded of
humanity, nor is it, in every region of its surface rendered,
by the physical and climatic changes that come on, unfit
to be the habitation of human beings. Even during ob
scuration a small colony of humanity clings to each planet,
and the monads associated with these small colonies fol
lowing different laws of evolution, and beyond the reach
of those attractions -which govern the main vortex of hu
manity in the planet occupied by the great tide- wave,
pass on from world to world along what may be called
the inner round of evolution, far ahead of the race at
large. What may be the circumstances which occasion
ally project a soul even from the midst of the great human
vortex, right out of the attraction of the planet occupied
by the tide-wave, and into the attraction of the Inner
Round — is a question that can only be a subject for us
at present of very uncertain conjecture.

It may be worth while to draw attention, in connection
with the solution I have ventured to offer as applicable
to the problem of the Inner Rounds, to the way in which
the fact of Nature I assume to exist, would harmonize

328 APPENDIX.

with the widely diffused doctrines of the Deluge. That
portion of a planet which remained habitable during an
obscuration would be equivalent to the Noah's Ark of the
biblical narrative taken in its largest symbolical meaning.
Of course the narrative of the Deluge has minor sym
bolical meanings also, but it does not appear improbable
that the Kabalists should also have associated with it the
larger significance now suggested. In due time when the
obscured planet grew ready once more to receive a full
population of humanity, the colonists of the ark would
be ready to commence the process of populating it afresh.

NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII.

The condition into which the monads failing to pass the
middle of the fifth round must fall as the tide of evo
lution sweeps on, leaving them stranded, so to speak,
upon the shores of time, is not described very fully in this
chapter. By a few words only is it indicated that the
failures of each manwantara are not absolutely annihilated
when they reach " the end of their tether," but are destined
after some enormous period of waiting to pass once more
into the current of evolution. Many inferences may be
deduced from this condition of things. The period of
waiting which the failures have thus to undergo, is, to
begin with, a duration so stupendous as to baffle the im
agination. The latter half of the fifth round, the whole of
the sixth and seventh have to be performed by the suc
cessful graduates in spirituality, and the latter rounds
are of immensely longer duration than those of the middle
period. Then follows the vast interval of Nirvanic rest,
which closes the manwantara, the immeasurable Night

APPENDIX. 329

of Brahma, the Pralaya of the whole planetary chain.
Only when the next manwantara begins do the failures
begin to wake from their awful trance — awful to the
imagination of beings in the full activity of life, though
such a trance, being necessarily all but destitute of con
sciousness, is possibly no more tedious than a dreamless
night in the memory of a profound sleeper. The fate
of the failures may be grievous first of all, rather on
account of what they miss, than on account of what they
incur. Secondly, however, it is grievous on account of
that to which it leads, for all the trouble of physical life
and almost endless incarnations must be gone through
afresh, when the failures wake up; whereas the perfected
beings, who outstripped them in evolution during that
fifth round in which they became failures, will have
grown into the god-like perfection of Dhyan Chohanhood
during their trance, and will be the presiding geniuses of
the next manwantara, not its helpless subjects.

Apart altogether, meanwhile, from what may be regard
ed as the personal interest of the entities concerned, the
existence of the failures in Nature at the beginning of
each manwantara is a fact which contributes in a very
important degree to a comprehension of the evolutionary
system. When the planetary chain is first of all evolved
out of chaos — if we may use such an expression as " first
of all" in a qualified sense, having regard to the reflec
tion that "in the beginning" is a mere fafon de parler
applied to any period in eternity — there are no failures
to deal with. Then the descent of spirit into matter,
through the elemental, mineral, and other kingdoms, goes
on in the way already described in earlier chapters of
this book. But from the second manwantara of a planet
ary chain, during the activity of the solar system, which
provides for many such manwantaras, the course of events

330 APPENDIX.

is somewhat different — easier, if I may again be allowed
to use an expression that is applicable rather in a con
versational than a severely scientific sense. At any rate
it is quicker, for human entities are already in existence,
ready to enter into incarnation as the world, also already
in existence, can be got ready for them. The truth thus
appears to be, that after the first manwantara of a series —
enormously longer in duration than its successors — no
entities, then first evolved from quite the lower kingdoms,
do more than attain the threshold of humanity. The late
failures pass first into incarnation, and then eventually
the surviving animal entities already differentiated. But,
compared with the passages in the Esoteric Doctrine
which affect the current evolution of our own race, these
considerations, relating to the very early periods of world-
evolution, have little more than an intellectual interest,
and cannot as yet by any contributions of mine be very
greatly amplified.

«NDJNQ SE^T. FE327'

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

BP Sinnett, Alfred Percy

565 Esoteric Buddhism

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1893