6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A. P. SINNETT PRESIDENT OF THE SIMLA ECLECTIC THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AUTHOR OF “THE OCCULT WORLD" NOTE TO SIXTH EDITION. INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. PREFACE CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. ESOTERIC TEACHERS. —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 III THE PLANETARY CHAIN. —Esoteric Views of Evolution. http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 1/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A —The Chain of Globes. —Progress of Man round them. — The Spiral Advance. — Original Evolution of the Globes. — The Lower Kingdoms . . . .75 CHAPTER IV. THE WORLD PERIODS. —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. — Division of the Principles at Death. — Progress of the Higher Duad. — Existence in Devachan. — Subjective Progress. — Avitchi. — Earthly Connection with Devachan. — Devachanic Periods . . . 121 CHAPTER VI. KAMA LOCA. —The Astral Shell. —Its Habitat. — Its Nature. — Surviving Impulses. — Elementals. — Mediums and Shells. — Accidents and Suicides. http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 2/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A — Lost Personalities . . . . 150 CHAPTER VII THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. —Progress of the Main Wave. — Obscurations. — Twilight and Dawn of Evolution. — Our Neighboring 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 Exceptional 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. http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 3/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A — Sankaracharya. —Vedantin Doctrines.—Tsong-ka-pa. — Occult Reforms in Tibet . . . . . .209 CHAPTER X. NIRVANA. —Its Remoteness. — Preceding Gradations. — Partial Nirvana. — The Threshold of Nirvana. —Nirvana. — 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 XI. 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 REVIEWED. —Correspondences of the Esoteric Doctrine with Visible 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 Consciousness. http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 4/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A — Transmigration. — The Soul and the Spirit. — Personality and Individuality. — Karma . . . . . . . .265 APPENDIX NOTE TO CHAPTER I. NOTE TO CHAPTER II. NOTE TO CHAPTER III. NOTE TO CHAPTERS V., VI. NOTE TO CHAPTER VII. NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII. NOTE TO SIXTH EDITION. The fifth English edition of Esoteric Buddhism consists of the text of the fourth American 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 corresponds 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 recommend it to public notice afresh in the latter part of 1884, after three English editions have passed through the press, I find myself in possession of much additional information bearing on many of the problems dealt with. But I am glad to be able to say that such later teaching as I have yet received only reveals incompleteness in my original conceptions of the esoteric doctrine,—no material error so far. Indeed, I am happy enough to have received, from the great adept himself from whom I obtained my instruction in the first instance, the assurance 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 developed 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 http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 5/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A 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 philosophy 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 unnecessarily from accepted Sanskrit nomenclature; 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 doctrines taught in Mr. Sinnett’s book, misnamed ‘Esoteric Buddhism,’ while there is not a single hamlet or village in the whole of India in which people are not more or less acquainted with the sublime tenets of the Vedanta philosophy. . . . The effects of Karma in the next INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 7 birth, the enjoyment of its fruits, good or evil, in a subjective or spiritual state of existence prior to the reincarnation 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 periods, . . . 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 ‘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 understanding as to the essential principles of that science, and if we find the principles defined 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 attention. 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” replies 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 brothers. 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 doctrine of the Buddhas, the Wise, i. e. the Wisdom Religion.” For my own part I need only add that I fully accept and adopt that explanation of the matter. It would, indeed, be a misconception of the design which this book is intended to subserve, to suppose it concerned with the recommendation, to a dilettante modern http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 6/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A 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 philosophers, and thus fall most readily into an Oriental mould. But the value of these teachings will perhaps be most fully realized when we clearly perceive that they are scientific in their character, rather than polemical. Spiritual 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 constitution 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 physical 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 brightened all the better for the process. Especially, as such processes continue, will the internal dissensions 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 certainty with which we comprehend some primary 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 sentiment. Externals of religious thought would still differ in different climates and among different races,—as dress and dietaries differ, but such differences would not give rise to intellectual 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 superficially 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 http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 7/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A preference to the more general 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 regarded as trenching at all on the domain of religion. Would the domain of religion be invaded by a discovery, for example, that should go one step behind the action of the nerves, and disclose a finer set of activities manipulating 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 positive fact of Nature, clearly shown to be such, as hostile to religion. Being a fact, it is inevitable that it should fit in with all other facts, and with religious truth among the number. So with the great mass of information in reference 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 respects with preconceived views, but whether it really does introduce us to a series’ of natural facts connected with the growth and development of Man’s higher faculties. If it does this, we may wisely examine the facts first in the scientific spirit, and leave them to exercise whatever effect on collateral belief 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, regarded as an all embracing account of creation; but, properly understood, it paves the way for a comprehension of the higher concurrent process, 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 instinctive craving of every self-conscious entity for perpetuity of individual life. The disjointed series of improving form 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 cased 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 requirements of justice and of the instinctive demand for continuity of individual life. http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 8/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A 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 intellectual life with which the present state of humanity renders us familiar. But through successive 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 experience which is summed up in its higher development. In the intervals between its physical incarnations, it prolongs and works out, and finally exhausts or transmutes into so much abstract 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 intervening 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 elucidation 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 engaged attention and speculation so widely of recent years in most civilized countries. It was time, in fact, that the esoteric doctrine 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 eases—the manifestation of some extra-physical laws and forces of Nature in others—have been latterly accumulating 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 necessary that they should do so now, in order to reach an intellectual standpoint from which the whole range of possibilities in regard to communications 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 Nature, while we in the West have been pushing forward our physical civilization to its present great height. Different races in the world advance in this way along different lines of progress; or, http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 9/136 6/7/2014 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM By A rather,— to state the idea more scientifically in the light of the occult doctrine,— all races have their cyclic progress to accomplish, at one period of which they are concerned with physical and at another with spiritual culture. We of the white race in Europe and America—embodying within the last few centuries one phase of the progress of our subsection of humanity—have been concerned almost 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 investigation of the facts of Nature in the spiritual region. We have keenly investigated these facts on the physical plane, for that was the proper function of our age; but all earnestness of effort on the part of Oriental races, in the meanwhile, has been turned in another direction. There, physical civilization has been stagnant, INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 17. material progress quite unimportant, but spiritual 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 discoveries in spiritual science as we in the West have been with the literature and research of physics. That kind of activity is itself a manifestation of material civilization. But the Asiatic races have fermented with capacities for great spiritual development, and the consequence has been that many Eastern people have devoted their lives to spiritual study and research, always, of course, pursuing the methods of research and the modes of life appropriate to a cycle of spiritual progress,—methods 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 material civilization, nor the East slackening it 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 acquiring real knowledge of spiritual science, and are more generally impressed with the necessity of such acquisitions. The East on the other hand has partially relaxed its hitherto inviolable 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 different 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 conservative devotees of occult science in the East; a book which sets forth in plain language, which all who run may read, the hitherto secret interpretations 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 http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/esoteric_buddhism.htm 10/136