H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3

SECTION XLV

 

An Unpublished Discourse of Buddha

 

(Page 393) (IT is found in the second Book of Commentaries and is addressed to the Arhats.)

 

Said the All-Merciful: Blessed are ye, O Bhikshus, happy are ye who have understood the mystery of Being and Non-Being explained in Bas-pa [Dharma, Doctrine], and have given preference to the latter, for ye are verily my Arhats. . . . The elephant, who sees his form mirrored in the lake, looks at it, and then goes away, taking it for the real body of another elephant, is wiser than the man who beholds his face in the stream, and looking at it, says, “Here I am . . . I am I” : for the “I,” his Self, is not in the world of the twelve Nidânas and mutability, but in that of Non-Being, the only world beyond the snares of Mâyâ. . . .. That alone, which has neither cause nor author, which is self-existing, eternal, far beyond the reach of mutability, is the true “I” [Ego], the Self of the Universe. The Universe of Nam-Kha says: “I am the world of Sien-Chan”; [The Universe of Brahmâ (Sien-Chan; Nam-Kha) is Universal illusion, or our phenomenal world.] the four illusions laugh and reply, “Verily so.” But the truly wise man knows that neither man, nor the Universe that he passes through like a flitting shadow , is any more a real Universe than the dewdrop that reflects a spark of the morning sun is that sun. . . . There are three things, Bhikshus, that are everlastingly the same, upon which no vicissitude, no modification can ever act: these are the Law, Nirvâna, and Space, [ Âkasha. It is next to impossible to render the mystic word “Tho-og” by any other term than”Space,” and yet, unless coined on purpose, no new appellation can render it so well to the mind of the Occultist. The term “Aditi” is also translated “Space,” and there is a world of meaning in it.] and those three are One, since the first two are within the last, and that last one a Mâyâ, so long as man keeps within the whirlpool of sensuous existences. One need not have his mortal body die to avoid the (Page 394) clutches of concupiscence and other passions. The Arhat who observes the seven hidden precepts of Bas-pa may become Dang-ma and Lha. [Dang-ma, a purified soul, and Lha, a freed spirit within a living body: an Adept or Arhat. In the popular opinion in Tibet, a Lha is a disembodied spirit, something similar to the Burmese Nat—only higher.] He may hear the “holy voice” of . . . [Kwan-yin], [Kwan-yin is a synonym, for in the original another term is used, but the meaning is identical. It is the divine voice of Self, or the “Spirit-voice” in man, and the same as Vâchishvara (the “Voice-deity”) of the Brâhmans. In China, the Buddhist ritualists have degraded its meaning by anthropomorphizing it into a Goddess of the same name, with one thousand hands and eyes, and they call it Kwan-shai-yin-Bodhisat. It is the Buddhist “daimon”-voice of Socrates.] and find himself within the quiet precincts of his Sangharama [Sanharama is the sanctum sanctorum of an ascetic, a cave or any place he chooses for his meditation.] transferred into Amitâbha Buddha. [ Amitâbha Buddha is in this connection the “boundless light” by which things of the subjective world are perceived.] Becoming one with Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi, [ Esoterically, “the unsurpassingly merciful and enlightened heart,” said of the “Perfect Ones,” the Jîvan-muktas, collectively.] he may pass through all the six worlds of Being (Rûpa-loka) and get into the first three worlds of Arûpa. [These six worlds—seven with us—are the worlds of Nats or Spirits, with the Burmese Buddhists, and the seven higher worlds of the Vedântins.] . . . He who listens to my secret law, preached to my select Arhats, will arrive with its help at the knowledge of Self, and thence at perfection.

 

It is due to entirely erroneous conceptions of Eastern thought and to ignorance of the existence of an Esoteric key to the outward Buddhist phrases that Burnouf and other great scholars have inferred from such propositions—held also by the Vedântins—as “my body is not body” and “myself is no self of mine,” that Eastern psychology was based upon non-permanency. Cousin, for instance, lecturing upon the subject, brings the two following propositions to prove, on Burnouf’s authority, that, unlike Brâhmanism, Buddhism rejects the perpetuity of the thinking principle. These are: 

1. Thought or Spirit [Two things entirely distinct from each other. The “faculty is not distinguished from the subject” only on this material plane, while thought generated by our physical brain, one that has never impressed itself at the same time on the spiritual counterpart, whether through the atrophy of the latter or the intrinsic weakness of that thought, can never survive our body: this much is sure.]—for the faculty is not distinguished from the subject—appears only with sensation and does not survive it.

 

2. The Spirit cannot itself lay hold of itself, and in directing attention to itself it draws from it only the conviction of its powerlessness to see itself otherwise than as successive and transitory. 

This all refers to Spirit embodied, not to the freed Spiritual Self on whom Mâya has no more hold.

 

A Mistaken View -  (Page 395) Spirit is no body; therefore have the Orientalists made of it “nobody” and nothing. Hence they proclaim Buddhists to be Nihilists, and Vedântins to be the followers of a creed in which the “Impersonal [God] turns out on examination to be a myth;” their goal is described as 

The complete extinction of all spiritual, mental, and bodily powers by absorption into the Impersonal. [Vedânta Sâra, translated by Major Jacob. p. 123.] 

 

SECTION XLVI

 

Nirvana-Moksha

 

(Page 396) THE few sentences given in the text from one of Gautama Buddha’s secret teachings show how uncalled for is the epithet of “Materialist” when applied to One Whom two-thirds of those who are looked upon as great Adepts and Occultists in Asia recognize as their Master, whether under the name of Buddha or that of Shankarâchârya. The reader will remember the just-quoted words are what Buddha Sanggyas (or Pho) is alleged by the Tibetan Occultists to have taught: there are three eternal things in the Universe—the Law, Nirvâna, and Space. The Buddhists of the Southern Church claim, on the other hand, that Buddha held only two things as eternal—Åkâsha and Nirvâna. But Âkâsha being the same as Aditi, [Aditi is, according to the Rig Veda, “the Father and Mother of all the Gods:” and Ãkâsha is held by Southern Buddhism as the Root of all, whence everything in the Universe came out, in obedience to a law of motion inherent in it : and this is the Tibetan “Space” (Tho-og).] and both being translated “Space,” there is no discrepancy so far, since Nirvâna as well as Moksha, is a state. Then in both cases the great Kapilavastu Sage unifies the two, as well as the three, into one eternal Element, and ends by saying that even “that One is a Mâyâ” to one who is not a Damg-ma, a perfectly purified Soul.

 

The whole question hangs upon materialistic misconceptions and ignorance of Occult Metaphysics. To the man of Science who regards Space as simply a mental representation, a conception of something existing pro formâ, and having no real being outside our mind, Space per se is verily an illusion. He may fill the boundless interstellar space with an “imaginary” ether, nevertheless Space for him is an abstraction. Most of the Metaphysicians of Europe are so wide of the mark, from the purely Occult standpoint, of a correct comprehension of “Space,” as are the Materialists, though the erroneous conceptions of both of course differ widely.

 

The Ãkâsha - (Page 397) If, bearing in mind the philosophical views of the Ancients upon this question, we compare them with what is now termed exact physical Science, it will be found that the two disagree only in inferences and names, and that their postulates are the same when reduced to their most simple expression. From the beginning of the human Æons, from the very dawn of Occult Wisdom, the regions that the men of Science fill with ether have been explored by the Seers of every age. That which the world regards simply as cosmic Space, an abstract representation, the Hindu Rishi, the Chaldæan Magus, the Egyptian Hierophant held, each and all, as the one eternal Root of all, the playground of all the Forces in Nature. It is the fountain-head of all terrestrial life, and the abode of those (to us) invisible swarms of existences—of real beings, as of the shadows only thereof, conscious and unconscious, intelligent and senseless—that surround us on all sides, that interpenetrate the atoms of our Kosmos, and see us not, as we do not either see or sense them through our physical organisms. For the Occultist “Space” and “Universe” are synonyms. In Space there is not Matter, Force, nor Spirit, but all that and much more. It is the One Element, and that one the Anima Mundi—Space, Ãkâsha, Astral Light—the Root of Life which, in its eternal, ceaseless motion, like the out-and in-breathing of one boundless ocean, evolves but to reabsorb all that lives and feels and thinks and has its being in it. As said of the Universe in Isis Unveiled, it is. 

The combination of a thousand elements and yet the expression of a single Spirit—a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason. 

Such were the views upon the subject of all the great ancient Philosophers, from Manu down to Pythagoras, from Plato to Paul. 

When the dissolution [Pralaya] had arrived as its term the great Being [Para-Ãtmâ, or Para-Purusha], the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are, and will be, . . . resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures. [Mânava-Dharma-Shâstra. i. 6, 7. ]

 

The mystic Decad [of Pythagoras] (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) is a way of expressing this idea. The One is God; [The “God” of Pythagoras, the disciple of the Ãryan Sages, is no personal God. Let it be remembered that he taught as a cardinal tenet that there exists a permanent Principle of Unity beneath all forms, changes, and other phenomena of the Universe.] the Two, Matter; the Three, combining Monad and Duad and partaking of the nature of both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection, expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all, involves the entire cosmos. [Isis Unveiled. i. xvi.] 

(Page 398) Plato's “God” is the “Universal Ideation,” and Paul saying “Out of him, and through him, and in him, all things are,” had surely a Principle—never a Jehovah—in his profound mind. The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the key to every great Philosophy. It is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the One evolving the many and pervading the All. It is the archaic doctrine of Emanation in a few words.

 

Speusippus and Xenocrates held, like their Master, Plato, that; 

The Amima Mundi (or world-soul”) was not the Deity, but a manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an animate nature. The original One did not exist, as we understand the term. Not till he (it) had united with the many emanated existences (the Monad and Duad), was a being produced. The τιμιον(“honoured”), the something manifested, dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity—the World-Soul. In this doctrine we find the spirit of Esoteric Buddhism. [ Isis Unveiled, i, xviii.] 

And it is that of Esoteric Brâhminism and of the Vedântin Adwaitis. The two modern philosophers, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann teach the same ideas. The Occultists say that: 

The psychic and ectenic forces, the “ideo-motor” and “electro-biological powers,” “latent thought,” and even “unconscious cerebration” theories can be condensed in two words: the Kabalistic Astral Light.[Isis Unveiled, i, 58.] 

Schopenhauer only synthesized all this by calling it Will, and contradicted the men of Science in their materialistic views, as von Hartmann did later on. The author of the Philosophy of the Unconscious calls their views “an instinctual prejudice.” 

Furthermore, he demonstrates that no experimenter can have anything to do with matter properly so termed, but only with the forces into which he divides it. The visible effects of matter are but the effects of force. He concludes thereby that that which is now called matter is nothing but the aggregation of atomic forces, to express which the word “matter” is used; outside of that, for science, matter is but a word void of sense. [Isis Unveiled, i. 59.] 

As much, it is to be feared, as those other terms with which we are now concerned, “Space,” “Nirvâna,” and so on. 

The bold theories and opinions expressed in Schopenhauer’s works differ widely from those of the majority of our orthodox scientists. [While they are to a great extent identical with those of Esoteric Buddhism, the Secret Doctrine of the East.] “In reality,” remarks this daring speculator, “there is neither Matter nor Spirit.
 

Matter is Ever Giving - (Page 399) The tendency to gravitation in a stone is as unexplainable as thought in the human brain . . . If matter can—no one knows why—fall to the ground, then it can also—no one knows why—think. . . . As soon, even in mechanics, as we trespass beyond the purely mathematical, as soon as we reach the inscrutable adhesion, gravitation, and so on, we are faced by phenomena which are to our senses as mysterious as the will and thought in man : we find ourselves facing the incomprehensible, for such is every force in nature. Where is, then, that matter which you all pretend to know so well, and from which—being so familiar with it—you draw all your conclusions and explanations, and attribute to it all things? . . . That which can be fully realized by our reason and senses is but the superficial: they can never reach the true inner substance of things. Such was the opinion of Kant. If you consider that there is in a human head some sort of a spirit, then you are obliged to concede the same to a stone. If your dead and utterly-passive matter can manifest a tendency toward gravitation or, like electricity, attract and repel and send out sparks, then as well as the brain it can also think. In short, every particle of the so-called spirit we can replace with an equivalent of matter, and every particle of matter replace with spirit . . . Thus, it is not the Christian division of all things into matter and spirit that can ever be found philosophically exact; but only if we divide them into will and manifestation, which form of division has naught to do with the former, for it spiritualizes everything; all that which is in the first instance real and objective—body and matter—it transforms into a representation, and every manifestation into will.” [Parerga, II., iii, 112: quoted in Isis Unveiled. i. 58.] 

The matter of science may be for all objective purposes a “dead and utterly passive matter;” to the Occultist not an atom of it can be dead—“Life is ever present in it.” We send the reader who would know more about it to our article, “Transmigration of Life-Atoms.” [ Five Years of Theosophy. p.338. et seq.] What we are now concerned with is the doctrine of Nirvâna.

 

A “system of atheism” it may be justly called, since it recognizes neither God nor Gods—least of all a Creator, as it entirely rejects creation. The Fecit ex nihilo is as incomprehensible to the Occult metaphysical Scientist as it is to the scientific Materialist. It is at this point that all agreement stops between the two. But if such be the sin of the Buddhist and Brâhman Occultist, then Pantheists and Atheists, and also theistical Jews—the Kabalists—must also plead “guilty” to it; yet no one would ever think of calling the Hebrews of the Kabalah “Atheists.” Except the Talmudistic and Christian exoteric systems there never was a religious Philosophy, whether in the ancient or modern world, but rejected a priori the ex nihilo hypothesis, simply because Matter was always co-eternalized with Spirit.

 

(Page 400) Nirvâna, as well as the Moksha of the Vedântins, is regarded by most of the Orientalists as a synonym of annihilation; yet no more glaring injustice could be done, and this capital error must be pointed out and disproved. On this most important tenet of the Brâhmo-Buddhistic system—the Alpha and Omega of “Being” or “Non-Being”—rests the whole edifice of Occult Metaphysics. Now the rectification of the great error concerning Nirvâna may be very easily accomplished with relation to the philosophically inclined, to those who, 

In the glass of things temporal see the image of things spiritual. 

On the other hand, to that reader who could never soar beyond the details of tangible material form, our explanation will appear meaningless. He may comprehend and even accept the logical inferences from the reasons given—the true spirit will ever escape his intuitions. The word “nihil” having been misconceived from the first, it is continually used as a sledge-hammer in the matter of Esoteric Philosophy. Nevertheless it is the duty of the Occultist to try and explain it.

 

Nirvâna and Moksha, then, as said before, have their being in non-being, if such a paradox be permitted to illustrate the meaning the better. Nirvâna, as some illustrious Orientalists have attempted to prove does mean the “blowing-out” [Prof. Max Mûller, in a letter to The Times (April. 1857), maintained most vehemently that Nirvâna meant annihilation in the fullest sense of the word. (Chips from a German Workshop, i. 287) But in 1869, in a lecture before the General Meeting of the Association of German Philologists at Kiel. “he distinctly declares his belief that the Nihilism attributed to Buddha’s teaching forms no part of his doctrine, and that it is wholly wrong to suppose that Nirvâna means annihiliation.” (Trubner’s Amer-and Oriental Lit. Rec., Oct. 16^th, 1869.) ] of all sentient existence. It is like the flame of a candle burnt out to its last atom, and then suddenly extinguished. Quite so. Nevertheless, as the old Arhat Nâgasena affirmed before the king who taunted him: “Nirvâna is “—and Nirvâna is eternal. But the Orientalists deny this, and say it is not so. In their opinion Nirvâna is not a re-absorption in the Universal Force, not eternal bliss and rest, but it means literally “the blowing-out, the extinction, complete annihilation, and not absorption.” The Lankâvatâra quoted in support of their arguments by some Sanskritists, and which gives the different interpretations of Nirvâna by the Tîrthika Brâhmans, is no authority to one who goes to primeval sources for information, namely, to the Buddha who taught the doctrine. As well quote the Chârvâka Materialists in their support.

 

Blind Faith Not Expected - (Page 401) If we bring as an argument the sacred Jaina books, wherein the dying Gautama Buddha is thus addressed: “Arise into Nirvi [Nirvâna] from this decrepit body into which thou hast been sent. . . . Ascend into thy former abode, O blessed Avatâra;” and if we add that this seems to us the very opposite of nihilism, we may be told that so far it may only prove a contradiction, one more discrepancy in the Buddhist faith. If again we remind the reader that since Gautama is believed to appear occasionally, re-descending from his “former abode” for the good of humanity and His faithful congregation, thus making it incontestable that Buddhism does not teach final annihilation, we shall be referred to authorities to whom such teaching is ascribed. And let us say at once: Men are no authority for us in questions of conscience, nor ought they to be for anyone else. If anyone holds to Buddha’s Philosophy, let him do and say as Buddha did and said; if a man calls himself a Christian, let him follow the commandments of Christ—not the interpretations of His many dissenting priests and sects.

 

In A Buddhist Catechism the question is asked: 

Are there any dogmas in Buddhism which we are required to accept on faith?

 

A. No. We are earnestly enjoined to accept nothing whatsoever on faith, whether it be written in books, handed down from our ancestors, or taught by sages. Our Lord Buddha has said that we must not believe in a thing said merely because it is said; nor traditions because they have been handed down from antiquity; nor rumours, as such; nor writings by sages, because sages wrote them; nor fancies that we may suspect to have been inspired in us by a Deva (that is, in presumed spiritual inspiration); nor from inferences drawn from some haphazard assumption we may have made; nor because of what seems an analogical necessity; nor on the mere authority of our teachers of masters. But we are to believe when the writing, doctrine, or saying is corroborated by our own reason and consciousness. “For this,” says he in concluding, “ I taught you not to believe merely because you have heard, but when you believed of your consciousness, then to act accordingly and abundantly.” [See the Kalama Sutta of the Anguttaranikayo, as quoted in A Buddhist Catechism by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society. pp. 55.56.] 

That Nirvâna, or rather, that state in which we are in Nirvâna, is quite the reverse of annihilation is suggested to us by our “reason and consciousness,’ and that is sufficient for us personally. At the same time, this fact being inadequate and very ill-adapted for the general reader, something more efficient may be added.

 

(Page 402) Without resorting to sources unsympathetic to Occultism, the Kabalah furnishes us with the most luminous and clear proofs that the term “nihil” in the minds of the Ancient Philosophers had a meaning quite different from that it has now received at the hands of Materialists. It means certainly “nothing”—or “no-thing.” F. Kircher, in his work on the Kabalah and the Egyptian Mysteries [Œdipus Ægypt., II. I, 291.] explains the term admirably. He tells his readers that in the Zohar the first of the Sephiroth [Sephir, or Aditi (mystic Space). The Sephiroth, be it understood, are identical with the Hindu Prajâpatis, the Dhyân Chohans of Esoteric Buddhism, the Zoroastrian Amshaspends, and finally with the Elohim—the “Seven Angels of the Presence” of the Roman Catholic Church.] has a name the significance of which is “ the Infinite,” but which was translated indifferently by the Kabalists as “Ens” and “Non-Ens” (“Being and “Non-Being”); a Being inasmuch as it is the root and source of all other beings; Non-Being because Ain Soph—the Boundless and the Causeless, the Unconscious and the Passive Principle—resembles nought else in the Universe.

 

The author adds: 

This is the reason why St. Denys did not hesitate to call it Nihil. 

“Nihil” therefore stands—even with some Christian theologians and thinkers, especially with the earlier ones who lived but a few removes from the profound Philosophy of the initiated Pagans—as a synonym for the impersonal, divine Principle, the Infinite All, which is no Being or thing—the En or Ain Soph the Parabrahman of the Vedânta. Now St. Denys was a pupil of St. Paul—an Initiate—and this fact makes everything clear.

 

The “Nihil” is in esse the Absolute Deity itself, the hidden Power or Omnipresence degraded by Monotheism into an anthropomorphic Being, with all the passions of a mortal on a grand scale. Union with That is not annihilation in the sense understood in Europe. [According to the Eastern idea, the All comes out from the One and returns to it again. Absolute annihilation is simply unthinkable. Nor can eternal Matter be annihilated. Form may be annihilated: co-relations may change. That is all. There can be no such thing as annihilation—in the European sense—in the Universe.] In the East annihilation in Nirvâna refers but to matter: that of the visible as well as the invisible body for the astral body, the personal double, is still matter, however sublimated. Buddha taught that the primitive Substance is eternal and unchangeable. Its vehicle is the pure, liminous ether, the boundless, infinite Space. 

Not a void resulting from the absence of forms, but on the contrary, the foundations of all forms . . . .