The Writings of Alfred Percy Sinnett
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Esoteric Buddhism
Chapter 9
Buddha
THE historical Buddha, as
known to the custodians 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 super-natural 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 philosopher. The mistake which ordinary European writers make in
dealing with a problem of this sort, lies in their inclinations 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 remarkable
life. This, it is assumed, however 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 before 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 miraculous manner. Hence the popular notion about Buddha, that
his incarnation in this world was due to an immaculate conception. Occult
science knows nothing of any process for the production 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 incarnations may select a 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 antecedent spiritual Ego emerging from Devachan is
concerned. But in those abnormal cases where the one life has already forced
itself 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 adeptship, 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 to
its application to such extraordinary events as the birth of a Buddha. It is a
phenomenon frequently reproduced by the higher adepts to this day; and while a
great deal recounted in popular Oriental mythology is either purely fictitious
or entirely symbolical, the re-incarnations of the Dalai and Teshu Lamas of 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-incarnate, and he very
rarely fails. We say very rarely, because there are some accidents of physical
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, meanwhile, in the body, the
adept is relatively helpless. 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
simplified, 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
embarrassed, and, as ordinary imagination might suggest, 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 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 allusion to anything
like a scientific fact, than the statement that Buddha entered the side of his
mother as a young white elephant. But the while elephant is
simply the symbol of adeptship - 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 habitation 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 physical
symbolism, are merely the various powers of adeptship.
The selection of the body
known as Siddhartha, and afterwards as Gautama, son
of Suddhodana, of Kapila-Vastu,
as the human tenement of the enlightened human spirit, who had submitted to
incarnation for the sake of teaching mankind, was not one of those rare
failures spoken of above; on the contrary, it was a signally successful choice
in all respects, and 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 students of exoteric
Buddhism, as elucidating some of the puzzling complications of the more
abstruse “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 subtleties and absurdities crowded round the simple morality which
sums up Buddhism as presented to the populace. The fifth, or Maitreya Buddha, will come after the final disappearance 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 middle 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 progress 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 infusion
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 be considered
the Buddha of the first race, appears. The Planetary Spirit, or Dhyân Chohan, 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 - Buddha in all his or their developments,
incarnates among the young, innocent, teachable fore-runners of the new
humanity, and impresses the first broad principles of right and wrong, and the
first truths of the esoteric doctrine on a sufficient number of receptive
minds, to ensure the continued reverberation of the ideas so implanted 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 Gautama Buddha stands fourth, is thus
the second incarnation of Avaloketiswara - the mystic
name of the hosts of the Dhyân Chohans or Planetary
Spirits belonging to our planetary chain - and though Gautama
is thus the fourth incarnation of enlightenment by exoteric reckoning, he is
really the fifth of the true series, and thus properly belonging to our fifth
race.
Avaloketiswara,
as just stated, is the mystic name of the hosts of the Dhyân
Chohans; the proper meaning of the word is manifested wisdom, 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 Buddhas, or Dhyân 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 manner 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 chapters, and need not, in any way, be attributed to mystic imaginings.
The Dhyani Buddhas, or Dhyân Chohans, are the
perfected humanity of previous manwantaric epochs,
and their collective intelligence is described by the name “Addi Buddha,” which Mr Rhys Davids
is mistaken in treating as a comparatively recent invention of the Northern
Buddhists. Addi-Buddha means primordial wisdom, and
is mentioned in the oldest Sanscrit books. For
example, in the philosophical dissertation on the “Mandukya
Upanishad,” by Gowdapatha, a Sanscrit
author contemporary with Buddha himself, the expression is freely used and
expounded in exact accordance with the present statement. A friend of mine in
India, a Brahmin pundit of first-rate attainments as a Sanscrit
scholar, has shown me a copy of this book, which has never yet, that he knows
of, been translated into English, and has pointed out a sentence bearing on the
present question, giving me the following translation: “Prakriti
itself, in fact, is Addi-Buddha, and all the Dharmas have been existing from eternity.” Gowdapatha is a philosophical writer respected by all Hindoo 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 scattered throughout the
world, they have sometimes 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 highest 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 condition 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-incarnated 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 consideration 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 perpetuated to this day under
curious circumstances, but the modern bearers of it are not in the direct line
of Buddhist spiritual incarnations.
Sankaracharya
appeared in India - no attention being paid to his birth, which appears to have
taken place on the
The position was as follows:
- Up to the time of Buddha, the Brahmins of
Later experience is held on
all hands now to have gone far towards vindicating the Brahmin apprehension,
and the next incarnation of Buddha, after that in the person of Sankaracharya, was a practical admission of this; but
meanwhile, in the person of Sankaracharya, Buddha was
engaged in smoothing over, beforehand, the sectarian strife in India which he
saw impending. The active opposition of the Brahmins 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 political 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 obliterating 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 of the Buddhist
reformation in its exoteric aspects. Chandragupta, Asoka’s
grandfather, was an upstart, and the family were Sudras.
This was enough to render his Buddhist policy unattractive 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 primitive Buddhism was entirely worsted, and the Brahmin ascendency
completely re-established in the time of Vikramaditya,
about 80 B.C. But Sankaracharya had traveled all over
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 Maharajah
sect, of very unfair fame, and may be divided into three great divisions - the Adwaitees, 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 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 the 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 doctrine, the Adwaitees
infer the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, regarding the future destiny of man, as
altogether depending on the causes he himself engenders.
The Vishishta
Adwaitees modify these views by the interpolation of
Vishnu as a conscious deity, the primary emanation of Parabrahm,
Vishu being regarded as a personal god, capable of
intervening in the course of human destiny. 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 believe only in salvation by works, the Vishishta
Adwaitee in salvation by grace. The Dwaitee differs but little from the Vishishta
Adwaitee, merely affirming, by the designation he
assumes, 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 exoteric variations
on the fundamental idea, introduced by different teachers with varying
impressions as to the capacity of the populace for assimilating transcendental
ideas. All leaders of Vedantin thought look up to Sankaracharva 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
Sankaracharya
founded four principal mathams, 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 designation Sankaracharya, in addition to some individual name. From
these four centres others have been established, and mathams
now exist all over
I have said that Buddha, by
his third incarnation, 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 fourteenth century. In this personality he was exclusively concerned
with the affairs of the adept fraternity, by that time collecting chiefly in
From time immemorial there
had been a certain secret region in Tibet, which to this day is quite unknown
to and unapproachable by any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to the
ordinary people of the country as to any others, in which adepts have always
congregated. 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, engendering the magnetism they find so
trying, had, however, by the date with which we are now dealing - the
fourteenth century - already 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 putting it under the
control of a rigid system of rule and law did Tsong-ka-pa
address himself.
Without re-establishing the
system on the previous unreasonable basis of caste exclusiveness, he elaborated
a code of rules for the guidance 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 principles.
An article in the Theosophist
for March, 1882, on “Re-incarnations in Tibet,” for the complete 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 Buddhism and Tibet, which
cannot be examined too closely by any one who desires an exhaustive
comprehension of Buddhism in its real signification.
“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 Dhyanis 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 Boddhisatvas, each of the former having created (read,
overshadowed with his spiritual wisdom) five of the last named . . . . . It was
because, among many other reforms, Tsong-kha-pa
forbade necromancy (which is practiced to this day with the most disgusting
rites by the Bhöns - the aborigines of Tibet, with
whom the Red Caps or Shammars had always fraternized)
that the latter resisted his authority. This act was followed by a split
between the two sects. Separating entirely from the Gyalukpas,
the Dugpas (Red Caps), from the first in a great
minority, settled in various parts of
“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 incarnation of Amitabha
or Buddha.”
Several writers on Buddhism
have entertained a theory, which Mr Clements Markham 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 with a mass of dogma and metaphysical speculation.
And Professor Max Müller 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
“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 lamaism, when compared with the
real esoteric, or Arahat, Buddhism of Tibet, offers a
contrast as great at 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
These explanations
constitute but a sketch of the whole position. I do not possess the arguments nor the literary leisure which would be required for its
amplification into a finished picture of the relations which really subsist
between the inner principles of Hinduism and those of Buddhism. And I am quite
alive to the possibility that many learned and painstaking students 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 explanations
directly gathered from authorities to whom the subject is no less familiar in
its scholarly 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 recorded of his
teaching, and what popular legends 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 demigod of tradition. And it is only
when we have comprehended the link between Buddhism and Brahaminism
that the greatness of the esoteric doctrine rises into
its true proportions.
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