Theos-Talk Archives (February 1994 Message tl00088)

Arvind--
South Boston is a small town in SOUTHERN Virginia.  I wouldn't
live amid the Yankees for anything, although my brother and
sister both do-- we're all Southern born.  South Boston is ALSO
the name of a neighborhood in Boston, MA.

Satchidananda does have a flowing beard and teaches yoga, so
that's probably the person you saw.  His disciples include the
singer Carole King and the artist Peter Max.

Jerry--
One interesting quote from HPB on her lack of understanding of
a certain area of religious tradition is in the article "The
Doctrine of Avataras" in the former 3rd vol. of the SD and now
in the CWS.  This relates to my discoveries of her indirect and
interrupted access to the library of the Panchen lama in
Shigatse:
The little that can be said here upon the subject may or may
not help to guide the psychic student in the right direction.
It being left to the option and responsibility of the writer to
tell the facts as she personally understood them, the blame for
possible misconceptions created must fall only upon her.  She
has been taught the doctrine, but it was left to her sole
intuition-- as it is now left to the sagacity of the reader--
to group the mysterious and perplexing facts together.  The
incomplete statements herein given are fragments of what is
contained in certain secret volumes, but it is not lawful to
divulge the details.

The details I uncovered are that the Bengali explorer/spy Sarat
Chandra Das went to Shigatse twice, in 1879 and in 1882, and
brought back 40 and 200 volumes of Tibetan scriptures
respectively from those trips.  Olcott was later on very
cordial terms with Das and his traveling companion Ugyen
Gyatso, a Sikkimese lama.  HPB's references to a Chohan Lama in
Shigatse are full of evidence pointing to Sengchen Tulku, prime
minister of the Panchen Lama and host of Das and Gyatso during
their visit.  After their departure and the death of the
Panchen, it was discovered they had been British spies.
Sengchen was tortured and killed as a result of having given
them hospitality.  It seems that Das gave HPB access to many of
these volumes, which possibly supplied the Stanzas and the
Voice of the Silence (many of these vols. were in Sanskrit AND
Tibetan, and HPB could read the former fluently).  Three
chapters of The Masters Revealed are devoted to exploring this
topic.