Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00030)

KEY21.TXT

The Buddhist Teachings on the Above

Q. What does Buddhism teach with regard to the Soul?

A. It depends whether you mean exoteric, popular Buddhism, or
its esoteric teachings. The former explains itself in The
Buddhist Catechism in this wise: Soul it considers a word used
by the ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is
subject to change, then man is included, and every material part
of him must change. That which is subject to change is not
permanent, so there can be no immortal survival of a changeful
thing.

This seems plain and definite. But when we come to the question
that the new personality in each succeeding rebirth is the
aggregate of "Skandhas," or the attributes, of the old
personality, and ask whether this new aggregation of Skandhas is
a new being likewise, in which nothing has remained of the last,
we read that: In one sense it is a new being, in another it is
not. During this life the Skandhas are continually changing,
while the man A.B. of forty is identical as regards personality
with the youth A.B. of eighteen, yet by the continual waste and
reparation of his body and change of mind and character, he is a
different being. Nevertheless, the man in his old age justly
reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and
actions at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of
the rebirth, being the same individuality as before (but not the
same personality), with but a changed form, or new aggregation
of Skandhas, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and
thoughts in the previous existence.

This is abstruse metaphysics, and plainly does not express
disbelief in Soul by any means.

Q. Is not something like this spoken of in Esoteric Buddhism?

A. It is, for this teaching belongs both to Esoteric Budhism or
Secret Wisdom, and to the exoteric Buddhism, or the religious
philosophy of Gautama Buddha.

Q. But we are distinctly told that most of the Buddhists do not
believe in the Soul's immortality?

A. No more do we, if you mean by Soul the personal Ego, or
life-Soul, Nephesh. But every learned Buddhist believes in the
individual or divine Ego. Those who do not, err in their
judgment. They are as mistaken on this point, as those
Christians who mistake the theological interpolations of the
later editors of the Gospels about damnation and hellfire, for
verbatim utterances of Jesus. Neither Buddha nor "Christ" ever
wrote anything themselves, but both spoke in allegories and used
"dark sayings," as all true Initiates did, and will do for a
long time yet to come. Both Scriptures treat of all such
metaphysical questions very cautiously, and both, Buddhist and
Christian records, sin by that excess of exotericism; the dead
letter meaning far overshooting the mark in both cases.

Q. Do you mean to suggest that neither the teachings of Buddha
nor those of Christ have been heretofore rightly understood?

A. What I mean is just as you say. Both Gospels, the Buddhist
and the Christian, were preached with the same object in view.
Both reformers were ardent philanthropists and practical
altruists, preaching most unmistakably Socialism of the noblest
and highest type, self-sacrifice to the bitter end. "Let the
sins of the whole world fall upon me that I may relieve man's
misery and suffering!" cries Buddha. "I would not let one cry
whom I could save!" exclaims the Prince-beggar, clad in the
refuse rags of the burial-grounds. "Come unto me all ye that
labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest," is the
appeal to the poor and the disinherited made by the "Man of
Sorrows," who hath not where to lay his head. The teachings of
both are boundless love for humanity, charity, forgiveness of
injury, forgetfulness of self, and pity for the deluded masses;
both show the same contempt for riches, and make no difference
between meum and tuum. Their desire was, without revealing to
all the sacred mysteries of initiation, to give the ignorant and
the misled, whose burden in life was too heavy for them, hope
enough and an inkling into the truth sufficient to support them
in their heaviest hours. But the object of both Reformers was
frustrated, owing to excess of zeal of their later followers.
The words of the Masters having been misunderstood and
misinterpreted, behold the consequences!

Q. But surely Buddha must have repudiated the soul's
immortality, if all the Orientalists and his own Priests say so!

A. The Arhats began by following the policy of their Master and
the majority of the subsequent priests were not initiated, just
as in Christianity; and so, little by little, the great esoteric
truths became almost lost. A proof in point is, that, out of the
two existing sects in Ceylon, the Siamese believes death to be
the absolute annihilation of individuality and personality, and
the other explains Nirvana, as we Theosophists do.

Q. But why, in that case, do Buddhism and Christianity represent
the two opposite poles of such belief?

A. Because the conditions under which they were preached were
not the same. In India the Brahmins, jealous of their superior
knowledge, and excluding from it every caste save their own, had
driven millions of men into idolatry and almost fetishism.
Buddha had to give the death-blow to an exuberance of unhealthy
fancy and fanatical superstition resulting from ignorance, such
as has rarely been known before or after. Better a philosophical
atheism than such ignorant worship for those:

Who cry upon their gods and are not heard,

Or are not heeded, and who live and die in mental despair.

He had to arrest first of all this muddy torrent of
superstition, to uproot errors before he gave out the truth. And
as he could not give out all, for the same good reason as Jesus,
who reminds his disciples that the Mysteries of Heaven are not
for the unintelligent masses, but for the elect alone, and
therefore "spake he to them in parables", so his caution led
Buddha to conceal too much. He even refused to say to the monk
Vacchagotta whether there was, or was not an Ego in man. When
pressed to answer, "the Exalted one maintained silence." Buddha
gives to Ananda, his initiated disciple, who inquires for the
reason of this silence, a plain and unequivocal answer in the
dialogue translated by Oldenburg from the Samyutta-Nikaya:

If I, Ananda, when the wandering monk Vacchagotta asked me: "Is
there the Ego?" had answered "The Ego is," then that, Ananda,
would have confirmed the doctrine of the Samanas and Brahmaas,
who believed in permanence. If I, Ananda, when the wandering
monk Vacchagotta asked me, "Is there not the Ego?" had answered,
"The Ego is not," then that, Ananda, would have confirmed the
doctrine of those who believed in annihilation. If I, Ananda,
when the wandering monk Vacchagotta asked me, "Is there the
Ego?" had answered, "The Ego is," would that have served my end,
Ananda, by producing in him the knowledge: all existences
(dhamma) are non-ego? But if I, Ananda, had answered, "The Ego
is not," then that, Ananda, would only have caused the wandering
monk Vacchagotta to be thrown from one bewilderment to another:
"My Ego, did it not exist before? But now it exists no longer!"

This shows, better than anything, that Gautama Buddha withheld
such difficult metaphysical doctrines from the masses in order
not to perplex them more. What he meant was the difference
between the personal temporary Ego and the Higher Self, which
sheds its light on the imperishable Ego, the spiritual "I" of
man.

Q. This refers to Gautama, but in what way does it touch the
Gospels?

A. Read history and think over it. At the time the events
narrated in the Gospels are alleged to have happened, there was
a similar intellectual fermentation taking place in the whole
civilized world, only with opposite results in the East and the
West. The old gods were dying out. While the civilized classes
drifted in the train of the unbelieving Sadducees into
materialistic negations and mere dead-letter Mosaic form in
Palestine, and into moral dissolution in Rome, the lowest and
poorer classes ran after sorcery and strange gods, or became
hypocrites and Pharisees. Once more the time for a spiritual
reform had arrived. The cruel, anthropomorphic and jealous God
of the Jews, with his sanguinary laws of "an eye for eye and
tooth for tooth," of the shedding of blood and animal sacrifice,
had to be relegated to a secondary place and replaced by the
merciful "Father in Secret." The latter had to be shown, not as
an extra-Cosmic God, but as a divine Savior of the man of flesh,
enshrined in his own heart and soul, in the poor as in the rich.
No more here than in India, could the secrets of initiation be
divulged, lest by giving that which is holy to the dogs, and
casting pearls before swine, both the Revealer and the things
revealed should be trodden under foot. Thus, the reticence of
both Buddha and Jesus, whether the latter lived out the historic
period allotted to him or not, and who equally abstained from
revealing plainly the Mysteries of Life and Death, led in the one
case to the blank negations of Southern Buddhism, and in the
other, to the three clashing forms of the Christian Church and
the 300 sects in Protestant England alone.

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