Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00902)

>In Indian
>ashrams salvation through knowledge would have sounded equally ridiculous.

While most of your points were well taken, I would have to argue with 
this one. Jnana-Yoga is a well-established and longstanding limb of the 
yogic path, and it essentially consists of enlightenment through 
philosophy.

For me, the main factor demonstrating the Western origin of the 
Theosophical teachings is the casual ease with which Western allusions 
are scattered through the works of supposedly Eastern writers. While the 
(Indian or) Tibetan Koot Hoomi, for instance, has no difficulty dropping 
casual references to the Greek myth of Echo and St. Paul's vision on the 
road, as well as to contemporary Western writers in great profusion and 
to European idioms everywhere, his references to actual Eastern words and 
doctrines are self-conscious, plodding, and relatively rare in comparison 
to the casual Western allusions; a very small set of ideas is presented 
over and over, and in a presentational mode rather than the 
conversational mode in which the Western ideas are often expressed.

Here we have a writer who seems much more comfortable in one world than 
the other -- which world, then, should we think the writer came from?

Or should we assume that Spencer's pamphlets on evolutionary philosophy 
were common reading in the ashrams and lamaseries of the time?

Tim Maroney