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Esoteric Buddhism by A.P
Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett Author also of The Occult World President of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society Fifth edition, annotated and enlarged by the author London, Chapman and Hall Ltd 1885 Page 1 Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett CONTENTS Preface to the Annotated Edition Preface to the Original Edition CHAPTER I - Esoteric Teachers Nature of the Present Exposition - Seclusion of Eastern Knowledge - The Arhats and their Attributes - The Mahatmas - Occultists generally - Isolated Mystics - Inferior Yogis - Occult Training - The Great Purpose -Its Incidental Consequences - Present Concessions CHAPTER II - The Constitution of Man Esoteric Cosmogony - Where to Begin - Working back from Man to Universe - Analysis of Man - The Seven Principles CHAPTER III -The Planetary Chain Esoteric Views of Evolution - The Chain of Globes - Progress of Man round them - The Spiral Advance - Original Evolution of the Globes - The Lower Kingdoms CHAPTER IV -The World Periods Uniformity of Nature- Rounds and Races - The Septenary Law - Objective and Subjective Lives - Total Incarnations - Former Races on Earth - Periodic Cataclysms - Atlantis - Lemuria - The Cyclic Law CHAPTER V - Devachan Spiritual Destinies of the Ego - Karma - Division of the Principles of Death - Progress of the Higher Duad - Existence in Devachan - Subjective Progress - Avitchi - Earthly Connection with Devachan - Devachanic Periods CHAPTER VI - Kâma Loca The Astral Shell - Its Habitat - Its Nature - Surviving Impulses - Elementals - -
BLAVATSKY,HP Key to Theosophy Pp 1-15 and 19-20.Docx Page 1 of 8
BLAVATSKY,HP Key to Theosophy pp 1-15 and 19-20.docx Page 1 of 8 H.P. BLAVATSKY The Key to Theosophy pp. 1-15 and 19-20 On religious intolerance pp. 1-15 Section 1 THEOSOPHY AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY THE MEANING OF THE NAME ENQUIRER. Theosophy and its doctrines are often referred to as a new-fangled religion. Is it a religion? THEOSOPHIST. It is not. Theosophy is Divine Knowledge or Science. ENQUIRER. What is the real meaning of the term? THEOSOPHIST. "Divine Wisdom," (Theosophia) or Wisdom of the gods, as (theogonia), genealogy of the gods. The word theos means a god in Greek, one of the divine beings, certainly not "God" in the sense attached in our day to the term. Therefore, it is not "Wisdom of God," as translated by some, but Divine Wisdom such as that possessed by the gods. The term is many thousand years old. ENQUIRER. What is the origin of the name? THEOSOPHIST. It comes to us from the Alexandrian philosophers, called lovers of truth, Philaletheians, from phil "loving," and aletheia "truth." The name Theosophy dates from the third century of our era, and began with Ammonius Saccas and his disciples (1), who started the Eclectic Theosophical system. ENQUIRER. What was the object of this system? THEOSOPHIST. First of all to inculcate certain great moral truths upon its disciples, and all those who were "lovers of the truth." Hence the motto adopted by the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." (2) The chief aim of the Founders of the Eclectic Theosophical School was one of the three objects of its modern successor, the Theosophical Society, namely, to reconcile all religions, sects and nations under a common system of ethics, based on eternal verities. -
The Theosophical Society's Ongoing Problem of Emotion and Control
Taming the Astral Body: The Theosophical Society’s Ongoing Problem of Emotion and Control John L. Crow Florida State University Abstract In New York City in 1875, a group interested in Spiritualism and occult science founded what would become the Theosophical Society. Primarily the creation of Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society went through a number of early incarnations. One original version promised to teach occult powers. After Blavatsky found that she could not honor earlier promises to teach occultism, she shifted the focus of the Society to one that promoted Universal Brotherhood instead, highlighting notions of the body and demanding the control of emotion as a means to rebuff demands for training. With this refocusing, Blavatsky reestablished control of the Society and asserted herself as the central channel of esoteric knowledge. Thus, by shifting the focus from the attainment of occult powers to the more ambiguous “spiritual enlightenment,” Blavatsky erected an elaborate, centralized system of delayed spiritual gratification, a system contingent upon the individual’s adoption of specific morals and values, while simultaneously maintaining control of the human body on all its levels: spiritual, social, physical, mental, and especially emotional. Introduction During a meeting of the Theosophical Society in New York City on October 18, 1876, the co-founder and legal counsel for the newly established organization, William Quan Judge (1851– 96), gave a lecture about his personal experiences in the study of Theosophy. He spoke about his recent experiences of astrally traveling and implanting his thoughts and ideas into the minds of others. He did this through focusing his will and commanding his “double,” or astral body, to go to these places and influence others. -
Download Occult Teachings Extracted from the Mahatma Letters to A. P
Occult Teachings Extracted from the Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Trevor A. Barker, Jose R. Zulueta, Rivercross Publishing, Incorporated, 1995, 0944957242, 9780944957240, . DOWNLOAD HERE Esoteric Christianity or, The lesser mysteries, Annie Wood Besant, 1975, Religion, 279 pages. The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett In Chronological Sequence, Vicente Hao Chin, Jan 1, 1972, Literary Collections, 600 pages. A classic in Theosophical literature.. The Growth of the Soul A Sequel to "Esoteric Buddhism", Alfred Percy Sinnett, 1896, Karma, 483 pages. Reflections on an Ageless Wisdom A Commentary on the Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Joy Mills, 2010, Religion, 580 pages. After pioneering Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky told the English journalist A. P. Sinnett that her esoteric knowledge had come from higher beings called "Mahatmas," he himself .... The Solar System , Arthur E. Powell, Jun 1, 1963, History, 388 pages. 1930 the Solar System was based to a great extent on the research by Besant & Leadbeater in Man: Whence, How and Whither and Leadbeater's the Inner Life. to students of these .... DГўmodar and the pioneers of the theosophical movement , , 1965, Religion, 720 pages. The Inner Life , Charles Webster Leadbeater, C. W. Leadbeater, Jan 1, 1978, Body, Mind & Spirit, 383 pages. A clairvoyant, Leadbeater wrote, is simply a person who develops "the power to respond to another octave out of the stupendous gamut of possible vibrations" and so is enabled .... Imagination monotonically gives condensed sanguine, the research approach to the problems of artistic typology you can find K.Fosslera. Structuralism change. Artistic talent, in first approximation, gracefully starts mannerism, the research approach to the problems of artistic typology you can find K.Fosslera. -
Subba Row Defends Esoteric Buddhism
Subba Row defends Esoteric Buddhism Subba Row defends Esoteric Buddhism v. 15.11, www.philaletheians.co.uk, 23 June 2018 Page 1 of 30 SUBBA ROW DEFENDS ESOTERIC BUDDHISM HISTORICAL BACKGROUND BY BORIS DE ZIRKOFF T. Subba Row’s observations on “A letter addressed to the Fellows of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, by the President and a Vice-President of the Lodge.” 1 From Blavatsky Collected Writings, (INQUIRIES OF AN ENGLISH F.T.S.) V pp. 134-38. Illustrations by Zaw Zaw Aung. Introductory remarks on the historical background by Boris de Zirkoff With regard to the Reply to Question No. VI — “Historical Difficulty — Why?”2 some light is thrown on its authorship by the following passage from a letter written by H.P. Blavatsky from Adyar to A.P. Sinnett, presumably in January 1884: . she [Dr. A. Kingsford] can hardly be an infallible Seer, or else Maitland would not have attributed to “Mad. Blavatsky” a sentence written by the Tirav- ellum Mahatma in Reply No. 2 of October, page 3, I have his MSS. I must be deuced clever to have written the “Replies” in The Theosophist. I do not under- stand ten lines in that occult and scientific gibberish.3 This has reference to a document entitled A Letter Addressed to the Fellows of the London Lodge of The Theosophical Society, by the President and a Vice-President of the Lodge, which Dr. Anna Kingsford and her collaborator Edward Maitland issued in December 1883, and which embodied a severe criticism of the teachings contained in A.P. -
RHA, MS#151A: Theosophy and the Arts
Theosophy and the Arts Ralph Herman Abraham January 11, 2017 Abstract The cosmology of Ancient India, as transcribed by the Theosophists, con- tains innovations that greatly influenced modern Western culture. Here we bring these novel embellishments to the foreground, and explain their influ- ence on the arts. 1. INTRODUCTION The cosmological model of Theosophy, as expected, is similar to the classical Sanskrit of 6th century BCE. The pancha kosa, in particular, is the model for these authors. The classical pancha kosa (five sheaths or levels) are, from bottom up: physical, vital, mental, intellectual, and bliss. Among important authors of theosophical books are Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Sinnett, Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater. 2. THE ESOTERIC PLANES AND BODIES The Sanskrit model was adapted and embellished by the early theosophists. 2-1. Blavatsky Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 { 1891){ HPB { was a Russian occultist, world traveller, While reputedly in India in the 1850s, she came under the influence of the ancient teachings of Hindu and Buddhist masters. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875. In 1977 she published her first book, Isis Unveiled, which is basic to Theosophy. 1 2-2. Sinnett Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840 { 1921) moved to India in 1879, where he was the editor of an English daily. The following year, HPB (traveling with Henry Steel Olcott, journalist and co-founder of the Theosophical Society) arrived in India and stayed for some time with the Sinnetts in Simla. Sinnett returned to England in 1984, where his book, Esoteric Buddhism, was published that year. This was based on his correspondence with masters in India. -
Images of the Crowned Buddha Along the Silk Road: Iconography and Ideology
Article Images of the Crowned Buddha along the Silk Road: Iconography and Ideology Rebecca L. Twist Art Department, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR 97123, USA; [email protected] Received: 9 August 2018; Accepted: 10 September 2018; Published: 21 September 2018 Abstract: The interpretation of early Buddha images with a crown has long been a source of debate. Many scholars have concluded that the iconography of the crown is intended to denote Śākyamuni as a cakravartin or universal Buddha. A few have suggested it represents a sambhogakāya Buddha in Mahāyāna Buddhism. This art historical and Buddhological study examines the visual record of early crowned Buddhas along the Silk Road, focusing on the iconographic signifiers of the crown, silk items, and ornaments, and interprets them within a broader framework of Buddhist theoretical principals and practice. Not only is this a visual analysis of iconography, it also considers contemporary Buddhist literary evidence that shows the development of the iconography and ideology of the crowned Buddha. As a result of this examination, I propose that the recurring iconographic evidence and the textual evidence underscore the intention to depict a form of sambhogakāya Buddha as an early esoteric meditational construct. Moreover, many Buddhas perform one of the two mudrās that are particular to the esoteric form of Vairocana Buddha. Therefore, the iconography also signifies the ideology of the archetypal Ādi Buddha as an esoteric conception. Keywords: crowned Buddha; Buddhism; Vajrayāna; sambhogakāya; Vairocana; cakravartin; Silk Road; Paṭola Śāhi 1. Introduction The paradigm of the crowned Buddha figures found along the transcontinental travel system of the Silk Road has been a discourse in scholarship for many years. -
Is There Really “Esoteric” Buddhism?
IS THERE REALLY “ESOTERIC” BUDDHISM? RICHARD D. MCBRIDE, II In his seminal book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault makes an important observation on a methodological problem associated with clas- sification: Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.1 In contemporary Western scholarship, the concept of “Esoteric Bud- dhism” has become part of a three-fold grid of knowledge deployed to describe the history of Buddhism. For instance, The Encyclopedia of Reli- gion presents three general essays titled: “Hinayana,” “Mahayana,” and “Esoteric Buddhism.”2 In this case the classification “Esoteric Buddhism” is clearly a euphemism and replacement term for “Buddhist Tantrism” or “Tantric Buddhism,” a problematic classification repeatedly shown by scholars in recent years to be largely a product of nineteenth-century Western Orientalist imagination.3 For this reason, perhaps, many scholars now favor the category of “Esoteric Buddhism.” It also may be because 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences [A trans- lation of Les mots et les choses] (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970; rpt. New York: Van- tage Books, 1994), 127-128. 2 See the book Buddhism and Asian History, ed. -
Theosophy,” Forthcoming In: SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion, Adam Possamai & Anthony Blasi (Eds.)
Egil Asprem, “Theosophy,” forthcoming in: SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion, Adam Possamai & Anthony Blasi (eds.) Theosophy Introduction Theosophy refers to a set of ideas and organizations originating with the activities of Russian- born occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891). Embodied in the Theosophical Society, established in New York City in 1875 by Blavatsky, the American military officer and lawyer Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), and the Irish-American barrister William Quan Judge (1851–1896), Theosophy attracted tens of thousands of students in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, leaving a number of splinter organizations in its wake. The leading branch of Theosophy moved its headquarters to Adyar in Chennai, India, in 1886; an independent American branch has been associated with the activities of Katherine Tingley (1847–1929), including the theosophical commune Lomaland (1900–1942) in Southern California, and is now known as the Theosophical Society Pasadena. In 1913 Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) took most of the German membership with him when he broke out of the Theosophical Society Adyar and formed the Anthroposophical Society, which has since spread Waldorf education, biodynamic farming and anthroposophial medicine to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Theosophically inspired groups have had a remarkable impact on contemporary religiosity, but also on a wide array of political, artistic, and social movements of the past 150 years. To sociologists of religion, Theosophy is particularly important for understanding the transnational exchanges that have transformed the modern religious field, as well as the emergence of “unchurched” religion/spirituality (primarily) among the educated middle classes under the pressures of secularization. -
Orzech, Charles D
H-Buddhism Orzech, Charles D. Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, November 17, 2020 Teachers of an Accidental Buddhist Studies Scholar: on Good Friends 善知識kalyāṇa-mitra Charles D. Orzech When Chuck Prebish contacted me about this project it occurred to me that his aim was to capture a more fine-grained picture of the assimilation of Buddhism in North America during the second half of the twentieth century. It is also—in effect—a group portrait or an autobiography of a generation of Buddhist teachers, scholars, and practitioners. I hope that when complete these self-portraits might serve as data for a larger analysis. Thinking about this assignment off and on for some time I also am reminded of one of John McRae’s rules of Zen Studies (I teach a course on Chan and Zen and use McRae). Rule number two reads, “Lineage assertions are as wrong as they are strong” (John R. McRae, Seeing Through Zen, xix). McRae then adds that if the lineage claims can be shown to be genuine they are probably insignificant. If we have learned anything in the last fifty years of Zen studies it is that Chan/Son/Zen traditions are under continual construction and reconstruction under the scaffolding of lineage. Almost every scholar of Buddhism or Buddhist practitioner I have met will at some point make a bow to their Buddhist ancestors. Should we be under any illusion that our ancestral invocations are fundamentally different that those of the eleventh century? The living construct the present out of the past. -
3 Esoteric Terminology
3 ESOTERIC TERMINOLOGY 3.1 Introduction 1It is not surprising that most esotericians seldom have exact esoteric concepts. Those who have tried to define those concepts have been unable to do so. This may have been due to their inability to interpret the ancient esoteric symbols rightly or to their lack of logical training. Admitted that philosophy is sheer fictionalism and thus unfit for a world view. If it puts emphasis on logical definitions, however, it gives a training in logical thinking that is probably necessary for anyone who sets about formulating exact definitions. This was the aim of the old Uppsala school of philosophy, represented by Hedvall, Hägerström, and Phalén and bitterly blamed for “logicomania” the significance of which their detractors never understood. 2If concepts and principles are not exactly defined and if these concepts do not agree with reality, the result is vagueness and thereby fictionalism as well. This is the defect that has always been inherent in all esoteric literature up to the present. The reader has never been able to acquire exact basic concepts. The terminology used has been an utter failure, which fact has also contributed to the confusion of ideas. It is a psychological error to use old worn-out terms for new unknown things, especially when these new things are beyond the normal individual’s possible experience (the term “spiritual world” used for world 45, for instance). 3European languages lack words for superphysical realities. When theosophy first appeared, making attempts at describing those realities, the consequence was that the authors had to find new words for them. -
Walter Y. Evans-Wentz and the Comparative Study of Religion
Jens Schlieter A Common Core of Theosophy in Celtic Myth, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism: Walter Y. Evans-Wentz and the Comparative Study of Religion Imgination is the greatest of magicians. (John Woodroffe, Foreword, Tibetan Book of the Dead) Abstract: The contribution will discuss the impact of American Theosophist Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878–1965) on the emerging “science of religion.” Evans-Wentz first pursued Celtic studies, concluding in his The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Here, in line with Theosophical doctrines and Psychical Research, he claimed a “Fairyland” as “a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, and in various ecstatic states.”“Fairies” are nothing less than the “intelligent forces now recognized by psychical researchers.” Already in his early work, he drew freely on various other religious traditions in comparative perspective, aiming to corroborate evidence that the idea of rebirth has been advanced as a “com- mon core” of the earliest strand of esoteric traditions. Later, he became at- tracted to Indian Yoga traditions, and, after periods of intensive practice and study in India, published a translation and commentary of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927). Being the first translation into a Western language, this work was a ground-breaking contribution, yet loaded with Theosophical ideas pro- jected into Tibetan Buddhism. An esoteric reading of the Book, Evans-Wentz ar- gued, offers an almost scientific proof of reincarnation, but also a theory of karmic hallucinations that helped to explain cultural variants of after-death im- agery. However, even though Evans-Wentz did offer an array of comparative re- marks, he never advanced a methodology or system of religious thought, ritual, or a history of religion that overcomes the speculative assumptions of Theosophy.