Esoteric Buddhism.

  • Alfred Percy Sinnett
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Esoteric Buddhism. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    various ways has been diffused the idea that some process of study which men here and there did actually follow, might lead to the acquisition of a higher kind of knowledge than that taught to mankind at large in books or by public religious preachers. The East, as pointed out, has always been more than vaguely impressed with this belief, but even in the West the whole block of symbolical literature relating to astrology, alchemy, and mys- ticism generally has fermented in European society, carrying to some few peculiarly receptive and quali- fied minds the conviction that behind all this superficially meaningless nonsense great truths lay concealed. For such persons eccentric study has sometimes revealed hidden passages leading to the grandest imaginable realms of enlightenment. But till now, in all such cases, in accordance with the law of those schools, the neophyte no sooner forced his way into the region of mystery than he was bound over to the most inviolable secrecy as to everything connected with his entrance and further progress there. In Asia in the same way, the “ chela/ or pupil of occultism, nc sooner became a chela than he ceased to be a witness on behalf of the reality of occult know- ledge. I have been astonished to find, since my own connection with the subject, how numerous such clielas are. But it is impossible to imagine any human act more improbable than the un- authorized revelation by any such chela, to persons in the outer world, that he is one, and so the great esoteric school of philosophy successfully guards its seclusion.