Gems from the East: A Birthday Book of Precepts and Axioms

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 67 pages

The longest document in this batch and the least like the rest of it: not an argument but a collection. In June 1890, having finished the work of setting out the correspondences between the world's religions and philosophies, Blavatsky gathered 365 pearls of perennial wisdom under the unassuming title Gems from the East — one self-evident truth for each day of the year, arranged as a birthday book.

The Series Editor's foreword makes a shrewd observation about that format: casting the collection as a birthday book was an astute ploy to keep it from falling into oblivion, since a book people write birthdays in gets kept. It did not entirely work. With one exception in 1948, when the Theosophical University Press in California reissued it as an illustrated pocket book, the Gems remained out of print, and it was a facsimile of that edition which Boris de Zirkoff later included in the Collected Writings. The foreword frames the collection with a line from the Bhagavad-Gita on sacrifice, and Edwin Arnold's closing verse from The Light of Asia stands at the head of the volume.

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