Madame Blavatsky on the Philosophical Mind of the Chinese

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 9 pages

Nine pages making a comparative argument about what a civilisation chose not to do. The annals of the Chinese dynasties, she notes, run back to a period between three and four thousand years BC — and across that whole span the Chinese mind proved, in her phrase, too philosophical to create for itself a Supreme Deity in its own likeness. The restraint is what interests her, since anthropomorphism is the fault the rest of the series treats as the parent of materialism.

The technical observation the piece turns on concerns the account of creation: that there are seven manifestations of light but only six days. The discrepancy is treated not as a muddle but as evidence — a seventh term that the exoteric account has dropped, of the kind the esoteric reading expects to find missing wherever a doctrine has passed into popular form. A further section gathers additional evidence of the same philosophical cast of mind from other parts of the Chinese record. It is a short piece, and one of the few places in the library where the comparative method is applied to China rather than to India, Egypt or Greece.

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