Madame Blavatsky on the Vishishtadvaita Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages on a school of Vedanta, and the editor has arranged it so that a reader without Sanskrit can follow. Quick definitions come first: Parabrahman is the one and only Reality, an unthinkable and unspeakable state of ultimate subjectivity; Ishvara is Conscious Universal Mind, the second Logos, and not the personal God and Master he is often taken for. Only then does the Vishishtadvaita position itself get stated.

It is set out in four numbered points, which makes the disagreement easy to locate. The Vishishtadvaitins are a sect of Vedantins who, refusing to accept dualism, place the origin of both evil and good in Parabrahman; they hold that sun-souls attract lost earth-souls and direct them toward Nirvana; they refer to the Advaitis as Buddhists in disguise; and refined Vishishtadvaitism is identified here with ancient Magianism. Blavatsky's own commentary follows, with supplementary annotations, and the document closes on the distinction it exists to draw — between the impersonal and the personal God — together with the table of the semi-exoteric constitution of man that recurs across the library.

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