Blavatsky on Divine Reincarnations in Tibet

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 11 pages

From The Theosophist of March 1882, and prompted by a paragraph in an Anglo-Indian paper — one of those, she notes, which pretend to know and discuss every blessed subject whether they know anything of it or not. The offending passage had explained that the Bhutan government consists of a spiritual chief called the Dhurm Raja, an incarnation of Buddha who never dies, and a civil ruler called the Deb Raja. Her interjected comment in the quotation is a bracketed exclamation.

The complaint she makes of it is worth more than the correction itself. A more ignorant assertion, she writes, could hardly have been made; and it may be argued that Christian writers believe even less in the reincarnations of the Buddha than the Buddhists of Ceylon do, and so trouble themselves little about accuracy. But in that case, why touch the subject at all? Large sums are spent annually by governments to secure old Asiatic manuscripts and learn the truth about old religions, and it shows respect for neither science nor truth to mislead the people interested in them by flippant and contemptuous treatment of facts. What follows is her own account, given on the authority of direct information received at the Society's headquarters.

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