Madame Blavatsky Annotates Joseph Edkins' Essay on Buddhism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages of annotation rather than argument. Joseph Edkins, the missionary sinologist, had published an essay on the Buddhist doctrine of the Western Heaven, and Blavatsky reprinted it in Lucifer in April 1888 with her own footnotes attached — a form that lets her correct the record point by point without writing a rival essay.

The corrections she makes are the substance. The only hell, she notes against one passage, is life on earth. Against another she records that the Buddha preached specifically against unreasoning faith. The historical claim she is most concerned to reverse is one of influence and direction: it was the Gnostics who were affected by Buddhist doctrines, she argues, and not the other way about — with the supporting observation that Babylonia was once a seat of the Sanskrit language. The Series Editor has added a short set of protreptics on three related precepts — resist not evil, forgive but do not forget, forgive and you shall be forgiven — closing on the formula that recurs throughout the library, that Deity is unerring Karma or abstract Nature.

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