Gautama and Jesus: Parallel Lives

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 15 pages

A study of the correspondences between the two lives, opening not with either figure but with Apollonius of Tyana, whom Blavatsky takes as a Nirmanakaya and who was, like Jesus and the Buddha, a healer, addressed as a king, and an enemy of religious display and hypocrisy. From that starting point the file moves through the charge that Apollonius confined his teaching to the rich, the demand of clergy for blind faith, and the claim that the Bible is the words of fallible men rather than the word of God.

The central section treats the Nazarene as a Bodhisattva with the spirit of Buddha in him, and takes up Gautama's reincarnations, the Buddha's rebirths and migrations, and the Roman claim on Gautama as a convert raised to sainthood. The legendary portions of the two lives, she argues, are identical, and she reads the marriage at Cana and the trials of the Sun-Initiate in that light — concluding that Jesus suffered much less than Gautama. A closing question asks whether Shankaracharya was Gautama Buddha; her own answer is that Shankaracharya was an Avatara, a position taken further in Hints about the triadic hypostasis of Buddha elsewhere in this series.

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