The Triadic Hypostasis of Gautama Buddha

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 17 pages

The subject is how Gautama associates himself with Avataras and Saints and works through them — occult explanations, the file says, not published before. It opens with a hard judgement: that Gautama's promulgation of the body of the esoteric teaching without its vivifying soul was an unintentional mistake with disastrous effects, and that Karma heeds intentions little if they remain fruitless.

The main argument concerns Shankara, born in 510 BC, fifty-one years and two months after the date given for the Buddha's Nirvana, and so having nothing to do with the persecution of Buddhists. Blavatsky's position is that the astral Gautama entered the outward Shankara, whose Atman was nevertheless his own divine prototype; that Shankara was an enlightened one but not a typical reincarnation of Gautama, being rather a direct incarnation of the Logos, one of the primordial seven rays, an Avatara in the full sense; and that the middle principles of Gautama which did not go to Nirvana formed the middle principles of Shankara. It is therefore nearer the truth, she concludes, to call the astral Gautama the upadhi of Shankara's spirit than to speak of reincarnation.

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