Budhism Is Inner Wisdom, Not a Religion

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 23 pages

The whole file turns on a single letter. Esoteric BuDhism, spelt with one D, is Inner Wisdom — Sophia in Greek — a pre-Vedic term millennia older than 643 BCE, the year given here for the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, and having nothing to do with the Buddhist religion at all. BuDDhism with two Ds is the religious system of ethics preached by Gautama and named after his title of the Enlightened. Blavatsky's practical complaint is that A.P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism was an excellent work with an unfortunate title, and the file opens with an agnostic student's puzzlement over exactly that and her answer to him.

The etymological ground is that Bodha, Bodhi, Buddha and Buddhi are one and the same — divine wisdom — and that long kalpas passed before the epithet became humanised enough to be applied to mortals and finally to Gautama. BuDhism she then presents as the archaic Wisdom-Religion which reconciles all religions by stripping each of its outward human garments and showing its root identical with every other; it proves the necessity of an immutable divine principle in nature while rejecting the gods of the monotheistic religions, and its god and dogma is truth. The distinction is put practically at the end: orthodox exoteric BuDDhism, the public teaching of Gautama, differs greatly from the secret doctrine he reserved for the initiated Brahmans of his day and for his Arhats.

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