The Learned Tree of Tibet

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 8 pages

First published in The Theosophist Vol. IV (6), March 1883, pages 130–31, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV pages 347–51 under the title “The Sacred Tree of Kumbum.” The head-note states the claim the article defends: that the inscriptions on the leaves are in Senzar, the sacred language of the adepts, and comprise the whole Dharma of Buddhism and the history of the world — adding the aside that the type-foundries of Didot contain nothing to excel them.

The article is built on a traveller's account and on what Blavatsky makes of it. Thirty-seven years before writing, two Lazarist missionaries attached to the Roman Catholic mission at Peking undertook the feat of penetrating as far as Lhasa to preach Christianity, and their narrative — published in Paris and twice translated into English — shows them, she says, to have been courageous and enthusiastic to a fault. She sets aside the book's general merits and confines herself to the portion where Huc describes the Tree of Ten Thousand Images seen at the lamasery of Kumbum. Huc reports the Tibetan legend that when the mother of Tsong-Kha-pa, the Buddhist reformer, devoted him to the religious life and cut off his hair and threw it away, a tree sprang from it bearing a Tibetan character on every leaf; the article quotes the fuller particulars from Hazlitt's London translation of 1852, noting that even it is not exact. The interest for Blavatsky is not the marvel but the script: her reading is that what the missionaries took for Tibetan characters is something older, and the argument of the article follows from that identification.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.6 MB, 8 pages)