The Eye versus the Heart Doctrine

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 11 pages

From Blavatsky Collected Writings XIV pages 443–53, under the heading “The Doctrine of the Eye and the Doctrine of the Heart, or the Heart's Seal.” A head-note describes it as a flood of light on the misconceptions of the Orientalists and a valuable aid to students of The Voice of the Silence, which is held complete elsewhere in this section. It pairs with “Heart Doctrine and Higher Ethics” in this same batch.

The argument is about transmission — where a teaching survived and where it did not. Professor Albrecht Weber is cited approvingly for the declaration that the Northern Buddhists alone possess the Buddhist scriptures complete: the Southern Buddhists, Blavatsky writes, have no idea of the existence of an esoteric doctrine enshrined like a pearl within the shell of every religion, while the Chinese and Tibetans have preserved numerous records of it. She grants the decline frankly — that the doctrine publicly preached by Gautama is now degenerate and fallen, and that for over two millennia every new reformer has taken something out of the original and replaced it with a speculation of his own — while holding that it is yet preserved in Chinese monasteries beyond the reach of visitors, and that truth lingers among the masses even now. The claim narrows to a place: that only in the trans-Himalayan fastnesses loosely called Tibet, in the most inaccessible spots of desert and mountain, does the esoteric Good Law, the Heart's Seal, live in its pristine purity. Swedenborg is then brought in as an unexpected witness, for his remark about the forgotten and long-lost Word — that one should seek it in China and might peradventure find it in Great Tartary — with the note that he had the information from spirits who said they worshipped according to that lost ancient Word.

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