Subba Row on the Occultism of Southern India

Tallapragada Subba Row · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 9 pages

From Tallapragada Subba Row: Esoteric Writings, first edition 1895, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1931, section I.9, “Occultism of Southern India,” pages 106–114 — described by the original editor as a summary of a discussion with Mr T. Subba Row at the Adyar Library on 1 December 1888. The frontispiece is Boris Hernández's 2011 portrait of the Cuban painter Tomás Esson.

Subba Row begins from a regional claim: that Southern India has always produced the greatest Āryan philosophers, Mādhavāchārya having come from the south and Śamkarāchārya been born in Malabar, with high adepts and schools of occultism there in his own day. The framework he sets out is sevenfold. In the adept hierarchy there are always seven classes, corresponding to the seven rays of the Logos; two of these are so mysterious, and their representatives on earth so rare, that they are seldom spoken of — perhaps one or two appearing every two or three thousand years, and it is suggested that Buddha and Śamkarāchārya come under this category. Of the other five, representatives are always to be found, and all five are represented in the Himalayan School. The point of the discussion follows from that. Though every adept anywhere belongs to one of these five classes and falls into one of the five rays, Subba Row holds it a doctrine of the Southern Indian school that adepts in India need not be correlated to the Tibetan School — need not, as he puts it, dovetail into the Guruparamparā chain of the Himalayan School. The independence of one tradition from another, within a single hierarchy, is what the piece exists to establish.

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