Denunciation Is Not a Duty

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Quan Judge · Living the Life Series · 16 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. III, No. 16, December 1888, pages 265–73, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings X pages 196–208. Three epigraphs frame it — from Master K.H., from a Buddhist precept, and from the Christian aphorism about judging not.

The epigraphs do much of the work. Master K.H. is quoted on a distinction that men of science do not make: that there is a vast difference between the qualities of two equal amounts of energy expended by two men, one on his way to his daily quiet work and the other on his way to denounce a fellow creature at the police station. The Buddhist precept gives the rule of conduct the article defends — condemn no man in his absence, and when forced to reprove do so to his face, but gently and in words full of charity, because the human heart is like the Kusūli plant, which opens its cup to the sweet morning dew and closes it before a heavy shower. The Christian aphorism supplies the third witness. The article itself begins from a difficulty its readers were evidently feeling: that not a few of the most earnest Theosophists believe themselves under some obligation to expose wrongdoing. The distinction drawn is between correction offered openly to the person concerned, which is allowed and sometimes required, and denunciation made to others in his absence, which is not — a distinction that turns on the effect on the denouncer as much as on the denounced.

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