Godless Buddhism Is Philosophical Agnosticism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 21 pages

A twenty-one page compilation, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts, built around Blavatsky's response to “The Essential Religion” by Babu Raj Narain Bose.

The argument is against religious uniformity as such, and it is made on grounds of psychology before grounds of doctrine. Where, she asks, is the necessity for imposing our personal views on others, who must be allowed to possess as good a faculty of discrimination and judgment as we believe ourselves to have? Innate differences of mental perception are described as difficult to obliterate and harder still to reconcile by bringing the endless varieties of human nature under one standard; and no attempt to engraft our views on individuals whose capacities differ from ours — as one species of plant differs from another — will ever succeed. The ethical consequence follows: that we shall never prove our love to a fellow man by depriving him of his divine prerogatives, an untrammelled liberty of reason, right of conscience and self-reliance. The historical charge is then made in the strongest terms the file contains — that the religion of love and charity was built upon a holocaust of the faithful, fuelled by the illegitimate desire to impose a universal belief, and the question is put as to what creed has ever surpassed it in bloodthirstiness, intolerance and cruelty. The title's positive claim, that godless Buddhism is a highly philosophical and logical agnosticism, is offered as the alternative to a creed that requires assent.

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