Judge on the Universal Applications of Doctrine

William Quan Judge · Living the Life Series · 10 pages

First published in The Path, Vol. IV, October 1889, pages 219–25, and reprinted in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient: The Writings of William Quan Judge, San Diego: Point Loma Publications, Vol. I (1975), pages 106–12, and in the second edition, Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 2009, pages 114–20. The running head calls karma and reincarnation our stellar beacons of hope and responsibility.

Judge's complaint is about the scope his colleagues have given the doctrines rather than about their truth. In the last few years of much writing in the theosophical field, he says, a failure to make broad or universal applications of the doctrines can be noticed: with the exception of Blavatsky, writers have confined themselves to narrow views, chiefly the state of man after death or how karma affects him in life. Of karma in particular, he observes that the greatest consideration has gone to deciding how it modifies our pleasure or our pain, and then whether Devachan will compensate for its failures; while reincarnation is written about as if only mankind were subject to the law. The same limited treatment, he adds, is adopted in handling many other doctrines of the Wisdom Religion. The remedy he proposes is stated as a matter of timing and of character together: that after fourteen years of activity it is time members made the application of every admitted doctrine universal, and stopped confining them to their own selfish selves. The remainder of the essay sets out to demonstrate what a universal application would look like.

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