What Shall We Do for Our Fellow-Men?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 25 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. IV, No. 23, July 1889, pages 430–37, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XI pages 343–54 under the heading “World-Improvement or World-Deliverance.” Twenty-five pages. The epigraphs are from the Dhammapada and the Sutta-Nipata, on making one's own effort since the Tathāgatas are only preachers, and on walking alone like a rhinoceros in the forest rather than keeping company with fools.

The occasion is a letter to the editor prompted by a paragraph in the Revue Théosophique published in Paris, and the question it raises is the one the section as a whole keeps returning to: what, practically, is to be done for other people. The alternatives are named in the reprint's own title — world-improvement or world-deliverance — and they are not treated as the same thing, since the first works on circumstances and the second on the condition that produces them. The head-note states the standard by which any answer is to be judged, and it is uncompromising: that whoever does not say with the Master that mercy alone opens the gate to save the whole race of mankind is unworthy of that Master. The two epigraphs pull in a direction that complicates the question rather than settling it — one insisting that the effort must be one's own because teachers can only preach, the other recommending solitude over bad company — so that the file sets the claim of universal mercy beside the counsel to walk alone, and works through what a person is actually to do when both are true.

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