Descent and Ascent of the Saviours of the World

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masque of Love Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages built on the entry for Trikaya in Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary and on the material around it, under the running heading "the rootless root of every triad and triplet."

The claim made for the doctrine is a large one: that Trikaya — literally three bodies or forms — is a most abstruse teaching which, once understood, explains the mystery of every triad or trinity and is a true key to every threefold metaphysical symbol. It is shown first in its simplest form, in the human entity divided into spirit, soul and body, and in the universe regarded as a unity of a purely spiritual principle, the supernal beings which are its direct rays, and humanity. The governing idea, traced to the prehistoric wisdom religion, is that the unknown and unknowable Essence is transformed first into subjective and then into objective matter, and that this is at the root of all the triads. The same pattern is then found repeatedly: in northern Buddhism as Ādi-Buddha, the Dhyāni-Buddhas and the Mānushi or human Buddhas; in European conceptions as God, angels and humanity, symbolised theologically by the God-Man; and in the Brāhmanical Trimūrti and the threefold body of Shiva. The three vestures themselves — Nirmānakāya, Sambhogakāya and Dharmakāya — are called the grandest of the doctrines of esoteric philosophy, and are said to have been accepted in more or less disfigured form by every religious sect and explained quite incorrectly by the orientalists. The criticism that follows is specific rather than general: that in its popular application the threefold body is reduced to Buddha's statue, his teachings and his stupas; that in priestly hands it becomes the Triratna, the formula of taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha; and that popular fancy, by making Buddha ubiquitous, places him on a par with an anthropomorphic god and lowers him to a tribal deity, falling into flat contradictions in Tibet and China as a result.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.4 MB, 17 pages)