A Master of Wisdom on the Divine Self, Seen by Self

A Himalayan Master of Wisdom · The Masters Speak Series · 7 pages

Seven pages from Mahatma Letter 59 in the third combined edition, with a contents page and central ideas at the front and a frontispiece by Lady Yana Dhyana. It is a companion to A Master of Wisdom on Higher Metaphysics in this same section, taking up the doctrine that letter only half-expounds.

The occasion is Sinnett's arrival at what the letter calls the centre of modern Buddhistic exegesis, in personal relations with its clever commentators — from whom, it adds, the holy Devas deliver us. The criticism that follows is directed at Rhys Davids and Lillie and at what their speculations are said to reveal: that the more one reads them, the less one can believe the unregenerate Western mind will ever reach the core of these doctrines. The image used for their position is the one the file is remembered for — that like the Cape settlers, they lived over diamond mines without suspecting it. Having said so, the letter decides that it is nonetheless worth testing the intuitions of the London members by half-expounding one or two mysteries and leaving them to complete the chain themselves. The doctrine so expounded is the identity of the two Avalokiteshvaras. Avalokiteshvara is described as both the unmanifested Father and the manifested Son, the second proceeding from and identical with the first — glossed as Parabrahm and Jīvātman, the universal and the individualised seventh principle in man, the passive and the active. Setting the two under one name is the point: the file argues that the distinction between First and Second Logos, and between the divine Self and the self that sees it, is a distinction within one thing rather than between two.

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