How Theosophy Rekindled True Brotherhood in India

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, each point carrying its page number. The claim in the title is a specific historical one — that the seeds of the true brotherhood of man, not of brother-religionists or sectarians only, had been sown on the sacred soil of India — and the evidence offered for it is a rapprochement between Brahmin and Buddhist theosophists.

The central section is an argument about even-handedness, and it is put as a challenge rather than a complaint. No theosophist, she writes, has ever spoken against the teachings of Christ, any more than against those of Krishna, Buddha or Shankaracharya. But if Europeans cry out against Brahmanical tyranny, against caste, against infant and widow marriage, and call every religious dogmatic rule idiotic, pernicious and devilish — why should theosophists not denounce the abuses and defects of Christian theology and sacerdotalism in the same terms? The particular charge she brings against the missionaries is that they degrade the pure ethics of Christ by their attitude to the people they work among, proselytising and enticing them to what she calls an inferior kind of worship. The last part of the file changes tone entirely: a section headed Is the Sun of India's glory set never to rise again? introduces a piece signed K.P.B. and described as a strange revery — a reflective, almost elegiac passage rather than an argument, which gives the file its close. A page of suggested reading from this series follows.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.8 MB, 13 pages)