Origin and Source of the Secret Doctrine

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages opening with an abstract that answers, more directly than anywhere else on the site, the question of *where The Secret Doctrine actually came from*. Anyone who has wondered what the Book of Dzyan is supposed to be should read the abstract first; it is short and states the whole position.

The Book of Dzyan is described as the first volume of Commentaries upon the seven secret folios of Kiu-te, together with a glossary of the public works of the same name. The thirty-five volumes of Kiu-te, she says, ought to be called the popularised version of the Secret Doctrine — and she is blunt about their quality: they are full of myths, blinds and errors. The fourteen volumes of Commentaries are the other thing entirely: with their translations, annotations and glossaries of occult terms, worked out from one small archaic folio called the Book of the Secret Wisdom of the World, they contain a digest of all the occult sciences. It is from the texts of all these works, she states plainly, that The Secret Doctrine was given in 1888. The body of the file then sets out the relation between the two bodies of material in the way likely to matter most to a scholar. The Books of Kiu-te are comparatively modern, edited within the last millennium, whereas the earliest volumes of the Commentaries are of untold antiquity, and the Commentaries stand to the Kiu-te volumes as the Chaldeo-Jewish Kabbalah stands to the Mosaic books. Her practical advice follows from that: no student, unless very advanced, would be benefited by reading the exoteric volumes, since they must be read with a key to their meaning and that key can only be found in the Commentaries — with a further warning that some comparatively modern works are positively injurious even to a fair comprehension of exoteric Buddhism.

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