Subba Row Defends Esoteric Buddhism

Tallapragada Subba Row · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 35 pages

Thirty-five pages, opened by historical background from Boris de Zirkoff and illustrated by Zaw Zaw Aung, from the Collected Writings volume V, pages 134 to 138. *It belongs to the same controversy as three other files in this section — the argument set off by A.P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism* — and it is the Indian side of it.

The document being answered is A Letter Addressed to the Fellows of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, by the President and a Vice-President of the Lodge, issued in December 1883 by Dr Anna Kingsford and her collaborator Edward Maitland, which embodied a severe criticism of the teachings in Sinnett's book. Kingsford is the subject of Blavatsky's warm obituary elsewhere in this section, so a reader meeting both files gets an unusually rounded picture of a disagreement between people who respected each other. De Zirkoff's background note settles a question of authorship with a quotation, and it is the liveliest thing in the file. Writing from Adyar to Sinnett in about January 1884, Blavatsky complains that Kingsford can hardly be an infallible seer, or Maitland would not have attributed to Madame Blavatsky a sentence written by the Tiravellum Mahatma — she has the manuscript — and adds, with heavy sarcasm, that she must be deuced clever to have written the Replies in The Theosophist, since she does not understand ten lines of that occult and scientific gibberish. What follows is Subba Row's own defence, taken point by point through the criticisms, and it is the fullest example on the site of a learned Indian theosophist arguing the doctrine on its own ground rather than translating it for a Western audience.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.1 MB, 35 pages)