The Theosophical Society: Mission and Future

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emile-Louis Burnouf · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 22 pages

Twenty-two pages with a contents page of key concepts and a frontispiece by Vitaly Urzhumov. *It is an exchange with a scholar rather than with a critic*: Émile-Louis Burnouf, the French Sanskritist and Indologist, is given the first and longer part, and Blavatsky answers.

Burnouf's position is put first and is a careful one. True Buddhism, he argues, is neither a sect nor a religion; it is rather a moral and intellectual reform, which excludes no belief but adopts none. What is called Buddhism today, however, is a rather dogmatic religion, split into many and heterogeneous sects — so the historical religion and the original reform have to be told apart before anything useful can be said about either. The distinction matters to the theosophical case because the same charge could be brought against the Society: that whatever it began as, it becomes a sect the moment it acquires members and officers. Blavatsky's reply, in the second part, takes his framework and applies it to her own subject. Like true Buddhism, she argues, theosophy asserts and maintains the truth common to all religions — pure truth undefiled by the concretions of ages of human passions and needs — and unveils its majesty to all thinking men. The claim is thus that theosophy stands to the religions as Burnouf's original Buddhism stands to the sects that grew from it: not one more of them, but the thing they have in common. Because the file gives a professional Orientalist his say at length before answering him, it is one of the better places on the site to see the theosophical position tested against scholarship rather than against hostility.

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