Course XXVII comparative religion

Teaching 19: Buddhism

Indian religion had degenerated in such a way that became mere external idolatry.

Superior castes tyrannized the people infusing religious terror into them. Even images of gods, with awful aspect, monstrous heads and macabre postures did not infuse love or veneration but superstition and panic.

Just as after a tremendous storm the waters become quiet and the sun shines, so amid Hindu decadence, the Buddha’s religion emerges on the firmament of the world like a radiant sun.

The Aryan religion of the Hindu, too much permeated by materialism, was to be substituted for a new monotheistic religion.

Certainly, this awakened the heart of the ancient Vedic religion, which seeing itself whipped by the new faith, tried to recover its pristine form; but also it left a deep groove in the world of universal religions.

Buddhism is so closely linked with the figure of its founder that it is impossible to speak of the one not remembering the other.

In Kapilavastu, small Punjabi kingdom, prince Siddhartha, ninth incarnation of god Vishnu, is born. Devaki Maya, his mother, dies during the delivery, and the king, his father, and sages of the kingdom take care of him. He grows up being unaware of miseries of the word, very comfortable in his palace. At the age of twenty, he marries a neighbor princess, and very soon becomes father of a little body.

But an infinite doubt stirs the mind of this beautiful prince: he desires to know life such as it is.

Therefore, unobserved, one day gets out of his palace and as soon as he sees men suffering, getting older and dying, decides to quit his crown and his family to go in search of the secret of the eternal happiness.

The prince becomes a Sannyasi, and begging bread, goes through dusty roads in search of the Arcane.

He follows the path of study and knowledge; tries Tantric Yoga’s exercises, by penitence reduces his body to a skeleton and passes through trials of mystical love, but he does not find the secret. It is then when, under the holy Bo tree, he receives the highest Initiation and discovers the reason of human suffering; attachment is cause of pain in lifetime, of death and of rebirth. As a being is devoid of desires and renunciation is absolute, then he does not suffer or come any more to Earth, and finds eternal happiness by returning to the Non-Absolute.

>From that day on, he begins his mission on Earth: teaching men the path to happiness, the right path.

The simple Buddhism stands up and drags the multitude as a reaction produced in a religious consciousness harassed by many symbols, ceremonies and laws.

Wherever the Buddha goes, there are thousands of adepts. And could one not to follow such clear and simple religion?

He said, men are all equal, and gave a deadly blow to Hinduism strongly adhered to caste division. He said, God is the essence of everything, and threw down and killed millenary gods at one stroke. He said man should do only a right work; so he destroyed another basic belief of the ancient religion, which founded the fruit of future life rather in divine help than in right behavior.

In Buddha’s view, celibacy was the summit of perfection; that is why columns of monks went behind him after quitting everything in the world in order to hear and practice his word. One day, his own son would come and ask to be admitted to his community.

You cannot imagine how much hatred the Buddha’s doctrine produced among Brahmans. But this hatred emerged along with the desire of competing with him; this was like a Hindu Counter-Reformation.

Among different Hindu sects, men emerged that understood that such an enlightened man and such an useful doctrine could be attacked only by using the same weapons. They understood the need of coming back to the early source of their religion, of drinking in Vedic pages those eternal truths they had forgotten and of applying and professing them again in their temples and ceremonies. In short: Buddhism awakened the conscience of India, brought a word of freedom that until then had felt slaves, and encouraged a rehabilitation of the early Vedas.

But Buddhism was not destined to settle in India. After Buddha’s death at the age of eighty in the arms of this disciple Ananda, again fights began and did not end until two generations later, when the Chatrias, guided by Brahmans, destroyed all Buddhists in India and this religion in its entire soil. But the blood of martyrs is always seed of new triumphs; the Buddha’s religion was not dead: it had been just transplanted to other more fertile lands in need of spiritual help.

Teaching 20: Yellow Buddhism

250 years before Jesus Christ, certain Buddhist missionaries went into China to preach the doctrine of the Exalted One.

There they were very kindly admitted, and very soon the new doctrine fused together with old extant religions.

The entire building of the new religion was erected upon the simple doctrine of the Buddha, with its dogmas, its multitude of gods, its ceremonies and monasteries, and the divine Siddhartha at the top of them.

Countless Initiates of Fire disseminated the Buddhist religion, offering to common people esoteric teachings behind veils of symbols and images.

Innumerable monasteries were erected and they were cradle of sages, faithful preservers of ancient texts and scientific books.

Those monks dug their cells in the very heart of the mountain and stayed there like lonely birds, feeding just by prayer and Eternal Wisdom. But a centre was necessary, an inaccessible place to common people, where the chosen could keep zealously the secrets of science and those of material and spiritual life.

Therefore they chose the mountains of Tibet, the most inaccessible and hidden to human eyes. There none would see them and rumors of the world, drums of war or conflictive changes of civilization would not reach them.

So Shambhala, the sublime city of Lhassa, is founded.

Countless monks stayed there preserving the Buddha’s esoteric doctrine in its pristine purity.

In Tibet, a theocratic worship, under religious power, is formed, with its mystical monks devoted to the external worship. But just as everything declines, so spiritual life declined in Tibet and those monks practiced black magic until a time when an exalted being, called Tutuguta, intended to reform it.

Bloody fights ensued, with one sector prevailing over the other, and finally, after the triumph of good, the wicked monks were defeated.

Tibet remains unchanged until today. It keeps always its religion intangible. Yellow-cap Lamas preserve the esoteric doctrine. An exalted being leads them: the Dalai Lama, taken as the very expression of God. Helene Petrovna Blavatsky tells in “Isis Unveiled” she witnessed in a Buddhist monastery the transmigration of the spirit of an old Dalai Lama to the body of a boy two years old.

Red-cap Lamas are those who lost the true doctrine and practice black magic and hoax.

Bernad, an eminent American physician, recently back from Tibet, where he could stay for three years in contact with Lamas and the Tibetan people, tells how those monks, far away of the world, detached of any civilization, had kept the religious concept pure, and how perfectly they know certain physical laws so far unknown to sages of our days, and explains how they practice levitation, telepathy, and long travels in astral body, and how they are able to stop beats of the heart and to regulate blood circulation.

As an oasis in the middle of the world, Tibet, navel of the world, center of force in our planet, has kept an ancient religion in its pristine power and beauty.

Teaching 21: The Germans

A tribe of pure Aryans, survivors of the great migration hecatomb, lived as if they were lost in the immense snowy steppes of Nordic countries.

They were red-haired men, of sharp and metallic gaze like steel, tall and handsome; their piercing cries resounded in the vastness of glacial deserts.

They inherited from their Aryan parents their worship to divine Nature and beautified it by means of legends and poems.

Germans are brothers of these peoples from the north of Europe; they preserve the type, worship and warlike tradition.

The epic of these peoples is written on the Scandinavian Edda, which is their holy book. You should not mistake it for Eddas written by Snorri Sturlesson about 1200.

Alphadur is the only god born of the boreal light on luminous skies. Thor or Donar is god of power; Odin is god of wisdom; and Freyr is god of kindness. They are the Scandinavian trinity.

In the course of times, Odin prevails over the rest of gods and becomes Wotan, god and lord of sky and earth, another Jupiter that steadily rules over destinies of gods, men and demons.

His enemy is Surtur, the black Satan of earth and abysses, with a cold and implacable space between them.

Friga is Wotan’s wife, symbol of fertilization, holy home and worthy matrimony.

Their sons are the shining Azas, thirty-two brave warriors that defend the Walhalla. They fight against Imes and his people, the giants of ice.

You notice similar symbols in other people describing a war waged between Aryans and Atlanteans.

There is a war between heaven and earth, between giants and gods. Thor, god of lightening, Odin’s first-born son, and Bora, god of courage, fight in this great war and destroy those immense figures of ice.

Earth becomes a river of blood, and a new race shows up on it. From the cut head of Imes, the human mate comes into being: Aske and Ambla.

Nine shining virgins, the far-sighted Walkiries are born; they announce the combat and on their white horses they lead the dead victor, the fallen soldier to the blissful abode of Walhala. They see destiny of men and lead always to victory.

In his wonderful music drama “Ring of the Nibelungs”, Wagner refers to such cosmogonic legend.

Combat was the highest religious worship to these savage peoples who lived in icebound jungles and attacked in an unstoppable way because they knew that after death they would be taken to paradise on a white steed by those warriors-goddesses.

Worship was held in the jungle, under a holy ilex or ash tree; ilex was devotes to ancestors and ash tree to gods.

There, a wild pythoness in white, on the light of full moon, invoked gods and established day and hour of the combat. She prevailed over chiefs of the clan, and her word was absolute and sacred.

Sometimes Ferni, a fierce wolf, tied by gods to a terrible chain, howled amid thunders and lightening, claiming for human blood; then they sacrificed human victims to placate the wrath of this dreadful wolf.

On the altar of white stone, the priestess opened the chest of young soldiers chosen for martyrdom.

But this people had to perish and this religion had to end, pushed by Roman eagles and Christian cross.

This was foretold by their holy books when they prophesized that the wicked Lake would destroy and defeat gods, Walhala would sink in flames, and everything would be again in ruins.

This image refers to a cosmic re-absorption the day of universal rest, but also can be applied to a fall of these pure Aryan beliefs.

Teaching 22: The Gauls

Celts form the fourth Aryan race. It is very difficult to determine the origin of it, since it is a part of the early Aryan race that had remained uncontaminated in the centre of Europe.

Celts gave place to Greeks, Macedonians and Carthaginians; these were beautiful, strong, warlike and versatile peoples that loved Nature.

It is very dubious the origin of Romans because Etruscans, ancient remnants of Iranians, and Sabines, inhabitants of Latium, originally were Aryan Semites, but Italic peoples, of pure Celtic race, lived in Sicily, throughout the coast of Calabria, who in the course of times made flourish their lands and, by mixing with other peoples, founded the Roman caste. That is why the esoteric annals include Romans and their religion among Celts.

These people extended throughout the Atlantic coast of Spain, invaded Gallia and passed to British Islands.

Gauls, of pure Celtic race, extended their lands from northern Italy until the Ocean and Rhin.

It was difficult the arrival of other peoples there because of thick forests, virgin jungles, torrential rivers, impassable ways-through, long winters and numerous wild animals. Even Gauls, deprived of any contact and forced to strive for their existence and preservation, remained in a half-savage state.

A clan was supreme authority, or rather, family concept and experience of the elders.

Since they lived by hunting and fishing, they worshipped images of those animals and worn them as amulets, along with feathers, bones, et cetera.

They are properly described by Pliny: their aspect was fierce and their gaze was grim, used stones and coarse spears for their defense, and his savage and guttural cries scared and drove away the enemy army.

Priestly or Druidical caste was the most representative of Gauls. Since their childhood they were devoted to the goddess of war. They lived detached from their parents, reared by priests, and instructed in the art of war and manipulation of weapons.

As they became adults, the entire people served and revered them. In the beginning of spring, when the snow melted away, or more exactly, after the first full moon of March, it was time to fight.

They led their people like gods-warriors. Battles took place among their own tribes or all together against barbarians of the other shore of the Rhin. Eventually Romans defeated them.

Devoid of mythology, they worshipped Nature, trees, mountains, rivers and, over all, their ancestors.

They had a house of virgins devoted to serve in the temple; they worshipped and constantly revered the Moon.

During full moons, they got out in white, forming long rows, singing hymns and beseeching help. The oldest and more expert virgin became a pythoness; she foretold by entrails of newly-sacrificed birds the future of tribes, destiny of peoples, hour of war, and signs of blessing or curse.

Memory of this religion and culture, acquired in the course of time, remained hidden as Christianity arrived.

But since nothing dies and everything renews itself, the very Christians that had consigned it to oblivion, exposed it during the Renaissance, and then religions were totally unburied, studied and loved.

A civilization with wonderful cities, called today Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, et cetera, flourished in the country of the Gauls.

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