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The Truth About Madame Blavatsky.

By Walter A. Carrithers

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II. H.P.B.s WRITINGS

In her great works, Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Voice of the Silence et al., H. P. Blavatsky asserted that she was, under the instruction of certain Tibetan Initiates, giving to the Western World certain essential tenets of a great secret tradition, hitherto partially concealed under the bonds of arcane darkness. As a reviewer summarizes it, you declare this to be sheer "poppycock" and insist that her literary production is gross plagiarism when not crass invention.

But your hypothesis is tenable only if we limit our considerations to your own evidence -- and avoid any other!

The Oxford scholar, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, M.A., D.LITT., B.S.C., in his Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford University Press, 1925) page 7, writes, "The late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (9) was of the opinion that, despite the adverse criticisms directed against H. P. Blavatsky’s works, there is adequate internal evidence in them of their author’s intimate acquaintance with the higher lamaistic teachings, into which she claimed to have been initiated."

William Emmette Coleman in his laborious and absurd lucubrations claimed to have proved that H.P.B.’s writings were an ignorant patchwork of piracy -- and Arthur Lillie, another self-styled "authority," long ago "proved" her to be "unacquainted with even the bare rudiments of real Buddhism." It is sad that you would cite these theorists after sixty years of contrary evidence.

The Oxford scholar, and great Japanese authority on Mahayana Buddhism, Professor D. T. Suzuki, is not the only qualified Orientalist who has negated those tattered Victorian "critics"!  (10)

In 1925, Basil Crump (for eleven years Editor of The London Law Times) and Alice Leighton Cleather (one of the twelve private students of H. P. Blavatsky) were privileged to come into close touch with His Holiness the Tashi Lama of Tibet, on the occasion of His visit to Peking, China.  (11)   At His personal request, they undertook the republication of H.P.B.’s The Voice of the Silence, endorsed by His Holiness as "...the only true exposition in English of the great Heart Doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism." (12)   With the assistance of His Excellency, Wang Ming Ching, one of the Tashi Lama’s private secretaries, they re-issued the original text, prefaced by a note in the personal script of His Holiness. (13)

You have avoided every one of these extremely pertinent facts -- apparently because they do not coincide with the clever plot of your interesting story book!!