“When we read the true story of Buddha and Buddhism, by Muller, and the enthusiastic opinions of both expressed by Barthelemy St. Hilaire, and Laboulaye; and when, finally, a Popish missionary, an eyewitness, and one who least of all can be accused of partiality to the Buddhists – the Abbe Huc, we mean – finds occasion for nothing but admiration for the high individual character of these “devil-worshippers”; we must consider Sakya-Muni’s philosophy as something more than the religion of fetishism and atheism, which the Catholics would have us believe it. Huc was a missionary and it was his first duty to regard Buddhism as no better than an outgrowth of the worship of Satan. The poor Abbe was struck off the list of missionaries at Rome, after his book of travels was published. This illustrates how little we may expect to learn the truth about the religions of other people, through missionaries, when their accounts are first revised by the superior ecclesiastical authorities, and the former severely punished for telling the truth.
When these men who have been and still are often termed “the obscene ascetics”, the devotees of different sects of India in short, generally termed “Yogi”, was asked by Marco Polo, “how it comes that they are not ashamed to go stark naked as they do”, they answered the inquirer of the thirteenth century as a missionary of the nineteenth was answered. “We go naked”, they say, “because naked we came into the world, and we desire to have nothing about us that is of this world. Moreover, we have no sin of the flesh to be conscious of, and therefore, we are not ashamed of our nakedness any more than you are to show your hand or your face. You who are conscious of the sins of the flesh, do well to have shame, and to cover your nakedness.”
One could make a curious list of the excuses and explanations of the clergy to account for similarities daily discovered between Romanism and heathen religions. Yet the summary would invariably lead to one sweeping claim: The doctrines of Christianity were plagiarized by the Pagans the world over! Plato and his older Academy stole the ideas from the Christian revelation – said the Alexandrian Fathers! The Brahmans and Manu borrowed from the Jesuit missionaries, and the Bhagavad-Gita was the production of Father Calmet, who transformed Christ and John into Christna and Arjuna to fit the Hindu mind! The trifling fact that Buddhism and Platonism both antedate Christianity, and the Vedas had already degenerated into Brahmanism before the days of Moses, makes no difference.
The same with regard to Apollonius of Tyana. Although his thaumaturgical powers could not be denied in the face of the testimony of emperors, their courts, and the population of several cities; and although few of these had ever heard of the Nazarene prophet whose “miracles” had been witnessed by a few apostles only, whose very individualities remain to this day a problem in history, yet Apollonius has to be accepted as the “monkey of Christ”.
If of really pious, good, and honest men, many are yet found among the Catholic, Greek, and Protestant clergy, whose sincere faith has the best of their reasoning powers, and who having never been among heathen populations, are unjust only through ignorance, it is not so with the missionaries. The invariable subterfuge of the latter is to attribute to demonolatry the really Christ-like life of the Hindu and Buddhist ascetics and many of the lamas. Years of sojourn among “heathen” nations, in China, Tartary, Tibet, and Hindustan have furnished them with ample evidence how unjustly the so-called idolators have been slandered. The missionaries have not even the excuse of sincere faith to give the world that they mislead; and, with very few exceptions, one may boldly paraphrase the remark made by Garibaldi, and say that: “A priest knows himself to be an impostor, unless he be a fool, or have been taught to lie, from boyhood.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 