Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"It is by the spirit of the teachings of both Buddha and Pythagoras, that we can so easily recognize the identity of their doctrines. The all-pervading universal soul, the Anima Mundi, is Nirvana; and Buddha, as a generic name, is the anthropomorphized monad of Pythagoras. When resting in Nirvana, the final bliss, Buddha is the [...]

"The spirits of creatures, the Pythagoreans hold, who are emanations of the most sublimated portions of ether, emanations, BREATHS, but not forms. Ether is incorruptible, all philosophers agree in that; and what is incorruptible is so far from being annihilated when it gets rid of the form, that it lays a good claim to IMMORTALITY. [...]

"It is upon this Buddhist doctrine that the Pythagoreans grounded the principle tenets of their philosophy. "Can that spirit, which gives life and motion, and partakes of the nature of light, be reduced to non-entity?", they ask. "Can that sensitive spirit in brutes which exercises memory, one of the rational faculties, die, and become nothing?" [...]

""Whoever is unacquainted with my law", says Buddha, "and dies in that state, must return to the earth till he becomes a perfect Samanean. To achieve this object, he must destroy within himself the trinity of Maya. He must extinguish his passions, unite and identify himself with the law (the teaching of the secret doctrine), [...]

"Irenaeus took it into his head to establish a new doctrine from the ruins of Plato's older Academy. his doctrine of God being the universal mind diffused through all things, underlies all ancient philosophies. The Buddhistic tenets which can never be better comprehended than when studying the Pythagorean philosophy - its faithful reflection - are [...]

"Every translator of Plato's works remarked the strange similarity between the philosophy of the esotericists and the Christian doctrines, and each of them has tried to interpret it in accordance with his own religious feelings. So Cory, in his Ancient Fragments, tries to prove that it is but an outward resemblance; and does his best [...]

"Those who can discern the true spirit of Plato's philosophy, will hardly be satisfied with the estimate of the same which Jowett lays before his readers. He tells us that the influence exercised upon posterity by the Timaeus is partly due to a misunderstanding of the doctrine of its author by the Neo-platonists. He would [...]

"The speculations of Plato, in the Banquet, on the creation of the primordial men, and the essay on Cosmogony in the Timaeus, must be taken allegorically, if we accept them at all. It is this hidden Pythagorean meaning in Timaeus, Cratylus, and Parmenides, and a few other trilogies and dialogues, that the Neo-platonists ventured to [...]

"Such is the insufficient sketch of elemental beings void of divine spirit, given by one whom many with reason believed to know more than he was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public. In the following chapter we will contrive to explain some of the esoteric speculations of the initiates of the [...]

"Man is arrogant in proportion of his ignorance", he makes the wise Mejnour say to Glyndon. "For several ages he saw in the countless worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless ocean, only the petty candles...that Providence has been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night [...]