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итак, как и следовало ожидать, обманутые невежественные терра заурусы, за свою темноту должны сказать спасибо, конечно же, далеко не в последнюю очередь, наивной привычке лезть за "прояснениями" мифов, как бы это странно не звучало.. к самим породителям этих мифов  ладно, если б "лезть" было б решительно больше некуда, так ведь уже в то время не от кого не скрывались достоверные источники не от кого-нибудь, но от по-настоящему компетентных филологов и религиоведов, не понаслышке знакомых со степенью доказательного потенциала Блаватской, уровнем ее "знаний". у Оксфордского профессора филологии и преподавателя санскрита, Макса Мюллера в "Эзотерическом буддизме" читаем:
I have never met her, though she often promised, or rather threatened, she would meet me face to fact at Oxford. She came to Oxford and preached, I am told, for six hours before a number of young men, but she did not inform me of her presence. At first she treated me almost like a Mahatma, but when there was no response I became, like all Sanskrit scholars, a very untrustworthy authority. I have watched her career for many years from her earliest appearance in America to her death in London last year. She founded her Theosophic Society at New York in 1875. The object of that society was to experiment practically in the occult powers of Nature, and to collect and disseminate among Christians information about Oriental religious philosophies? Nothing could be said against such objects, if only they were taken up honestly, and with the necessary scholarly preparation. Later on, however, new objects were added, namely to spread among the benighted heathen such evidences as to the practical results of Christianity as will at least give both sides of the story to the communities among which missionaries are at work. With this view the society undertook to establish relations with associations and individuals throughout the East, to whom it furnished authenticated reports of the ecclesiastical crimes and misdemeanours, schisms, heresies, controversies and litigations, doctrinal differences and Biblical criticisms and revisions with which the press of Christian Europe and America constantly teems. You may easily imagine what the outcome of such a society would be, and how popular its Black Book would become in India and elsewhere. However, I am quite willing to give Madame Blavatsky credit for good motives, at least at the beginning of her career. Like many people in our time, she was, I believe, in search of a religion which she could honestly embrace.
To India, therefore, she went with some friends, but, unfortunately, with no knowledge of the language, and with very little knowledge of what she might expect to find there, and where she ought to look for native teachers who should initiate her in the mysteries of the sacred lore of the country. That such lore and such mysteries existed she never doubted; and she thought that she had found at last what she wanted in Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder of the Arya-Samaj. His was, no doubt, a remarkable and powerful mind, but he did not understand English; nor did Madame Blavatsky understand either the modern or the ancient languages of the country. Still there sprang up between the two a mutual though mute admiration, and a number of followers soon gathered round this interesting couple. However, this mute admiration did not last long, and when the two began to understand each other better they soon discovered that they could not act together. I am afraid it can no longer be doubted that Dayananda Sarasvati was as deficient in moral straightforwardness as his American pupil. Hence they were both disappointed in each other, and Madame Blavatsky now determined to found her own religious sect - in fact, to found a new religion, based chiefly on the old religions of India.
Unfortunately, she took it into her head that it was incumbent on every founder of a religion to perform miracles, and here it can no longer be denied that she often resorted to the most barefaced tricks and impositions in order to gain adherents in India. In this she succeeded more than she herself could have hoped for. The natives felt flattered by being told that they were the depositaries of ancient wisdom, far more valuable than anything that European philosophy or the Christian religion had ever supplied. The natives are not often flattered in that way, and they naturally swallowed the bait. Others were taken aback by the assurance with which this new prophetess spoke of her intercourse with unseen spirits, of letters flying through the air from Tibet to Bombay, of showers of flowers falling from the ceiling of a dining-room, of saucers disappearing from a tea-tray and being found in a garden, and of voices and noises proceeding from spirits through a mysterious cabinet. You may ask how educated people could have been deceived by such ordinary jugglery; but with some people the power of believing seems to grow with the absurdity of what is to be believed. When I expressed my regret to one of her greatest admirers that Madame Blavatsky should have lowered herself by these vulgar exhibitions, I was told, with an almost startling frankness, that no religion could be founded without miracles, and that a religion, if it was to grow, must be manured. These are the ipsissima verba of one who knew Madame Blavatsky better than anybody else; and after that it was useless for us to discuss this subject any further.
But, as I said before, I am quite willing to allow that Madame Blavatsky started with good intentions, that she saw and was dazzled by a glimmering of truth in various religions of the world, that she believed in the possibility of a mystic union of the soul with God, and that she was most anxious to discover in a large number of books traces of that theosophic intuition which re-unites human nature with the Divine. Unfortunately, she was without the tools to dig for those treasures in the ancient literature of the world, and her mistakes in quoting from Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin would be amusing if they did not appeal to our sympathy rather for a woman who thought that she could fly though she had no wings, not even those of Icarus.
Her book, called Isis Unveiled, in two volumes of more than 600 pages each, bristling with notes and references to every kind of authority, both wise and foolish, shows an immense amount of drudgery and misdirected ingenuity. To quote her blunders would be endless. Of what character they are will be seen when I quote what she says about the serpent being the good or the evil spirit. [i.133.] ‘In this case,’ she writes, ‘the serpent is the Agathodaimon, the good spirit; in its opposite aspect it is the Kakothodaimon, the bad one.’ I believe that this mistake, when I pointed it out to an undergraduate friend of mine at Oxford, saved him from enrolling himself as an Esoteric Buddhist. Again, speaking as if she knew the whole of Vedic literature, she says: [ii.80.] ‘Certainly, nowhere in the Veda can be found the coarseness and downright immorality of language that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.’
It is very difficult, when you deal with ancient races who go about almost naked, to decide what is immodest and what is not. But, speaking not altogether without book, I may say that the Veda does contain certain passages which would not bear translation into English.
Again, what shall we say to the argument that the Vedas must have been composed before the Deluge, because the deluge is not mentioned in them? [ii.727.] Now, first of all, the Deluge is mentioned in the Brahmana of the Yagur-veda, and Madame Blavatsky knows it; and secondly, are we really to suppose that every book which does not mention the Deluge was written before the Deluge? What an enormous library of antediluvian books we should possess! M. Jacolliot, as usual, outbids Madame Blavatsky. He writes:
"The Vedas and Manu, those monuments of old Asiatic thought, existed far earlier than the diluvian period; this is an incontrovertible fact, having all the value of an historical truth, for, besides the tradition which shows Vishnu himself as saving the Vedas from the Deluge - a tradition which, notwithstanding its legendary form, must certainly rest upon a real fact - it has been remarked that neither of these sacred books mentions the cataclysm, while the Puranas and the Mahabharata describe it with the minutest detail, which is a proof of the priority of the former. The Vedas certainly would never have failed to contain a few hymns on the terrible disaster which, of all other natural manifestations, must have struck the imagination of the people who witnessed it."
Such hymns could only have been written by Noah or by Manu, and we possess, unfortunately, no poetic relics of either of these poets, not even in the Veda. I must quote no more, nor is more evidence wanted, to show that Madame Blavatsky and her immediate followers were simply without bricks and mortar when they endeavoured to erect the lofty structure which they had conceived in their minds. I give full credit to her good intentions; at least at first. I readily acknowledge her indefatigable industry. She began life as an enthusiast; but enthusiasts, as Goethe says, after they have come to know the world, and have been deceived by the world, are apt to become deceivers themselves.
No one can study Buddhism unless he learns Sanskrit and Pali, so as to be able to read the canonical books, and at all events to spell the names correctly. Madame Blavatsky would do neither, though she was quite clever enough, if she had chosen, to have learnt Sanskrit or Pali. But even her informants must have been almost entirely ignorant of these languages, or they must have practised on her credulity in a most shameless manner.
I simply say that modern India is the worst country for studying Buddhism. India is, no doubt, the birthplace of Buddha and of Buddhism. But Buddhism, as a popular religion, has vanished from India, so that the religious census of the country knows hardly of any Buddhists, except in Ceylon and in some districts bordering on Tibet or Burmah. As no Buddhist teachers could be found in Bombay or Calcutta, some imaginary beings had to be created by Madame Blavatsky and located safely in Tibet, as yet the most inaccessible country in the world. Madame Blavatsky’s powers of creation were very great, whether she wished to have intercourse with Mahatmas, astral bodies, or ghosts of any kind. ( Esoteric Buddhism by F. Max Muller)
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