THEOSOPHY IN ENGLAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 21, 13 September 1889, Page 15

THEOSOPHY IN ENGLAND.

(Ceylon Catholic Messenger )

AM extract from the Birmingham Daily Gazette, under the heading of " Buddhists in Birmingham," which has found its way into the columns of a local cod temporary, and which we reproduce in another column, does not bear on the face of it much information that will be Dew to most of our readers; but in an "esoteric" manner — to quote the jargon of the Theosopliists themselves — it contains evidence of two things, namely, the small number of people there can be in England who know or care anything about Theosophy, and the audacity with which the Theosophistß presume on the English ignorance of Buddhism. If there were any general interest in Theosophy in England, it would be scarcely possible for an editor of an English daily paper to be ignorant — as the editor of the Birmingham Daily Gazette apparently is — of the full exposure which was made of Madame Blavatsky's impostures by the publication of her correspondence with Madame Coloumb, when these two women quarrelled about the division of their dishonest earnings ; nor could anybody who knows anything about Buddhism honestly tell such impudent fibs about it as were told by the Theosophists of Malvern to the representative of the Birmingham journal. It is hardly necessary to tell anybody in Ceylon that it is no part of Buddhism that "a man has several souls, and at least two bodies— an astral and a physical.' 1 This may be Olcottißm or Sinnettism, but it most certainly is not Buddhism, whatever else it may be. Buddhism denies the existence of any soul at all in man and knows nothing whatever of an " astral jJv " distinct from the physical body. Neither is it any part of JbKadbism that Karma " is the holiday enjoyed by souls between one incarnation and the next." Karma, as most of our readers know, means no such thing, but is the sum of our merits and demerits which will be transferred to an animal or to another person after our own existence has been completely annihilated by death. Then just fancy the cool audacity of Madame Blavatsky in telling the good people of England that Buddhists never enter a grog-shop I " Don't ask a

Buddhist to accompany you to a grog-shop ! " No, don't, if your object in so doing be to make a compliment without incurring expense, for it is tan to one that you will be taken at your word. It is not true either that Colonel Olcott was sent to Japan by the Buddhist* of India. There are no Buddhists in India to tend him, and his mission to Japan was a self-imposed one undertaken for his own profit.