Theos-Talk Archives (January 2011 Message tt00194)

Dear friends

My views are:

I find the below quotes by Blavatsky to be quite interesting.

It seems as if the Dzyan Stanzas was written in a language using words and letters, and also sounds and colurs in a manner not seen in many a manuscript.
If such manuscripts have been seen, someone must have heard of them - well unless they for years have been guarded by certain persons who know that it is important to keep their words a secret - 

Because as Blavatsky said: 
"There were portions of the Secret science that for incalculable ages had to remain concealed from the profane gaze. But this was because to impart to the unprepared multitude secrets of such tremendous importance, was equivalent to giving a child a lighted candle in a powder magazine."  (SD, vol I, p. xxxv)


Here we have the quotes on Dzyan Stanzas:
"H. P. Blavatsky wrote:
* In some MSS. notes before us, written by Gelong (priest) Thango-pa Chhe-go-mo, it is said: âThe few Roman Catholic missionaries who have visited our land (under protest) in the last century and have repaid our hospitality by turning our sacred literature into ridicule, have shown little discretion and still less knowledge. It is true that the Sacred Canon of the Tibetans, the Bkah-hgyur and Bstan-hgyur, comprises 1707 distinct worksâ1083 public and 624 secret volumes, the former being composed of 350 and the latter of 77 volumes folio. May we humbly invite the good missionaries, however, to tell us when they ever succeeded in getting a glimpse of the last-named secret folios? Had they even by chance seen them I can assure the Western Pandits that these manuscripts and folios could never be understood even by a born Tibetan without a key (a) to their peculiar characters, and (b) to their hidden meaning. In our system every description of locality is figurative, every name and word purposely veiled; and one has first to study the mode of deciphering and then to learn the equivalent secret terms and symbols for nearly every word of the religious language. The Egyptian enchorial or hieratic system is childâs play to our sacerdotal puzzles.â
http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v14/mb_007.htm



H. P. Blavatsky wrote in The Voice of Silence:
"The work from which I here translate forms part of the same series as that from which the "Stanzas" of the Book of Dzyan were taken, on which the Secret Doctrine is based. Together with the great mystic work called ParamÃrtha, which, the legend of NÃgÃrjuna tells us, was delivered to the great Arhat by the Nagas or "Serpents" (in truth a name given to the ancient Initiates), the "Book of the Golden Precepts" claims the same origin. Yet its maxims and ideas, however noble and original, are often found under different forms in Sanskrit works, such as the Dnyaneshwari, that superb mystic treatise in which Krishna describes to Arjuna in glowing colours the condition of a fully illumined Yogi; and again in certain Upanishads. This is but natural, since most, if not all, of the greatest Arhats, the first followers of Gautama Buddha 
were Hindus and Aryans, not Mongolians, especially those who emigrated into Tibet. The works left by Aryasanga alone are very numerous. 

The original Precepts are engraved on thin oblong squares; copies very often on discs. These discs, or plates, are generally preserved on the altars of the temples attached to centres where the so-called "contemplative" or MahÃyÃna (YogachÃrya) schools are established. They are written variously, sometimes in Tibetan but mostly in ideographs. The sacerdotal language (Senzar), besides an alphabet of its own, may be rendered in several modes of writing in cypher characters, which partake more of the nature of ideographs than of syllables. Another method (lug, in Tibetan) is to use the numerals and colours, each of which corresponds to a letter of the Tibetan alphabet (thirty simple and seventy-four compound letters) thus forming a complete cryptographic alphabet. When the ideographs are used there is a definite mode of reading the text; as in this case the symbols and signs used in astrology, namely the twelve zodiacal animals and the seven primary colours, each a triplet in shade, i.e. the light, the primary, and the darkâstand for the thirty-three letters of the simple alphabet, for words and sentences. For in this method, the twelve "animals" five times repeated and coupled with the five elements and the seven colours, furnish a whole alphabet composed of sixty sacred letters and twelve signs. A sign placed at the beginning of the text determines whether the reader has to spell it according to the Indian mode, when every word is simply a Sanskrit adaptation, or according to the Chinese principle of reading the ideographs. The easiest way however, is that which allows the reader to use no special, or any language he likes, as the signs and symbols were, like the Arabian numerals or figures,  

common and international property among initiated mystics and their followers. The same peculiarity is characteristic of one of the Chinese modes of writing, which can be read with equal facility by any one acquainted with the character: for instance, a Japanese can read it in his own language as readily as a Chinaman in his. 

The Book of the Golden Preceptsâsome of which are pre-Buddhistic while others belong to a later dateâcontains about ninety distinct little treatises. Of these I learnt thirty-nine by heart, years ago. To translate the rest, I should have to resort to notes scattered among a too large number of papers and memoranda collected for the last twenty years and never put in order, to make of it by any means an easy task. Nor could they be all translated and given to a world too selfish and too much attached to objects of sense to be in any way prepared to receive such exalted ethics in the right spirit. For, unless a man perseveres seriously in the pursuit of self-knowledge, he will never lend a willing ear to advice of this nature. 

And yet such ethics fill volumes upon volumes in Eastern literature, especially in the Upanishads. "Kill out all desire of life," says Krishna to Arjuna. That desire lingers only in the body, the vehicle of the embodied Self, not in the SELF which is "eternal, indestructible, which kills not nor is it killed" (Katha Upanishad). "Kill out sensation," teaches Sutta NipÃta; "look alike on pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat." Again, "Seek shelter in the eternal alone" (ibid). "Destroy the sense of separateness," repeats Krishna under every form. "The Mind (Manas) which follows the rambling senses, makes the Soul (Buddhi) as helpless as the boat which the wind leads astray upon the waters" (Bhagavatgita II. 70).

Therefore it has been thought better to make a judicious selection only from those treatises which will best suit the few real mystics in the Theosophical Society, and which are sure to answer their needs. It is only these who will appreciate these words of Krishna-Christos, the "Higher Self":â

"Sages do not grieve for the living nor the dead. Never did I not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men; nor will any one of us ever hereafter cease to be." (Bhagavatgita II. 27). 

In this translation, I have done my best to preserve the poetical beauty of language and imagery which characterise the original. How far this effort has been successful, is for the reader to judge."
(The Voice of Silence, p. VIII-X)
http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/Avoice%20of.htm



See also Secret Doctrine Vol. p. 310:
" The many-sided facets of the mystery language have led to the adoption of widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals. It is they, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church, e.g., the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the Resurrection; the seven capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The seven keys to the mystery tongue, however, having always been in the keeping of the highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity, it is only the partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of some early Church Fathers â ex-initiates of the Temples â into the hands of the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery."
http://www.phx-ult-lodge.org/SDVolume_I.htm



So it seems that the knowledge of this Mystery Language is quote important, when one wants to understand how to read or interpret Dzyan Stanzas and the various ideograms given in them as well as elsewhere around the world. It also seems that the secret protects it self. The Dzyan Stanzas is only given to the Initiated it seems.
I must be so, that, the initiated do not usually go around giving small children a lighted candle in a powder magazine.





M. Sufilight


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