Henry Steel OlcottReseñas

BUDDHIST CATECHISM

PREFACE

TO THE THIRTY-THIRD EDITION

IN the working out of my original plan, I have added
more questions and answers in the text of each nevw
English edition of the Catechism, leaving it to its
translators to render them into whichever of the other
vernaculars they may be working in. The unpretending
aim in view is to give so succinct and yet
comprehensive a digest of Buddhistic history, ethics
and philosophy as to enable beginners to understand
and appreciate the noble ideal taught by the Buddha,
and thus make it easier for them to follow out the
Pharma in its details. In the present edition a great
many new questions and answers have been introduced,
while the matter has been grouped within five
categories, viz.: (1) The Life of tha Buddha; (2) the
Doctrine; (3) the Sangha, or monastic order; (4) a
brief history of Buddhism, its Councils and
propaganda ; (5) some reconciliation of Buddhism with
science. This, it is believed, will largely increase the
value of the little book, and make it even more
suitable for use in Buddhist schools, of which, in
Ceylon, over one hundred have already been opened
by the Sinhalese people under the general supervision
of the Theosophical Society. In preparing this edition
I have received valuable help from some of my oldest
and best qualified Sinhalese colleaguos. The original
edition was gone over with me word by word, by that
eminent scholar and bhikkhu, H. Sumangala,
Pradhana Nayaka, and the Assistant Principal of his
Pali College at Colombo, Hyeyantuduve Anunayaka
Terunnanse; and the High Priest has also kindly
sorutinised the present revision and given me invaluable
points to embody. It has the merit, therefore, of
being a fair presentation of the Buddhism of the
"Southern Church," chiefly derived froin first-hand
sources. The Catechism has been published in twenty
languages, mainly by Buddhists, for Budahists.

OLD DIARY LEAVES

INTRODUCTION

THE Diary from which the present series of chapters
has been compiled was opened in January, 1878,
three years after the formation of the Theosophical
Society at New York, by the late Madame Blavatsky
myself, and a few others, and has been systematically
kept up ever since. Under the title, " Old
Diary Leaves: The True History of the Theosophical
Society," a volume, with illustrations, was
published in the year 1895, by Messrs. G. P. Putnam
& Sons (London and New York), which has had a
wide circulation. It covered the period from the
first meeting of my great colleague and myself in
the year 1874, down to the sailing of our party from
New York for Bombay in December, 1878. The
thread of our narrative, now taken up, leads us
from that point onward to the autumn of 1883,
embracing the novel and exciting incidents of the
establishment of our movement in India and Ceylon
from which such momentous results have followed.

No important event has been omitted, no falsification
of the record resorted to. Other volumes will
be issued from time to time should there be a...

OLD DIARY LEAVES : THE HISTORY OF THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY APRIL 1896 SEPTEMBER 1898 : VOLUME VI

CHAPTER I

INSPECTING SCHOOLS IN CEYLON
(1896)

ALL good things must come to an end and the
grand Rajput wedding at Varal was no exception.
On the 19th of April Prince Liluba, the Heir
Apparent of Morvi, left and the bride's presents and
dowry were displayed in a large temporary structure.
The presents alone were worth thirty thousand
rupees and made a splendid display, as may be
imagined from what I said in the preceding chapter.
The wedding guests and hangers-on having departed,
Harisinhji and I were left alone.

He had a somewhat
extensive library and I took advantage of the
occasion to read, among other things, Max Nordau's
Degeneracy, which gave me the impression that the
author was fully persuaded in his own mind that he
was the only person in the world who could not be
classified as a degenerate. Still, his book is full of
sage deductions from observed facts and should be
read along with the books of the great hypnotists of...

OLD DIARY LEAVES :
THE HISTORY OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY JANUARY 1893- APRIL 1896 :
VOLUME V

CHAPTER I

BUDDHA GAYA AND SARNATH
(1893)

THE year 1893 now opens up before us, and its events
will be found to be very important.

As previously shown, the rumblings of the coming
tempest about Mr. Judge were beginning to be heard.
Towards the end of last year the arrival of Mr. Walter
G. Old of the London staff, with the budget of notes and
memoranda which he had taken, enabled me by
comparing documents to see the depth and fullness of the
treachery which Mr. Judge had long been planning.
I find from my Diary of 1893 that the greater part
of the first day was spent by Messrs. Keightley, Old,
and myself in summarising the cvidence in the case;
and needless to say, all our hearts were filled with
sorrow, for this was almost if not the very first case
of downright perfidy in our Society's history.

Until now the splendid collection of Japanese.
Buddhist Scriptures, which I had brought back from
Japan in 1889, had been lying on our shelves
uncatalogued for lack of expert help; but now Mr
Kawakami, a young priest student of Kyoto, who...

OLD DIARY LEAVES :
THE HISTORY OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 1887-1892 :
VOLUME IV

EDITOR'S PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

Ir is six years since the Third Scries of OLD DIARY
LEAVES appeared in book form, and it is nine years
since the contents of the present volume were published
in the pages of the Theosoplist. The author passed
over in 1907, and, as all who knew him well are aware,
the publication of the whole of this true history of
the Theosophical Society" was a matter that lay near
his heart. There still remains sufficient material to
fill one, if not two, additional volumes, and it is hoped
this will appear in due course, for the longer the lapse
of time that separates the present membership of the
Theosophical Society from its early history, the more
important it is that the facts should be placed on record.

For the carlier part of the story, relating to America
and India, there was no living authority so well able
to bear witness to the facts as the late Co-Founder of
the Society. In this present volume, however, we
traverse a period when, owing to the world-wide spread
of the organisation, the touch of the President with the
whole of the Society was not so close, and maybe
there are those well qualified to write of the
development of different Sections, who could
effectively supplement the present history so far
as their own...

OLD DIARY LEAVES ;
THE HISTORY OF THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 1883-87 :
VOLUME III

INTRODUCTION

THE first volume of these historical sketches covered
the period from the meeting of Madame Blavatsky
and myself, in 1874, to our departure from New York
for Bombay in December, 1878; the second tells of
our adventures in India and Ceylon, the formation of
Branches, the giving of lectures, healings of the sick
by hundreds, occult phenomena produced by HD.В.
etc., and brings us down to the autumn of 1883: at
this time we take up the thread of narrative, and go
forward to the month of May, 1887. I think the
reader will agree with me that the subject-matter of
this volume possesses absorbing interest, quite equal
to that in its two preceding volumes, if not even
greater.

Accounts are given among other things of
my meetings with several of the Masters" in the
course of my travels, and of the results of the same,
of our removal of the Society's Headquarters from
Bombay to Madras, of H.P.B.'s last departure from
her beloved Indian home into the exile of an European
residence. The troublous times of the Coulomb
conspiracy are dealt with in this volume, and the true
story of the S.P.R. Report is placed on record, so that
each member of our world-wide organisation may be...

CATECHISMO BUDDHISTICO

Il Buddhismo del XX secolo deve molto alla
Società Teosofica (anno di fondazione 1875) e,
in particolare, all'americano (di fede buddhista)
Colonnello Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), suo
primo Presidente e co-fondatore con la russa
H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891).

Già nel 1897 questo "Catechismo" era già stato
tradotto in venti lingue diverse e, nel 1908, era
già alla 42a edizione.

Ma il valore unico ed inestimabile dell'opera non
sta soltanto nella chiara ma documentata
presentazione della Vita del Buddha, della sua
Dottrina, del "Sangha" (l'ordine monastico) e di
una breve storia del Buddhismo, dei suoi concili
e della sua diffusione, ma nel fatto che Olcott,
per la prima volta, è riuscito a riunire tutto il
mondo Buddhistico attorno alle Quattordici
Proposizioni, accettate come Principi
Fondamentali del Buddhismo.

Fin dalla sua uscita, questo "Catechismo
Buddhista" è raccomandato per l'uso nelle scuole
Buddhiste.

OLD DIARY LEAVES :THE HISTORY OF TEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 1878/83 : VOLUME II

Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, was a versatile man. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of American agricultural education and also served in the U.S. War Department. Later Olcott was admitted to the New York Bar and became interested in psychology and spiritualism, travelling to India and Sri Lanka with Madame Blavatsky to explore eastern spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism. In this volume (published in 1900) Olcott chronicles how he and Madame Blavatsky journeyed to India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in the years 1878 to 1883 to oversee the foundation of new branches of their Society. This is part classic travel writing in which the author gives breathless descriptions of the beauty of Indian nature, culture and philosophy and part characterisation of Madame Blavatsky's 'psychological eccentricities' as Olcott experiences them. To him she was and remained 'an insoluble riddle'.

OLD DIARY LEAVES:THE HISTORY OF THEOSOPHICAL SOCIEETY : :AMERICA 1874/78. VOLUME I

Inside the Occult is a 1975 reprint of the first of six volumes from Henry Steel Olcott's Old Diary Leaves, in which he provides a memoir of the Theosophical Society, for which he was a founder and the first president. Although Daniel Grotta-Kurska (better known as a Tolkein biographer) provides a new introduction for this reprint, Olcott's original foreword is omitted. This volume covers the period of 1874-1879, and might have been titled "H.P.B. and Me: Origins of the Theosophical Society."

Old Diary Leaves was written after the death of H.P. Blavatsky, the famous sybil who had been Olcott's chief collaborator in the creation of the Theosophical Society, as well as their most conspicuous link to the Masters, Adepts, or to use the later-standard Theosophical jargon, Mahatmas. Olcott and Blavatsky had had some disagreements in the period between the events described in this volume and her later death, but his memories of her here are highly complimentary. She is presented as noble in intention, if flawed in character, and certainly in possession of supernatural powers, although these are employed in strange mixtures with trickery for purposes that are inscrutable often even to herself. Olcott suggests that he and Blavatsky's other close associates at the time may have had their perceptions routinely altered by post-hypnotic suggestions of her devising.

Olcott discusses the manner in which H.P.B. served as a vehicle for a variety of adepts who were understood to have guided the creation of the Theosophical Society and the authoring of Isis Unveiled, that erratic compendium of lore that was such a touchstone for the occultism of its era. It is important to note that Blavatsky did not profess herself, nor was she viewed by Olcott as, a passive trance medium for spirits of the dead after the fashion of the Spiritualism of the time. Spiritualism had provided the setting for these two to encounter each other initially, but their own later Theosophical occultist reading of Spiritualist phenomena held such operations to be misunderstood and misrepresented by their advocates. The "spirit controls" were actually "elemental and elementary" spirits being given undeserved free rein among human dupes. Blavatsky's possession by her Masters was in contrast a conscious collaboration with still-living humans of supernatural puissance.

In a somewhat tentative passage, that is still one of the most striking in the book, Olcott goes so far as to hypothesize that the woman Helena Blavatsky may have actually died a violent death in Europe before he met her, and that during the entire period of their association, she was animated by the combined efforts of a group of adepts who were using her as their worldly instrument....