Sources of Information about the Religion and Culture of Tibet in “The Mahatma Letters”

“Lama Tsongkapa” FPMT Study Group Coordinator,

Expositor at the Museum and Exhibition Complex of Lesnoy

Abstract. Over the century that has passed since the first publication of “The Mahatma Letters,” information about the religion and culture of Tibet found in them has repeatedly become the subject of attention of researchers. This attention, however, was most often episodic and non-systemic, and complex work to identify the sources of this information was not carried out. Based on an exhaustive definition of the sources of borrowing of all the Tibetan vocabulary present in the letters, quotations from Buddhist literature and references to elements of the popular culture of Tibetans, the article also reveals the nature and circumstances of their inclusion in the letters' text. This, in turn, makes it possible to clarify the true attitude of the author of the letters (H.P. Blavatsky) to the Tibeto-Buddhist heritage and reconsider her role in the popularization of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Key Words: The Mahatma Letters, Tibet, complex work, the Tibetan vocabulary, Buddhist literature, H.P. Blavatsky, the Tibeto-Buddhist heritage, popularization.

In the history of the spread of Buddhism in the West the phenomenon of H.P. Blavatsky continues to be a peculiar “birthmark.” Despite numerous critical studies of her activity and written heritage, which began during her lifetime and invariably yielded results that denied the validity of the myth she popularized about the “Tibetan esoteric brotherhood” and the characters associated with it ‒ the so-called “mahatmas” ‒ until recent years researchers have made attempts if not to confirm the existence of “mahatmas” exactly as they are described by Blavatsky, then at least to discern in these characters personifications of some real people who were familiar to her.

One such attempt is the experience of a “linguistic study” made in 2013 by the philologist B.S. Grechin, who, concentrating on the Tibetan component of “The Mahatma Letters,” tried to prove that all the Tibetan words and concepts mentioned in these letters could not have appeared there without real communication with some Tibetan lamas. Before the appearance of his work, the Tibetan terms and phrases in “The Letters” had come to the attention of scholars only sporadically and had never been considered as a whole. Nevertheless, the insufficient coverage of the Tibetan vocabulary of “The Letters,” the small source base, and several originally incorrect theses on which his study was based, did not allow B.S. Grechin to come to correct conclusions. Meanwhile, it seems that the potential of a comprehensive analysis of the Tibetan vocabulary of the “Letters” is broader than the possibility of clarifying the reality of the personalities of the “mahatmas” or the persons who served as their prototypes. In particular, the nature of Blavatsky's use of Tibetan material while writing “Letters” could make more evident her own attitude to Tibetan Buddhism in general and, as a consequence, specify her role in the process of its popularization in Europe on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Grechin's first, and most unfortunate, assumption about the sources of the Tibetan vocabulary in “The Letters,” which led his entire study down the wrong path, was that if “mahatmas” were created by Blavatsky “with her imagination, if at no time in her life had she spoken to a living Tibetan, the only source of these words in the letters could have been dictionaries. By 1881 only two Tibetan-English dictionaries had been published, and no other dictionaries of the Tibetan language existed in the Western world”[1]. The dictionaries he is referring to are those of Kőrös (1834) and Jäschke (1881). It should be noted that beside them there were at least three other well-known dictionaries which Blavatsky could have used ‒ the Tibetan-Russian and Tibetan-German dictionaries created by Schmidt on the basis of Kőrös' dictionary, as well as Jaeschke's Tibetan-German dictionary. However the thesis that the author of the letters could borrow the Tibetan vocabulary only from dictionaries and nowhere else seems completely wrong, since by the beginning of the 1880s, the time of the appearance of “The Letters,” a large volume of literature devoted to the language, history and religion of Tibet had already been published in English and other European languages, including Russian. In all of these books one could find a mass of terms related to the religion and life of the Tibetans. Finally, some set of Tibetan vocabulary, mostly, presumably, titles and names, could be drawn from the Indian colonial press: Tibet was, after all, the northern neighbor of British India. Therefore, the author of the “historical and linguistic argument” should have looked for the sources of the Tibetan vocabulary in the letters of the “mahatmas” outside the two dictionaries he mentioned.

So, not finding such words as “Deva-Chan” and “Cho-Khan” in the dictionaries of Kőrös and Jaeschke mentioned by him, Grechin concludes that the author of the letters could have picked them up only from communication with living Tibetans in the process of studying from them. As for the first word, both the name and the description of Devachan (bde ba can) are found, in particular, in Schlagintweit's book Buddhism in Tibet (1863)[2], an introduction to which Blavatsky revealed in one of her articles.[3]

The identification of the word “Cho-Han,” which also occurs more than once in the letters of the “mahatmas,” has long troubled scholars of the history of the Theosophical movement. It has been interpreted as distorted “chos kyong” ‒ “dharmapala,” “guardian of the Dharma,” and as “lord of the Dharma,” “dharmaraja,” or more precisely “khan of the Dharma.” B. Grechin is in solidarity with the latter version. The unanimous interpretation of the element “Cho” as “chos,” “dharma,” may be agreed, but the identification of the element “khan” or “han” with the Mongolian title “khan” should be rejected. Although the Tibetan language after contacts with the Mongols and Oirats introduced a number of Mongolian words denoting mainly administrative terms and feudal titles, the Buddhist term “dharmaraja” is traditionally translated into Tibetan as “chos kyi rgyal po.”[4]

The book that allowed Blavatsky to construct the term should be recognized as C.F. Koeppen's “The Lamaist Hierarchy and Church,” which was first published in Berlin in 1859. As a book written in German, it escaped the attention of scholars of the sources of the mythology set forth in “The Mahatma Letters.” In Koeppen's book, the second part of the term occurs in the form “mKhan po” and is translated as “instructor, master, abbot” (der Lehrer, Meister, Abt)[5]. In Blavatsky's letter, in which the word “Cho-han” appears for the first time, she explains it very similarly: “spiritual instructor, master and the Chief of a Tibetan Monastery.”[6]

As for the first element, “Cho,” it most likely owes its appearance to Koeppen's book as well. On the same page where the term “mKhan po” is first mentioned in the book, we see this word in the title “Tschhoss rDsche” (Wiley: chos rje), and on the next page we find its transcription (Tschoidsche) and translation: “Lord of the Law” (Gesetzesfürst); separately, “Tschoss (Dharma)” is translated as “law, teaching, religion.”[7] It seems that in general the term “Cho-han” was originally conceived by Blavatsky as a translation into Tibetan of the expression “spiritual master,” which corresponds perfectly to the context in which it was first used by her.

There is other evidence in this letter that Blavatsky used Koeppen's book when writing it. Thus, further in the same letter Blavatsky uses a hybrid Sanskrit-Tibetan term “Dyan-Cho-han” (later in “The Secret Doctrine” she transliterates it as “Dhyan-Chohan”). In Koeppen we see the prefix “Dhyâni-” in the terms “Dhyâni-Bodhisattva” and “Dhyâni-Buddha.”[8] “Toong-ting, reliquary” from the same letter of Blavatsky is “gDung rTen” (Reliquien- oder Knochenbewahrer).[9] It is likely that she also took from the same book the notions of “shammars” [zhwa dmar] and “dugpas” [‘brug pa] as evil sorcerers, perverters of Buddhism and implacable opponents of Tsongkhapa's teaching, which appear in “The Letters,” as she did with these words themselves.[10]

We should mention one of Grechin's examples of how Blavatsky, allegedly hearing Tibetan words by ear, wrote them down at haphazard in the absence of a commonly used system of transcription. As examples Grechin cites variations of the word “byang chub” from the letter No 20[11] of “mahatma Koot Hoomi”: “Tchang-chub” and “Byang-tzyoob.” However, both of these forms are by no means arbitrary but are borrowed from the report of the Capuchin missionary Francesco della Penna, which was brought out in an English translation as a supplement to the book “Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and the Journey of Tomas Manning to Lhasa,” that was published in London in 1881. It is certain that Blavatsky was familiar with this book, as she herself quoted it extensively in one of her articles.[12]

It is clear from Della Penna's text that he refers to the bodhisattvas as “chang chubs.” The same understanding Blavatsky demonstrates in her articles and “mahatma Koot Hoomi” in his letters, confidently using their transcriptions of the Tibetan “byang chub” as a synonym for “bodhisattva.” Meanwhile, “byang chub” is by no means “bodhisattva” (which in Tibetan would be “byang chub sems ‘dpa”) but “Bodhi,” “Awakening”– the state to which a bodhisattva aspires. Tibetans never shorten “byang chub sems ‘dpa” to “byang chub.” If the poetic size and the number of syllables in a stanza require it, they always abbreviate it to “byang sems.”

In spite of this, without a shadow of a doubt Blavatsky reproduces in “The Letters” the inaccuracy made by Della Penna in his work. It is possible, however, that the author's confidence in the inaccurate translation of the word “byang chub” was reinforced by another English book published four years before, which, as it will be shown below, the author of the letters was also familiar with and actively used. It is a self-study manual of the Tibetan language by T. Lewin, published in Calcutta in 1877. At the same time, in the vocabulary accompanying this manual, the word “saint” is translated into Tibetan as “chang-chhub sem-pa,” which is quite correct. However, the parts of this word combination, “chang-chhub” and “sem-pa,” are placed on different lines one above the other, moreover, after “chang-chhub” there is a period[13]. Such a layout could have led the author of the letters to believe that these were not two parts of a whole, but two words synonymous to each other, which only reinforced the misuse of the word.

This assumption would seem quite credible in light of the description of a situation in which the particulars of the layout of Lewin's textbook were the factor that unwittingly exposed the complete ignorance of the author of “The Mahatma Letters” in regard of the Tibetan language, while perfectly demonstrating the “creative method” used in writing them.

“With a textbook in the lap”

The letter No. 54 tells the following story: mahatma Koot Hoomi, being at Pari Jong in a temple (“gun-pa”) of his friend, was walking in the yard listening to a telepathic speech of lama Ton-dhup Gyatcho. He was handed a letter and carelessly slipped it into his bag. When he heard a “young gyloong”'s (monk’s) cry, he woke up, but the letter had already been almost completely eaten by a goat. Koot Hoomi wanted to “rematerialize” the important letter in a magical way despite the prohibition to do so with the things of strangers, but then an image of the Chohan appeared to him and said: “Why break the rules? I will do it myself” and restored the letter to its pristine state. The author quotes the Tibetan speech of the “Chohan”: “Kam mi ts'har ‒ I'll do it.”

In 2009, A. Goyios discovered the phrase “Kam mi ts'har” in T. Lewin's manual of Tibetan language. It is placed opposite to the phrase in English “I can complete the task,” but both expressions are parts of longer sentences. The author of the letter felt that the first was a translation of the second, but the three Tibetan words at the end of the full sentence did not mean “I will do it,” as it might have seemed from the English phrase opposite it, but “or not do/complete.”[14] Goyios, followed by Grechin, rightly believe that a person familiar at least in a first approximation with the Tibetan language would never make such an error. Grechin, however, admits the possibility that the blatant illiteracy and inattention shown in the letter could have belonged not to the author of the letter but to “the one who wrote it down” ‒ as we know, Blavatsky claimed that “mahatmas” could telepathically dictate their letters to disciples, who wrote them down on paper and then sent them to a recipient.

Meanwhile, a careful comparative analysis of the text of the letter and the content of Lewin's manual allows us to explain the coincidences contained in them, which are not limited to the above case, even without the involvement of hypotheses about telepathy. Most likely, the circumstances of writing the letter were as follows: Blavatsky intended to impress Sinnett with some story that would show that the Chohan himself appreciated the importance of his letters to Koot Hoomi ‒ supposedly the Chohan himself had “phenomenally” recovered his suddenly lost letter. For greater effect, she wanted to add a phrase in Tibetan to her description. Knowing that Lewin's manual had an English-Tibetan dictionary with indication of the exercises, in which the words from the dictionary appeared for the first time, Blavatsky found in the dictionary a word with the meaning of “to do” (or she simply looked it up, assessing the applicability of words for her idea as she went along). She found a suitable word, “complete,” at the beginning of the dictionary. The dictionary offers its several translations into Tibetan, while indicating that only one of these is a verb ‒ “tshar,” and it is used in the phrase in the exercise No. 16. Turning to this exercise, Blavatsky carefully read the English phrases, looking for “complete” in them, but there was none ‒ the word “tshar” here is in a Tibetan phrase, which is translated into English as “We have sold our bull to the friend of our uncle.” Meanwhile, on the same page 15, she also came across the word “goat.” Failing to find “complete” she was looking for on the pages 14 and 15, she flipped through the textbook further, thinking the exercise continues on the page 16. But there was a new one, No. 17, in the English part of which she found the name Tondub, which is indicated as a man's name.

Well, perhaps one would manage to find the word “complete” somewhere else, since it is listed in the dictionary? After scrolling through two dozen pages, Blavatsky found it on p. 43 in an appropriate combination: “I can complete the task” (which, as noted, is part of a longer sentence). The word “tshar” is present in the transcription ‒ so the material for the story was found, along with unexpected details: the goat and lama Tondub. Blavatsky altered the transcription “Tondub” from the manual to “Ton-dhub” and added to it the last part of the name of the lama who consulted the author of the manual, Yapa Ugyen Gyatsho, which appears on the title page. In a usual way, she also distorted it slightly, writing it as Gyatcho.

Here, in Lewin's manual, we also see the word “gun-pa” used by the author of this letter. In the dictionary it is transcribed as “gön-pa” and translated as “temple.” As for the word “gyloong,” it is from the already mentioned book about the travels to Tibet by Bogle and Manning, familiar to Blavatsky. In the index to it we find “gylong” and even, in a subheading, “young gylong.” The same book also uses the transcription “Pari-jong,” reproduced in the letter as “Pari Jong.” B.S. Grechin tried to identify this toponym as a truncated “[gnyan] pa ri rdzong” ‒ “Nyenpa ridzong, a famous monastery near Mount Kailash.” Pari-jong (phag ri rdzong), however, is a village on the Tibeto-Bhutanese border.

Goyios cites another egregious case to illustrate that Blavatsky's “mahatmas” had very little understanding of Tibetan, and in case they needed to write something in Tibetan they turned to Lewin's textbook. On the envelope of one of the letters of “mahatma Morya” there is a quote from “Ratna-gotra-vibhāga” written in Tibetan script and accompanied by a Latin transcription and translation into English. Both the Tibetan text and the transcription, as well as the translation are borrowed to the letter from the same Lewin’s textbook. Not only that, but the Tibetan inscription on the envelope reproduces all the printing defects in the book. Where the ink in the textbook is blurred, something illegible is also drawn on the envelope. Where a letter in the textbook is more or less clear, it's relatively clear on the envelope as well. The look of the poorly copied graphemes and their combinations quite clearly shows that “mahatma Morya,” who copied them, had no basic knowledge of the written Tibetan language, and in case of a need to express himself in Tibetan he did it, as B.S. Grechin aptly put it, “with a textbook in the lap.”[15]

Mangled transcriptions

As already mentioned, one of the arguments put forward by B.S. Grechin in favor of the fact that Blavatsky did communicate with some Tibetan lamas was the presence in “The Mahatma Letters” of Tibetan words, “which are not so much incorrect but rather inaccurate.” That is, the “mahatmas” supposedly transcribed Tibetan words by ear as they had to, while no unified system of Latin transliteration of the Tibetan language, like Wiley's, had yet been developed.

Meanwhile, having determined the source of the borrowings of those Tibetan words that appear in the letters, it is easy to identify the mechanism of all those “inaccuracies” about which Grechin speaks. When deciding to use a word found in a book in a “mahatma's” letter, Blavatsky most often deliberately distorted the available transcription so that the borrowing would be less obvious. This distortion followed a simple pattern: the letter “d” in the original could be changed to “t” (and vice versa), “t” to “th,” “k” to “kh,” “d” to “dh,” “u” to “oo,” “e” to “i,” and “tsh” to “ch.” This last pair shows that Blavatsky did not know how the grapheme, written in Wiley's system as “tsha,” was actually supposed to be read. Apparently, she thought that it should be pronounced as “tsha” (according to the rules of English phonetics), which does somewhat resemble “cha,” but not “tskha” as it should be pronounced in reality.

It is quite symptomatic that a similar incorrect interpretation of Latin transcriptions of Tibetan words can also be found in letters of Blavatsky's ideological heir and translator of her “Secret Doctrine” into Russian, H.I. Roerich, who translated the neologism “Cho-han” as “Kogan” in Russian. Apparently, Roerich decided that the combination of the letters “ch” in this word should be read as “k” on the model of English words of Greek origin like “chaos,” “chimera,” “technic,” etc.

Quotes from Buddhist literature

In addition to individual Buddhist terms, “The Letters” contain references to individual Buddhist sutras and shastras, as well as entire quotations from Buddhist sources. Do Blavatsky's “mahatmas” demonstrate an outstanding knowledge of Buddhist literature that surpasses that of European Buddhologists? Not at all ‒ all the works, the titles of which are mentioned in the letters of “mahatmas,” with or without quotations from them, had already appeared in Buddhist and Tibetan literature in English, published by the beginning of 1880s.

For example, in the letter No. 1670, a “mahatma” quotes the Buddha's words from a certain work called “Shan-Mun-yi-Tung.” His quotation is nothing but an inaccurate and abridged translation made by S. Beal and included by him in the book “A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese,”[16] which was noticed by D. McDavid, followed by D. Reigle[17]. The title “Shan-Mun-yi-Tung” is also taken from there, and, characteristically, it is not a Chinese translation of a Buddhist sutra or shastra, as one might think. It is the name of a Chinese prayer book, from which Beal extracted a fragment of the Amitabha Sutra (aka Sukhavativyuha Sutra), first translated and published by him as early as in 1866[18]. In the 1866 edition the real name of the sutra is given, but not in the 1871 edition, where only a reference to the above-mentioned collection of prayers is provided. So the “mahatma” was compelled to cite this collection as the source, instead of giving the exact title of the sutra.

The same letter No. 1670 also mentions the Avatamsaka Sutra, which describes the postmortem states, the “Territory of Doubt.” In the same Beal’s book we read both of the Avatamsaka Sutra, and of the varieties of postmortem states[19] described therein. The Lau-Tan Sutra, aka the Pinda-dhana Sutra, is also mentioned there. Both names, Chinese and Sanskrit, together with quotations from it, are again borrowed from Beal[20].

The author's active use of quotations from Beal's book was noted as early as in 1895 by W. Coleman in his essay “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings.”[21] However, Blavatsky took from it not only excerpts from sutras. Thus, the author of the letter No. 9288 informs Sinnett, who was going to London, that evil sorcerers and spirits will try to confuse him there by means of false letters. And if a received letter does not contain three code words “Kiu-t-an,” “Na-lan-da” and “Dha-ra-ni,” it means that it is not from the mahatma. All three of these words are easily found in the subject and name indexes to Beal's monograph: “Kiu-t'an, Gotama, a name of Buddha,” “Nalanda, convent of,” and “Dharani, magic formulae.”

The source of the extensive quotation from the letter No. 1088 (1882) has also been ascertained. It is none other than a not too distant paraphrase of the original of the beginning of the Mahavagga, a translation of which was published in 1881 in the three-volume “Vinaya Texts” by Rhys Davids and Oldenburg[22].

The letter No. 54 (1882) quotes the words of the Tathagata from another unnamed source: “He who masters Self is greater than he who conquers thousands in battle.” In these words the stanza from “Dhammapada,” translated and published by M. Müller a year before[23], can be easily recognized. The letter No. 64 also contains another saying attributed by the author to the Buddha: “The right in thee is base, the wrong a curse,” which turns out to be a literal quotation from the poem “The Light of Asia” by E. Arnold, published in London in 1879.

It is very indicative that the “members of the Tibetan secret brotherhood” did not quote in their letters a single sutra, tantra or shastra typical of the Tibetan tradition. Blavatsky also hardly ever gave translations from Tibetan in the articles written on her own behalf, and what she did quote was taken from Western literature. For example, such is the quote from Kangyur in “Tibetan Teachings,” which she transcribed verbatim from the London edition of Udanavarga,[24] again without citing the source.

A separate case is the so-called book “Kiu-te” and its constituent part, the “Book of Dzyan.” The identification of these works has long been an insoluble problem for researchers of Blavatsky's literary heritage. However, in 1975 H. Spierenburg identified this word as a phonetic transcription of the Tibetan “rgyud sde,” that is a “section of Tantra” ‒ one part of the Kangyur[25]. Six years later D. Reigle managed to confirm this conjecture by identifying the source from which this transcription had been borrowed. It turned out to be the aforementioned report by Della Penna from the 1881 book on the Tibetan missions of Bogle and Manning[26]. In Della Penna's work “the thirty-six volumes of the law Khiute,” that “gives precepts for practising magic,” is expressly called one of the two constituent parts of the Kangyur along with the “Dote”, “mdo sde,” a section of the Sutra[27]. As for the “Book of Dzyan,” Reigle suggested that it could be some currently unknown tantra of the Kalachakra cycle (or a part of such a tantra) as long as the “extracts” from it deal with cosmogony. However, in the light of the above, all “excerpts from the Book of Dzyan” in “The Mahatma Letters” and other works of Blavatsky should be considered, apparently, no more than a fruit of her own creativity.

Tibetan proverbs

When writing the letters on behalf of “mahatma Koot Hoomi,” Blavatsky used several “Tibetan proverbs” in order to give her addressee A.P. Sinnett the impression that his correspondent was well acquainted with Tibetan culture. One of them looks like this: “No Lama knows where the ber-chhén will hurt him until he puts it on.” This phrase in the letter No. 8 is a deliberately “Tibetanized” version of an English proverb that is still used today: “Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.” It is recorded in the popular collection of proverbs “Jacula prudentium” by the 17th century English priest and metaphysician poet G. Herbert, and in turn goes back to an anecdote mentioned by Plutarch in his “Comparative Biographies” when describing the divorce of Aemilius Lepidus.

Blavatsky's method of “creative remaking” of this proverb cannot be called elaborate. Having slightly changed its wording, she found in the Tibetan-English dictionary compiled in 1866 by H.A. Jaeschke the first name of a typical Tibetan garment, “ber-chhén,” which was translated as “lama's cloak,” and mechanically inserted both “ber-chhén” and “lama” into it. Blavatsky obviously did not know what this “ber chen” (full cloak) looked like, nor did she know how this word is translated literally, otherwise she probably would have had to wonder if a cloak, and a big one at that, could hurt, squeeze, etc.?

By the way, this is not the only example of an unsuccessful attempt to mention Tibetan clothing in order to give “The Letters” an appropriate flavor. Thus, in the letter No. 5, “mahatma Koot Hoomi” ironically suggests putting a perfumed handkerchief in the pocket of his “chogga” in order to make a better impression in the company of English gentlemen. “Chogga” is, of course, chos gos, lit. “Dharma garment,” which could mean either the standard set of three monastic robes or the upper cloak of a full gelong monk. The word may have been borrowed from Koeppen[28] in particular. However, none of the garments called by this word have any pockets, of course.[29]

Another “Tibetan proverb” quoted by a “mahatma” in the letter No. 54 is as follows: “Like the bird of night: by day a graceful cat, in darkness an ugly rat.” Such a proverb is indeed recorded, and given by the “mahatma” with almost no “creative reworking,” only again it is not Tibetan but... Kabyle.[30] This proverb got straight from W. Hodgson's book “Notes on Northern Africa, the Sahara and Soudan” (1844), where it sounds like this: “You are like the bird of night; by day a cat, in darkness a rat.”[31] Interestingly, there is a truly Tibetan proverb that is very similar in meaning, in which not the “night bird” (mtshan bya) but the “night mouse” (“mtshan byi,” a bat) also shows one of its guises depending on the situation[32]. However, the almost literal coincidence of the phrase from the “mahatma's” letter with Hodgson's translation of the Kabyle proverb leaves no doubt as to where exactly this proverb was copied from.

Cosmological notes

To the greatest extent Tibetan “terms” are concentrated in the so-called “Cosmological Notes,” which consist of “mahatma Morya's” answers to questions posed to him by one of his correspondents, A.O. Hume. The original letter (or a series of letters) “from a mahatma,” which formed the basis of the “Notes,” did not survive; its content is known only because Sinnett copied the entire text into his notebook for personal purposes. From the context it is possible to date the appearance of the original “Notes” in the fall of 1881.

The “Notes” contain not only scattered Tibetan words but also two full tables with Sanskrit “parallels” and English “semantic translation” of the mentioned Tibetan “terms.” This orderliness made some optimistic researchers believe that behind these tables is some real Buddhist source, not yet introduced into the Western Tibetology. Individual tantras (such as the lost Kalachakra “root” tantra), the literature of the Dzogchen cycle, and individual termas have been cited as such a hypothetical source. However, the author of the work, from which “mahatma Morya” borrowed all the Tibetan vocabulary used in his tables, was by no means a certain little-known terton. Ironically, the terms describing “the teachings of the esoteric Tibetan brotherhood” were supplied to a member of this brotherhood by the Protestant missionary to Western Tibet H.A. Jaeschke, translator of the Bible into Tibetan.

His famous Tibetan-English Dictionary appeared in 1881, the same year as the original “Notes,” but it was not it that the “mahatma” used, rather the “Romanized Tibetan-English Dictionary”, which Jaeschke had compiled as early as in 1866. This small, 157-page dictionary was apparently intended for the internal use of the mission in Western Tibet, existed only as a manuscript and was never published. It is difficult to say how Jaeschke's manuscript (or a copy) ended up in Blavatsky's hands, but the very fact that the Tibetan terms from the “cosmological” tables of “mahatma Morya,” as well as other Tibetan words from the “Notes,” were taken from it should be considered indisputable.

Obviously, the basic structure of these tables demonstrating the “seven principles” of the structure of man and the universe was invented by Blavatsky beforehand. A relatively small volume of the dictionary allowed her to read it in its entirety, selecting and writing out Tibetan words that fitted the meaning. The same applies to the words mentioned in the “Notes” outside the tables. At the same time, while the main text of the notes, in the preparation of which she had few restraints, could be written so that the Tibetan words inserted for authenticity were used in a more or less literal sense, the finished structure of the tables did not provide for such liberties. As a result, of the 18 Tibetan words used in these tables, only two of them could be used in their basic dictionary meaning. The rest of the words were used in their figurative meaning, and for those concepts for which it was not possible to find words even approximately, two-part neologisms were constructed (such as, for example, the awkward phrase “Zigten-jas,” which is given as a translation of the word “cosmogony”).

If in the main text such words from Jaeschke's dictionary as “Chhag” (genesis); “Kyen” (cause); “Dang-ma” (purified soul); “jas” [byas] (to make); “Dam-ze” (brahman); “Jigten” (written as “Zigten” ‒ “world”) are used literally, then in the table they are only “A-ku” (body) and “Nyug” (duration). In contrast to the cases of borrowings from other sources described above, here Blavatsky almost did not distort the transcriptions, being satisfied with those suggested by Jaeschke. It should be noted that in these examples not only the transcriptions are exactly the same, but even the English words given as translations.

The reason for Blavatsky's carelessness seems to lie in the fact that she was not worried that Jaeschke's manuscript would ever come across to Hume or Sinnett in the foreseeable future (given that all their correspondence with the “mahatmas” was confidential and not intended for publication). It must be mentioned that this plan turned out to be quite justified ‒ this dictionary remained unknown not only to them but also to everyone except a narrow circle of specialists in Tibetan linguistics until it was digitized. Therefore, Blavatsky could indeed feel relatively safe in transcribing, almost without alteration or distortion, fragments of Jaeschke's dictionary entries into the letter “from mahatma Morya” to Hume. However, she did make a few unintentional mistakes, and the resulting absurdities testify to the source of borrowing with all possible unambiguity.

To be fair, not all of the linguistic absurdities in the “Notes” owe their appearance to Blavatsky's ignorance of the Tibetan language. Some of them are certainly faults of the copyist, Sinnett. Such, for example, is the mysterious word “A-ku” from the table, translated there as “body,” which is found in Jaeschke in the form “(s)ku.” The fact is that in the characteristic handwriting used to write the letters “from Morya” and to which Sinnett was unaccustomed, the capital S extremely resembles the letter A, which led to the birth of this verbal chimera. Obviously, the term “Zhihna,” “Vital soul,” appeared in a similar way. In Jaeschke “zhi-(ma)” is “basis,” “reason,” but further the word combination [kun gzhi] is given in Tibetan and explained as “first cause, soul (in some metaphysical schools).” Apparently, in the original, the first vertical element of the letter “m” was written somewhat higher than the others, which led Sinnett to mistake it for the combination “hn.” The second time he encountered this word, he rewrote it correctly: “Zhima.” In addition, in the text of the copy, as a Tibetan analogue of the concept of duration, there are both the dictionary word “Nyug” [snyugs] and the distorted “Nyng.” The spelling “Zigten” instead of “Jigten” also seems to be nothing more than a copying defect.

As for the absurdities that Blavatsky herself made when writing out words from the dictionary, the most egregious of them is the case of the word “Chh-rab,” which the author of the letter translates as genesis. This “chh-rab,” unlike other distorted Tibetan words from the “Notes,” remained completely unreadable to interpreters. Turning oneself to Jaeschke's dictionary easily resolves this difficulty. Here we find the transcription “chhag(s)-pa” with the first meaning “to be fond of, love.” The second meaning, indicating the form [chags rab], is genesis. So how is it that instead of the first syllable entirely, “mahatma” copied its chunk? As it has been demonstrated more than once, Blavatsky and her “mahatmas” did not know Tibetan writing even in the very first approximation. The form [chags rab] in the dictionary article was given in Tibetan, which means that Blavatsky could not understand how it sounds from this spelling. Therefore, as in all other cases of borrowing from this dictionary, she turned to the phonetic Latin transcription. However, this time it turned out to be abbreviated: not “chhag(s)-ráb” but “chh.-ráb.” If Jaeschke had not saved space on the page or if Blavatsky had noticed the period after “chh,” then this absurd, phonetically impossible “chh-rab” would not have come from the pen of “mahatma Morya.” Nor would it have come out, had “mahatma Morya” (together with his author) mastered the Tibetan language at least at the level of Mongolian novices, khuvrags, who were described by M.A. [mistyped for A.M.] Pozdneev in the second half of the 19th century. Even if they were quite ignorant of what a Tibetan text was about, they were still able to understand the Tibetan graphemes and pronounce them correctly.

The word “Chyang” is another example of this kind in the “Notes”; it is translated there as “omniscience.” This “translation” made some interpreters and researchers assume that the author meant the Tibetan “byang [chub]” (Awakening), a word whose pronunciation really resembles the author's transcription and fits well in meaning. However, this rather lucky guess turned out to be erroneous at first sight. In Jaeschke's dictionary there is a word “chang” [cang], which is a shortened form of the phrase “chi-ang” [ci'ang], which literally translates as “whatever,” “anything.” Here again, the peculiarities of the abbreviations in dictionaries, multiplied by the ignorance of Tibetan, played a cruel joke on Blavatsky. Further in the corresponding dictionary entry, the expression “chang-shes” is given, which is translated as “knowing anything, omniscient.” But the first word in this expression, “chang,” was omitted by Jaeschke, because it was already given by him at the beginning of the article, and the second, “-shes,” was written down by him in Tibetan. Blavatsky could not read this “shes,” and she had to use what was available by modifying “chi-ang” into “Chyang.”

This error is only aggravated later in the “Notes” by her use of “Chyang-mi-shi-khon,” translated as “ignorance,” meant to be an antonym to “Chyang.” However, not only is this phrase non-antonymous to “Chyang,” as it has just been shown, but it is not translated as “ignorance.” In Jaeschke, this expression is given in the form “chang-mi-she(s)-khan” [cang mi shes mkhan] and translated as “ignorant”; literally, it means “incapable of understanding anything.” Blavatsky, who could not find anything in the dictionary more suitable as an antonym for the word “omniscience,” decided to insert into her text something even remotely resembling it.

Not only “mahatma Morya” but also other characters of Blavatsky, in particular ‒ “the Chohan-Lama,” “the Chief of the Archive-registrars of the secret Libraries of the Dalai and Ta-shü-hlumpo Lamas,” and a “Gelung of the Inner Temple, a disciple of the Sacred Teachings,” were “taught” by Jaeschke. Two articles that Blavatsky prepared in 1882 were written as excerpts from letters of these two characters.[33] The entire Tibetan vocabulary of this “gelung” (Bas-pa, Phag-pa, Sang-gyas, Ngag-pa, A-tsa-ra, Thar-lam, Tul-pa, Dal-jor, Tong-pa-nyi, Dang-ma, Dzu-tul, Jang-khog), as well as partially the wording of the English translations of these words, were taken from Jaeschke's dictionary. His fellow the “Chohan-Lama” explicitly mentioned that he had attended a missionary school in Lahoula as a child, whereas the “Moravian brethren,” among whom Jaeschke was a member, worked precisely in Lahaul district, as was indicated on the title page of his dictionary. Apparently, Blavatsky made the “Chohan-Lama” mention it among other things in order to make sure in case after publishing these articles (which, by the way, never happened during her life) someone familiar with Jaeschke's dictionary would demand to explain why her highly learned Tibetan correspondents so often and so willingly resort to the fruits of his linguistic studies.

Conclusions

The identification of the literary sources for the whole Tibetan vocabulary used in “The Mahatma Letters” shows that Blavatsky hardly communicated with any living bearers of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition; in any case, there is nothing in her own works or in “The Letters” that proves the contrary. All of the Tibetan words they contain are borrowed from European (mostly English-language) literature published in the 1850s and early 1880s; all information about Tibetan culture and religion is taken from there as well. No new information about the history, culture, and religion of Tibet reported in “The Letters” and subsequently confirmed has been revealed.

The Tibetan elements were inserted into the letters of the “mahatmas” in order to impress two Britons, who knew almost nothing about Tibet, so the methods of falsification did not have to be too elaborate. Blavatsky drew and compiled these disparate elements from religious, linguistic and popular science literature, sometimes even from adjacent pages of a single book, picking up details as she went along and masking her borrowings by distorting transcriptions.

The nature and peculiarities of the reproduction of the Tibetan vocabulary in Blavatsky's works clearly show that she had no knowledge of the Tibetan language, not only at the level of basic grammar but even of a basic acquaintance with Tibetan writing. Those works on the Tibetan language that she used to compile the texts of “The Mahatma Letters” (Lewin's manual and Jaeschke's dictionary) contained descriptions of the both, but Blavatsky ignored the opportunity to fill this gap. This circumstance, given Blavatsky's undoubtedly remarkable intellectual capacity and memory, calls into question whether she had a genuine interest in Tibetan Buddhism, its teachings and literature. Meanwhile, her systematic use of data from a number of European publications on Tibetan religion and culture, without mentioning the books themselves or their authors, suggests that she purposely tried to create the appearance of such an interest and, moreover, of her own profound knowledge of the field.

In fact, the “terms” constructed with the help of Tibetan vocabulary arbitrarily extracted from dictionaries and other literature that came into her possession were used by her as an exotic wrapper for presenting to the public her own metaphysical fabricationsderivations based on European and Middle Eastern material. As for the rare authentic Tibeto-Buddhist terms found in “The Letters” (bde ba can, sems can, dkon mchog, stong pa nyid, etc.), they are stripped of their original meaning and interpreted by her in isolation from tradition.

Although Blavatsky caused a surge of interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the West with her activities, she herself had no such interest in it and even treated it with a considerable degree of disdain, feeling at liberty to treat fragments of its teachings freely, twisting them according to her own ideas. This attitude, coupled with direct declarations of a deeper knowledge of the Buddhist tradition than that possessed by its direct bearers, is quite in keeping with the standard Orientalist paradigm characteristic of European authors who in one way or another touched on the subject of the East in the XIX century.

Sources and Literature

Beal S. 1866. Translation of the Amitâbha Sûtra from Chinese // Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Beal S. 1871. A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese. ‒ London: Trübner & Co.

Blavatsky H. P. 1894:1. Tibetan Teachings \\ Lucifer, Vol. 15, No. 85.

Blavatsky H. P. 1894:2. Tibetan Teachings. Doctrines of the Holy “Lha”: // Lucifer, Vol. 15.

Blavatsky H. P. 1936. Letter to Mrs. Hollis Billings. Simla, Oct. 2 1881 // The Theosophical Forum. ‒ Point Loma, California: May 1936.

Blavatsky H. P. 1979. Collected Writings. Vol. VI. ‒ Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House.

Coleman W. 1895. The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings. ‒ London, Longmans, Green, and Co., Appendix C. Pp. 353-366.

Goyos A. 2009. Tracing the Source of Tibetan Phrases Found in Mahatma Letters #54 and #92. URL: http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/kammitshar/kammitshar.htm (accessed 09.12.2020).

Grechin B. S. 2013. A Buddhist's Attitude to Theosophy. A Historical and Linguistic Study. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https://proza.ru/2013/07/28/61 (accessed 09.12.2020).

Hare H. E., Hare W. L. 1936. Who Wrote the Mahatma Letters? ‒ London: Williams & Norgate Ltd.

Hodgson W. B. 1884. Notes of Northern Africa, the Sahara and Soudan. ‒ NY: Wiley and Putnam.

Huc, Gabet. 1866. Journey through Mongolia and Tibet to the Capital of the Dalai Lama {Russ.}. Moscow: K.S. Henrich Publishing House.

Jaeshcke H. A. 1866. Romanized Tibetan and English Dictionary. ‒ Kyelang.

Jäschke H. A. 1881. A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Special Reference to the Prevailing Dialects. ‒ London.

Koeppen C. F. 1859. The Lamaic Hierarchy and Church. ‒ Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider.

Lewin T. H. 1879. A Manual of Tibetan. ‒ Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press.

Lhamo Pemba. 1996. Tibetan Proverbs. ‒ Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.

Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and the Journey of Tomas Manning to Lhasa ‒ London: Trübner & Co, 1881.

Reigle D. 1983. The Books of Kiu-te, or the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras: A Preliminary Analysis. ‒ San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf.

Reigle D. 2017. Some Mahatma Letters Sources. URL: http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/some-mahatma-letters-sources/# (accessed 04.05.2020).

Schlagintweit, E. 1863. Buddhism In Tibet with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding it in India. ‒ London: Trübner & Cо.

Spierenburg H. L. 1975. De Zeven Menselijke Beginselen in het Werk van H. P. Blavatsky en het Tibetaans Buddhisme // Tibetaans Boeddhisme. ‒ Amsterdam.

The Dhammapada. A Collection of Verses / transl. by M. Muller. ‒ Oxford University Press, 1881.

The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett / transl., compiled and with an introduction by A. T. Barker. ‒ London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923.

Udânavarga: a Collection of Verses from the Buddhist Canon. ‒ London: Trübner & Co., 1883.

Vinaya Texts. Part I / transl. from Pali by T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenburg. ‒ Oxford University Press, 1881.

[1] Grechin, 2013.

[2] Schlagintweit, 1863. P. 101.

[3] Blavatsky, 1894:2. P. 97.

[4] “The Letters” meanwhile do use authentic Mongolian titular denominations, which, along with some Tibetan titles and a number of toponyms, were borrowed from the book of Huc and Gabet (1866), widely known in Europe and Russia.

[5] Koeppen, 1859. P. 253.

[6] Blavatsky. 1936, P. 345.

[7] Koeppen, 1859. P. 254.

[8] Koeppen, 1859. Pp. 23‒25, 27.

[9] Koeppen, 1859. P. 58.

[10] Koeppen, 1859. Pp. 112, 269, 361; 272, 360.

[11] Hereafter the letters are numbered according to the first edition (The Mahatma Letters..., 1923).

[12] See Blavatsky, 1894:1. Pp. 9‒17.

[13] Lewin, 1879. P. 167.

[14] Lewin, 1879. P. 43.

[15] This case is not the only one in which printing defects in books caused Blavatsky and her “mahatmas” to make curious mistakes. For example, in the letter No. 49, “Sankia K'houtchoo ‒ the precious wisdom” is given as an epithet of the Buddha. This hardly understandable phrase was inadvertently copied from Koeppen's book, where we find: “Sangdsche Kontschog, “Buddha-Kleinod”” (Koeppen, 1859. P. 292). The final “oo” instead of “og” probably appeared because of the poorly printed outline of the letter “g” in her copy of the book.

[16] Beal, 1871. Pp. 378‒379.

[17] Reigle, 2017.

[18] Beal, 1866. Pp. 136‒144.

[19] Beal, 1871. Pp. 30‒31.

[20] Beal, 1871. P. 90.

[21] Coleman,1895. Pp. 353‒366.

[22] Vinaya Texts... 1881. Pp. 73‒78.

[23] The Dhammapada... 1881. P. 34.

[24] Udânavarga... 1883. P. 93.

[25] Spierenburg, 1975. P. 74.

[26] Reigle, 1983.

[27] Narratives ... 1881. P. 338.

[28] See Koeppen, 1859. P. 267.

[29] Two other Tibetan words, given without translation in the text of “The Letters” and also intended to demonstrate the author's familiarity with Tibetan culture and language, are “akhu” (No. 24) (uncle) and “dzing dzing” (No. 24b) (not quite compos mentis). Both are taken from the already mentioned Jaeschke's dictionary.

[30] The Kabylie are a Berber people living in northern Algeria.

[31] Hodgson, 1844. P. 18.

[32] Lhamo Pemba, 1996. P. 129.

[33] See Blavatsky, 1894:1. Pp. 9‒17; Blavatsky, 1894:2. Pp. 97‒104.