What Are the Books of Kiu-te?
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- Published: Sunday, 22 May 2011 22:19
David Reigle – USA
[“What Are the Books of Kiu-te?” by David Reigle, was published in the High Country Theosophist 9.2 (Feb. 1994): 2-9, and reprinted in David and Nancy Reigle’s collection Blavatsky’s Secret Books: Twenty Years’ Research (San Diego, CA: Wizards Bookshelf, 1999), pp. 43-52, from which it is reproduced here, with slight modifications for our house style.]
The books of Kiu-te, as most Theosophists know, are said to be the source from which the Stanzas of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine were translated. We are told that besides the secret books of Kiu-te from which the Stanzas of Dzyan were translated, there exist public books of Kiu-te, found in the libraries of Tibetan monasteries.1 Yet these public books of Kiu-te remained, for all practical purposes, secret until 1981, when they were finally identified. Though the books are "public," in that they are found in the printed collection of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, they continue to be regarded by Tibetan tradition as the Buddha's secret teachings, and therefore as having restricted access. Even now only a tiny fraction of them has been translated into English.
Among the items of curious lore in H. P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine are her references to a language called Senzar. Senzar is a mystery. According to Blavatsky, it is the original language of the stanzas of Dzyan, which are the core of her great book and also the original language of all humanity. Blavatsky calls Senzar “a tongue absent from the nomenclature of languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted” (SD 1:xxxvii), and so it is. The name of Senzar appears in none of the lists of the world’s languages that linguists have compiled, nor is it ever likely to. We know about Senzar only what HPB has told us, although in fact she has told us a good deal.
Universal Life, in all its multi-myriad forms and aspects, is in constant flux. Unalterable in its underlying essence, it is in perpetual outward change. As soon as any one of its temporary manifestations becomes rigid, decay sets in, which is but another aspect of life, breaking up the outworn form, in order to build a new and more adequate one.
H. P. Blavatsky was a great psychological mystery to the world. She was a great psychological mystery even to her followers; ay, even to those who thought that they knew her best, and who met her daily and worked with her and were taught by her. To them, at least to most of them, she was an astounding paradox of what seemed to be conflicting and confusing traits of character. The intuitions of her followers and pupils told them that they were in the presence of a World-Teacher, the Messenger of other World-Teachers even greater than she was, who had sent her forth to strike the keynotes of a new age; and yet despite all this she puzzled these followers of hers most sadly, as much by those other traits of character which astonished and perplexed them because they had not the vision to expect to find such lofty and almost incomprehensible traits in a spiritual Teacher and Leader.
The careful analysis of external circumstances and difficulties that are gripping societies and countries at this moment in time, makes us understand how important it is to reaffirm the concept of the unity of life, which is at the heart of Theosophical reflection. A sense of separateness, selfish achievements—be they of a political or financial nature—refusal of philosophical and religious contact, personal achievement as the keystone of development, have shown, and are showing, that they are not capable of giving humanity a better future. Therefore even today there is the problem of knowing how to interpret the evolutionary momentum of humanity, and the conditions for its real development in an ethical and positive sense.
While in its earlier days the Theosophical Society was only one of the very few organizations to bring Eastern thought to the West, today it is one of the many voices in a vast choir. Yet, as a Society, we have as much right to exist as any other of its kind; and it is clear that we still have a strong, uplifting, and healing message to offer to the public at large, whose need for clarity and truth is ever-increasing. Even when at this moment some of the original reasons for establishing the TS have since long been achieved, much remains to be done to help one another convert parts of the outer and inner human wastelands into flourishing heavens of peace and sustainable spiritual prosperity.
Will is the exclusive possession of man on this our plane of consciousness. It divides him from the brute in whom instinctive desire only is active.
We speak of rendering homage. There are various ways of so doing. There is the homage of words, and there is the homage of the heart which leads to emulation. The homage of words is good when the heart is behind it; but the homage imitating grand action is finer and higher still. 
[The following article is based on a talk by Lorraine Christensen, given during the 2007 summer meeting of the Theosophical Society in America at Wheaton, Illinois.]
