The Voice of the Silence

H.P.B was a remarkable lady. Not of years ago, humanity has been helped and stimulated to make progress in her evolution through all phases of mental and spiritual development. The call of the gods to take our noble Self-development in our own hands will continue until all humans have reached the stage of full humanity that is to be self consciously at one with his innermost God or Self.

Great teachers, Rşis, Avatāras, Prophets, Messiahs, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas', Tīrthankaras, Zoroasters and Quetzalcoatls etc. have, from the symphony of the Universal Truth or Universal Religion, struck a keynote for the particular cycle of development of life on earth in which they were involved.

Mme. Blavatsky was a humble person, far from claiming any of such epithets. Nevertheless she was an exponent of the same "un known Lodge" which has fulfilled this task since the beginning of time.

Thanks to her, her superiors and her ardent coworkers and followers, the impulse dropped by her into humanity's mind-stream set the tone for times to come as the only genuine support for humanity in modern times which can compare with the grand religions which were initiated in the past and which came from the same source.

She did not claim to be a "guru" or even the president of an organization, nor did she bring any "revelation" or new religion to the world. She compared herself merely with a string holding together a bouquet of flowers. But the way she presented the ancient know ledge to the public in The Secret Doctrine and her other writings has initiated a revolution in humankind's mind, by handing out to those who want to receive them the keys to Truths long hidden.

The Voice of the Silence is another wise and until then unknown text, which she did not write herself, but consists of verses which she chose to translate from Telugu, the language of Andhra Pradesh in South-East India. It is of Buddhist or pre-Buddhist origin, what in itself is remarkable, because traditional Buddhism has long ago vanished from Indian soil.

The following pages are derived from the Book of the Golden Precepts, one of the works put into the hands of mystic students in the East. The knowledge of them is obligatory in that school, the teachings of which are accepted by many Theosophists. Therefore, as I know many of these Precepts by heart, the work of translating has been relatively an easy task for me.

It is well known that, in India, the methods of psychic development differ with the Gurus (teachers or masters), not only because of their belonging to different Schools of Philosophy, of which there are six, but because every Guru has his own system, which he generally keeps very secret. But beyond the Himalayas the method in the Esoteric Schools does not differ, unless the Guru is simply a Lama, but little more learned than those he teaches.

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 Paramartha', which, the legend of Nagarjuna 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 Jñaneśvari", that superb mystic treatise in which Krsna describes to Arjuna in glowing colours the condition of a fully illumined Yogi; and again in certain Upanişads. 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 Āryāsanga 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 Mahāyana (Yogächārya) schools are established. They are written variously, sometimes in Tibetan, but mostly in ideographs.

The sacerdotal language (Senzar), besides an alphabet 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 co lours, each of which corresponds to a letter of the Tibetan alphabet (thirty simple and seven ty-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 co lours, each a triplet in shade, i.e. the light, the primary, and the dark stand 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.

**Contents and Sample Pages**