have the keys to unlock the meaning of much of Buddha’s doctrine which has been almost inaccessible to Europeans.’[1]
Some of the more learned lāmas, including the late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, have believed that since very early times there has been a secret international symbol-code in common use among the initiates, which affords a key to the meaning of such occult doctrines as are still jealously guarded by religious fraternities in India, as in Tibet, and in China, Mongolia, and Japan.
In like manner, Occidental occultists have contended that the hieroglyphical writings of ancient Egypt and of Mexico seem to have been, in some degree, a popularized or exoteric outgrowth of a secret language. They argue, too, that a symbol-code was sometimes used by Plato and other Greek philosophers, in relation to Pythagorean and Orphic lore; that throughout the Celtic world the Druids conveyed all their esoteric teachings symbolically; that the use of parables, as in the sermons of Jesus and of the Buddha, and of other Great Teachers, illustrates the same tendency; and that through works like Aesop’s Fables, and the miracle and mystery plays of medieval Europe, many of the old Oriental symbols have been introduced into the modern literatures of the West.[2]
- ↑ L. A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet or Lāmaism (London, 1895), p. 17.
- ↑ There is some sound evidence for supposing that one source of the moral philosophy underlying certain of the Aesop’s Fables (and, also, by way of comparison, of the Indian Panchatantra and Hitopadesha) may yet be shown to have been such primitive Oriental folk-tales about animals and animal symbols as scholars now think helped to shape the Jātaka Tales concerning the various births of the Buddha (cf. The Jātaka, ed. by E. B. Cowell, Cambridge, 1895–1907). Similarly, the Christian mystery plays contain symbolism so much akin to that found in mystery plays still flourishing under ecclesiastical patronage throughout Tibet and the neighbouring territories of Northern Buddhism as to point to another stream of Orientalism having come into Europe (cf. Three Tibetan Mysteries, ed. by H. I. Woolf, London, n.d.). The apparent Romanist canonization of the Buddha, under the medieval character of St. Jehoshaphat, is an additional instance of how things Eastern seem to have become things Western (cf. Baralâm and Yĕwâsĕf, ed. by E. A. W. Budge, Cambridge, 1923). Furthermore, the once very popular medieval work De Arte Moriendi (cf. The Book of the Craft of Dying, ed. by F. M. M. Comper, London, 1917), of which there are many versions and variants in Latin, English, French, and other European languages, seems to suggest a still further infiltration of Oriental ideas, concerning death and existence after death, such as underlie both the Tibetan Bardo
