Eastern Religion & Philosophies

This is the root that came last. The others fed the Renaissance synthesis in the 1460s; this one arrived four centuries later and was grafted onto a tree already fully grown. It is a root all the same, because almost nothing taught in a modern mystery school is free of it.

Europe had almost no direct knowledge of Indian or Buddhist thought until the end of the eighteenth century. The Upanishads reached the West in a Latin translation from a Persian version in 1801; Schopenhauer read it and called it the consolation of his life. Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society began translating Sanskrit in Calcutta. By the 1870s the material was flooding in: Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East, Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, the first English Bhagavad Gita anyone actually read. It arrived in translation, through colonial administrators and philologists, filtered by Victorian assumptions, and the esoteric world took it up at once.

The door it came through was the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky founded it in New York in 1875 and moved it to India in 1879, and from that point her teaching was framed as Eastern wisdom: karma, reincarnation, the seven planes, the seven bodies, the chakras, the Masters in Tibet. Much of this was a Western construction wearing Sanskrit terms, but it fixed the vocabulary. When Vivekananda spoke at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and then published Raja Yoga, the yoga of the Sutras entered the same channel. John Woodroffe's Serpent Power (1919) gave the West its picture of the chakras and kundalini. Zen arrived with D. T. Suzuki in the 1920s.

Gurdjieff took a different road. He claimed to have gathered his system from Sufi, Central Asian and Buddhist sources on his own travels, and from 1912 taught it in Moscow and later in France as the Fourth Way, a discipline of self-observation and work against mechanical habit. Whatever its true origins, it stands apart from Theosophy and has fed a separate line of schools ever since.

You can recognise this root by its content rather than its shape. Reincarnation and karma, the chakras and the subtle body, meditation as technique, the enlightened master, the idea that the self is an illusion to be seen through: these are all Eastern, and none of them were part of Western esotericism before 1875. When a school teaches the Tree of Life and the Tarot in one module and past lives and the chakras in the next, it has spliced two roots that never met until Blavatsky introduced them. The splice can be fruitful. But it is a splice, and it is worth knowing which ideas belong to which tradition before you decide how they fit together.