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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2 [[Vol. 2, Page]] 423 THE "BUDDHAS OF CONFESSION." ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE VERSES OF STANZA XII. T HE MS. from which these additional explanations are taken belongs to the group called "Tongshaktchi Sangye Songa," or the Records of the "Thirty-five Buddhas of Confession," as they are exoterically called. These personages, however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion "Buddhas," may just as well be called Rishis, or Avatars, etc., as they are "Buddhas who have preceded Sakyamuni" only for the Northern followers of the ethics preached by Gautama. These great Mahatmas, or Buddhas, are a universal and common property: they are historical sages - - at any rate, for all the Occultists who believe in such a hierarchy of Sages, the existence of which has been proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity. They are chosen from among some ninety-seven Buddhas in one group, and fifty-three in another,* mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifications of the powers of the first-named.** These "baskets" of the oldest writings on "palm leaves" are kept very secret. Each MS . has appended to it a short synopsis of the history of that sub-race to which the particular "Buddha-Lha" belonged. The one special MS . from which the fragments which follow are extracted, and then rendered into a more comprehensible language, is said to have been copied from stone tablets which belonged to a Buddha of the earliest day of the Fifth Race, who had witnessed the Deluge and the submersion of the chief continents of the Atlantean race. The day when much, if not all, of that which is given here from the archaic records, will be found correct, is not far distant. Then the modern symbologists will acquire the certitude that even Odin, or the god Woden, the highest god in the German and Scandinavian mythology, is one of these thirty-five Buddhas; one of the earliest, indeed, for the continent to which he and his race belonged, is also one of the earliest. So early, in truth, that in the days when tropical nature was to be found, where now lie eternal unthawing snows, one could cross almost by dry land from Norway via Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present surround Hudson's [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Gautama Buddha, named Shakya Thub-pa, is the twenty-seventh of the last group, as most of these Buddhas belong to the divine dynasties which instructed mankind. ** Of these "Buddhas," or the "Enlightened," the far distant predecessors of Gautama the Buddha, and who represent, we are taught, once living men, great adepts and Saints, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatars of the Celestial Beings -- eleven only belong to the Atlantean race, and 24 to the Fifth race, from its beginnings. They are identical with the Tirtankaras of the Jainas. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Bay.* Just, as in the palmy days of the Atlantean giants, the sons of the "giants from the East," a pilgrim could perform a journey from what in our days is termed the Sahara desert, to the lands which now rest in dreamless sleep at the bottom of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Events which were never written outside the human memory, but which were religiously transmitted from one generation to another, and from race to race, may have been preserved by constant transmission "within the book volume of the brain," and through countless aeons, with more truth and accuracy than inside any written document or record. "That which is part of our souls is eternal," says Thackeray; and what can be nearer to our souls than that which happens at the dawns of our lives? Those lives are countless, but the soul or spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and though "the book and volume" of the physical brain may forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections can never desert the divine soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever present before its mind's eye. It is this soul-voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradition more than in written History, that what is said below is all true, and relates to pre-historic facts. This is what is written in one passage: -- " T HE K INGS OF L IGHT HAVE DEPARTED IN WRATH. T HE SINS OF MEN HAVE BECOME SO BLACK THAT E ARTH QUIVERS IN HER GREAT AGONY. . . . T HE AZURE SEATS REMAIN EMPTY. W HO OF THE B ROWN, WHO OF THE R ED, OR YET AMONG THE B LACK ( races ), CAN SIT IN THE SEATS OF THE B LESSED, THE S EATS OF KNOWLEDGE AND MERCY! W HO CAN ASSUME THE FLOWER OF POWER, THE PLANT OF THE GOLDEN STEM AND THE AZURE BLOSSOM?" [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * This may account for the similarity of the artificial mounds in the U. S. of America, and the tumuli in Norway. It is this identity that led some American archaeologists to suggest that Norwegian mariners had discovered America some one thousand years ago. ( Vide Holmboe's Traces de Bouddhisme en Norvege, p. 23). There is no doubt that America is that "far distant land into which pious men and heavy storms had transferred the sacred doctrine," as a Chinese writer suggested by his description to Neumann. But neither Professor Holmboe, of Stockholm, nor the American archaeologists, have guessed the right age of the mounds, or the tumuli. The fact that Norwegians may have re-discovered the land that their long-forgotten forefathers believed to have perished in the general submersion, does not conflict with that other fact that the Secret Doctrine of the land which was the cradle of physical man, and of the Fifth Race, had found its way into the so-called New World ages and ages before the "Sacred Doctrine" of Buddhism. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 425 THE OLDEST RECORDS ABOUT ATLANTIS. The "Kings of Light" is the name given in all old records to the Sovereigns of the divine Dynasties. The "azure seats" are translated "celestial thrones" in certain documents.