Tuesday

ON THE ALLEGED TIBETAN SOURCE OF ALICE BAILEY'S WRITINGS by David Reigle




David Reigle is a very good researcher of oriental texts and I admire his work very much, but there is also something where I do not agree with him, and it is in his defense of Alice Bailey.

In 1997, Reigle published an article in which he explained the reasons why he considers that Alice Bailey is genuine and his article you can read here.


And below I summarize the reasons he gave, and I add the reasons why I disagree with him:



1) The first reason is because Alice Bailey's books are structured through themes divided into subtopics and these subtopics divided into sub-subtopics, and so on. And Reigle says that this peculiar way of structuring a text is very characteristic of Tibetan writings and very unusual in English-language writings.

But the detail is that there are also Westerners who write this way. For example, when I write a very long and complex article, I structure it in this way and I know other Western researchers who do the same, such as David Pratt or José Ramón Sordon, and our texts are not of Tibetan origin.



2) His second reason is because the five initiations mentioned by Alice Bailey have several similarities with the "Fivefold Path to Buddhahood" which is one of the most defining teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. And David Reigle argues that this idea of the five initiations taught by Leadbeater and Bailey is not found in Blavatsky's writings.

And on this point I cannot tell you if what he says is true or not, because I have not yet compiled the theosophical information that was written about the initiations, but even assuming that it is true, knowing that Leadbeater lived for several months with Colonel Olcott, who was a great scholar of Buddhism, who knew several important lamas, and who was instructed by Master Morya himself, it is quite possible that Colonel Olcott knew about these five initiations and mentioned them to Leadbeater, who later published them in his books and then Alice Bailey copied them.



3) And as a third reason David Reigle wrote:

« Perhaps the greatest objection maintained by the Theosophists against the Tibetan origin of Alice Bailey's writings is the frequent use of the word "God". »

And then he gave an argument to invalidate this objection, and I agree with him that some masters are more open to the religious beliefs of the people (as for example is the case of Master Pasteur) and it is likely that for many Theosophists this is their main objection.

But for those of us who have studied the original Theosophy, our main objection to Alice Bailey is not that, but the fact that her work is filled with the lies and falsehoods that Leadbeater invented, and while the three previous arguments mentioned by David Reigle could leave some doubt, this last statement completely eliminates the possibility that the books of Bailey were transmitted by a master of the Orient.

Because it makes no sense that a great Tibetan master who lives in the Himalaya and who is in close contact and collaboration with the Transhimalayan masters, instead of transmitting the Eastern esoteric teaching that these Masters taught to Blavatsky, to William Judge and to Henry Olcott, he repeats exactly all the falsehoods that an ex-Anglican priest had just invented on the other side of the world.

And therefore it is much more logical to consider that Alice Bailey, ignoring the deceit of Leadbeater, copied the lies that he invented without realizing his mistake, and to give more prestige to his books, she pretended that these were dictated telepathically by a great Tibetan master.













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