258
This is quite correct, from the occult standpoint, and also Kabbalistically, when one looks into the question of the seven and ten Sephiroths, and the seven and ten Rishis, Manus, etc. It shows that in sober truth there is not, nor can there be any fundamental disagreement between the esoteric philosophy of the Trans and Cis-Himalayan Adepts. The reader is referred, moreover, to the earlier pages of the above mentioned article, in which it is stated that "the knowledge of the occult powers of nature possessed by the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis was learnt by the ancient Adepts of India, and was appended by them to the esoteric doctrine taught by the residents of the sacred island (now the Gobi desert)*[1]. The Tibetan Adepts, however, (their precursors of Central Asia) have not accepted the addition." (pp. 155-156.) But this difference between the two doctrines does not include the septenary division, as it was universal after it had originated with the Atlanteans, who, as the Fourth Race, were of course an earlier race than the Fifth—the Aryan.
Thus, from the purely metaphysical standpoint, the remarks made on the Septenary Division in the "Bhagavad-Gita" Lecture hold good to-day, as they did five or six years ago in the article "Brahmanism on the sevenfold principle in Man," their apparent discrepancy notwithstanding. For purposes of purely theoretical esoterism, they are as valid in Buddhist as they are in Brahmanical philosophy. Therefore, when Mr. Subba Row proposes to hold to "the time-honoured classification of four principles" in a lecture on a Vedanta work—the Vedantic classification, however, dividing man into five "kosas" (sheaths) and the Atma (the six nominally, of course),†[2] he simply shows thereby that he desires to remain strictly within theoretical and metaphysical, and also orthodox computations of the same. This is how I understand his
