A related misconception, which must now be cleared up, prevails chiefly among Indian readers. It arises out of the statement in the final paragraph of the final page of The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, wherein it is asserted that every tenet of my exposition found its parallel somewhere in the old Sanksrit writings and could therefore be fitly declared Indian in origin. Here again I must remind readers of the aforementioned fact that I have refused to expound these tenets in the archaic fashion with its terse undetailed dogmatic and dry form, but have entirely reshaped them with the help of modern Western thought, adding numerous details lacking in the old texts. This reworking and renovation of the old tenets naturally tends to make them somewhat unrecognizable by Indians accustomed only to the somewhat dreary and highly condensed material in their own texts. To Hindus who criticize The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga as being unauthentic, I reply that the last chapter of Aitareya Upanishad plainly says that everything that is, is Mind. But the point I wish to explain here is that I soon ascertained the undoubted historical fact that several of the most important texts of the hidden teaching had been lost to India since at least seven hundred years ago. This was because they were the work of Buddhist sages, and they disappeared in the general stamping-out of everything Buddhist from India--a persecution practised partly by the Brahmin priests fearful for their own selfish power and financial profit and partly by the Muhammedan invaders antipathetic to what they wrongly regarded as atheism. It must here be pointed out what is not realized by most Indians today, that Buddhism and Brahminism dwelt as sister religions for several hundred years after Buddha appeared, their esoteric doctrines merely complementing each other, and their esoteric teachers friendly to each other. The philosophers of one faith showed no hostility to the philosophers of the other. It was--and ever shall be--only among the unphilosophical priests and uninitiated mystics and their followers, the masses, that mutual antagonism later reared its ugly head.
Unfortunately, in their craze for eliminating everything that seemed of Buddhist origin these persecutors--both Brahmin and Moslem--even eliminated many of their own pre-Buddhist texts because they seemed to teach similar "atheistical" doctrines. The present-day consequences of these destructive activities is that it is now so difficult to ascertain what precisely was the complete hidden teaching (as opposed to the mere fragments which are available) that whoever attempts the task alone and unaided will soon lose himself in a labyrinth of puzzling contradictions and tantalizing obscurities. The only way whereby the numerous tenets into which the general teaching ramifies can be collected in all their completeness is to enlarge one's research beyond the frontier of India itself. For thousands of Buddhist monks and scholars fled from the bitter persecutions and cruel massacres to the remote mountains of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the interior of the Himalaya range, taking such of their texts with them as they could carry. In addition to them, there had been earlier propagandist journeys of Indian sages and philosophers to other parts of Asia, such as Tibet, China, and Cambodia, as well as the vast territory now called Sinkiang, and these ambassadors had already introduced and translated several important texts.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 5 : The Literary Work > # 211
