THEO. They may as well deny that Nature has any hidden secrets for the men of science. Further on I will prove it by Buddha’s conversation with his disciple Ananda. His esoteric teachings were simply the _Gupta Vidya_ (secret knowledge) of the ancient Brahmins, the key to which their modern successors have, with few exceptions, completely lost. And this _Vidya_ has passed into what is now known as the _inner_ teachings of the _Mahayana_ school of Northern Buddhism. Those who deny it are simply ignorant pretenders to Orientalism. I advise you to read the Rev. Mr. Edkins’ _Chinese Buddhism_—especially the chapters on the Exoteric and _Esoteric_ schools and teachings—and then compare the testimony of the whole ancient world upon the subject. ENQ. But are not the ethics of Theosophy identical with those taught by Buddha? THEO. Certainly, because these ethics are the soul of the Wisdom-Religion, and were once the common property of the initiates of all nations. But Buddha was the first to embody these lofty ethics in his public teachings, and to make them the foundation and the very essence of his public system. It is herein that lies the immense difference between exoteric Buddhism and every other religion. For while in other religions ritualism and dogma hold the first and most important place, in Buddhism it is the ethics which have always been the most insisted upon. This accounts for the resemblance, amounting almost to identity, between the ethics of Theosophy and those of the religion of Buddha. ENQ. Are there any great points of difference? THEO. One great distinction between Theosophy and _exoteric_ Buddhism is that the latter, represented by the Southern Church, entirely denies (a) the existence of any Deity, and (b) any conscious _post-mortem_ life, or even any self-conscious surviving individuality in man. Such at least is the teaching of the Siamese sect, now considered as the _purest_ form of exoteric Buddhism. And it is so, if we refer only to Buddha’s public teachings; the reason for such reticence on his part I will give further on. But the schools of the Northern Buddhist Church, established in those countries to which his initiated Arhats retired after the Master’s death, teach all that is now called Theosophical doctrines, because they form part of the knowledge of the initiates—thus proving how the truth has been sacrificed to the dead-letter by the too-zealous orthodoxy of Southern Buddhism. But how much grander and more noble, philosophical and scientific, even in its dead-letter, is this teaching than that of any other Church or religion. Yet Theosophy is not Buddhism. FOOTNOTES: