Talbot Mundy’s “The Nine Unknown” Men of Ashoka, the Maurya Clan, and its Connection to Theosophy

On Talbot Mundy’s 1923 novel The Nine Unknown, the Maurya Dynasty of ancient India (322-185 BCE), the Theosophical Society’s doctrine of hidden Mahatmas and the Yogācāra tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This entry simply deals with the claim advanced by Blavatsky and elaborated in the Mahatma papers, that Morya or the identity behind this name was connected to the historical Maurya clan and served as custodians of an esoteric Bodhist system predating the historically known Asanga (c. 320-390 CE). Mundy’s fiction, far from being mere literary invention or orientalist fantasy, systematically paralleled a body of Theosophical claims about secret custodians of ancient Indian knowledge that had been articulated decades before the novel’s publication. We can assess the historical plausibility of the Maurya-Morya connection using independent Puranic and epigraphic evidence and analyze the philosophical coherence between Yogācāra epistemology and Theosophical positions.

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1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AND THE MAHATMA OCCULT PHILOSOPHY
3. YOGACARA BUDDHISM AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
4. MAURYA DYNASTY IN HISTORICAL SCHOLARHSIP
5. THE MAURYA DYNASTY: EMPIRE, BUDDHISM AND LEGACY
6. THE POST-DYNASTIC MAURYAS: BLAVATSKY’S CLAIMS AND PURANIC EVIDENCE
7. MORYA-SAKYA CONNECTION
8. THEOSOPHICAL MAHATMAS AND THE NINE UNKNOWN: MEETING WITH MORYA (1851)
9. COMPARISON WITH THE NINE UNKNOWN
10. J.N. MASKELYNE AND THE SKEPTICAL TRADITION
11. FURTHER YOGACARA CONNECTION: THE TWO ARYASANGAS
12. ASANGA, MAITREYA, AND THE TUSHITA TRADITION
13. YOGACARA
14. THE SHADDARSHANAS AND ESOTERIC FOUNDATIONS
15. BLAVATSKY ON WESTERN SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM
16. THEOSOPHICAL-MAURYA CLAIMS ASSESSED
17. NOVELISTIC DRAMATIZATION OF THEOSOPHICAL LEGEND
18. LIMITS OF THE SKEPTICAL POSITION UPHELD AGAINST THEOSOPHY
19. SKEPTICISM AND QUESTIONS OF INTELLECTUAL HONESTY
20. LEGACY OF TALBOT MUNDY’S NOVEL

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INTRODUCTION

Talbot Mundy (author of The Nine Unknown) went by the pen name of William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940) and was an English adventure writer who had spent formative years in British India and later became profoundly influenced by the doctrines of Theosophy. In 1923 he published The Nine Unknown, which was a novel about a secret society founded by Emperor Ashoka (c. 268-232 BCE) in the aftermath of the devastating Kalinga War and his subsequent conversion to Buddhism. In Mundy’s narrative, nine men were entrusted with guarding nine books of secret knowledge, i.e., knowledge deemed too dangerous for the masses, too powerful for the uninitiated, and too consequential to be left unprotected in a world of competing empires, religious fanaticism, and spiritual ignorance. The novel, originally serialized in Adventure magazine, depicts a group of British, American, and Indian adventurers seeking the identities of these nine custodians, who must protect their ancient charge against Kali worshippers and Shaktists who impersonate them. The concept was later popularized by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in Le Matin des Magiciens in 1960 (English trans. The Morning of the Magicians, 1963), pushing it further into the popular imagination and ensuring its survival as one of the most persistent legends of hidden knowledge in modern esotericism.

Mundy’s novel eerily paralleled a well-established body of Theosophical literature from the 1870s through the 1890s, which asserted the existence of hidden adepts (mahatmas) in the Trans-Himalayan region who were custodians of ancient esoteric knowledge preserved through an unbroken lineage traceable to the era of the Buddha and the Maurya emperors. My argument here, is that Theosophical claims about Morya’s connection to the historical Maurya clan, and the existence of an esoteric Buddhist school predating the historically known Asanga do constitute a coherent and internally consistent body of assertions that deserve serious scholarly examination rather than reflexive dismissal. These claims, when assessed against independent evidence from Puranic literature, Buddhist canonical texts, epigraphic records, and the historiography of South Asian philosophy, exhibit a degree of historical and philosophical coherence that is routinely underappreciated in mainstream scholarship.

The skeptical counterpoint must, of course, be acknowledged. J.N. Maskelyne (1839–1917), a celebrated British stage magician and professional debunker of spiritualist fraud, published The Fraud of Modern Theosophy Exposed in 1912 through George Routledge & Sons, a work in which he dubbed Helena P. Blavatsky “the greatest fraud in history” and denied any evidence for the existence of the Mahatmas. The Hodgson Report of 1885, produced by Richard Hodgson for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), similarly concluded that Blavatsky had fabricated the Mahatma Letters and that the phenomena associated with her were the product of deliberate deception. These critiques have cast a long shadow over any scholarly engagement with Theosophical claims, as well as lead to the false conclusion that the case was settled. The rebuttals or defenses are not taken into account. While the skeptical tradition addressed the phenomenal claims of Theosophy —precipitated letters, materialized objects, clairvoyant demonstrations — it largely failed to engage with the philosophical content and historical assertions that constitute the substantive core of the Theosophical Movement’s project.

Rather than adjudicating the metaphysical claims of Theosophy, which is a task seen as lying outside the full competence of historical scholarship, we can examine the historical, textual and philosophical evidence underlying these claims with independent scholarship in Indology, Buddhist studies and South Asian history. The question is not whether the Mahatmas exist as described, but whether the body of assertions attributed to them is consistent with what we know from other sources, as Blavatsky argued, and what it means that this body of assertions was systematically dramatized in the fiction of a writer who was himself a committed Theosophist.

REVIEW: TALBOT MUNDY AND THE INFLUENCE OF THEOSOPHY ON HIS FICTION

Mundy’s deep engagement with Theosophy came through his friendship with Katherine Tingley, the leader of the Point Loma Theosophical community in California, and he became an active member of the community, living on the grounds of Lomaland for a period. This engagement profoundly shaped his later fiction, including not only The Nine Unknown (1923) but also Om, the Secret of Ahbor Valley (1924), the Dorian Dorian stories, and several other works that explore themes of hidden masters, esoteric knowledge, and the clash between Eastern wisdom and Western materialism.

As Emmett A. Greenwalt observed, Mundy’s novels written during his active membership at Point Loma “most clearly show the theosophical influence,” particularly in their use of Tibet as a locale for mystical narratives and their recurring pattern of a disillusioned Westerner who “chose to sit at the feet of a wise old lama and learn of the Masters.” After Tingley’s death in 1929, Mundy drifted away from Point Loma but remained sympathetic to Theosophical teachings until his death in 1940, producing approximately thirty-five principal works in all. The Nine Unknown was serialized in Adventure magazine before its book publication by Bobbs-Merrill, and its plot centered on the conflict between the true Nine Unknown, who embody spiritual wisdom, and nine Kali worshippers who impersonate them dramatizes a Theosophical concern with the distinction between genuine and counterfeit spiritual authority.

THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AND THE MAHATMA OCCULT PHILOSOPHY

From its inception, the Theosophical Society promulgated the existence of a brotherhood of advanced spiritual beings, variously called Mahatmas, Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, or Adepts. The Mahatma Letters, communications allegedly from Mahatma Koot Hoomi (K.H.) and Mahatma Morya (M.) to the British journalist A.P. Sinnett and the civil servant A.O. Hume, constitute the most extensive primary source for this doctrine. The letters are now preserved at the British Library and were first published by A. Trevor Barker in 1923 as The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett.

Joscelyn Godwin’s scholarly analysis in “The Mahatma Letters,” published in Rudbøg and Sand’s Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society (Oxford University Press, 2020), represents a significant advance in the academic treatment of this material, treating the Letters as historical documents worthy of philological and philosophical analysis regardless of one’s position on their provenance. The skeptical tradition includes the Hodgson Report (1885) of the SPR, which concluded that Blavatsky had forged the letters. However, Vernon Harrison’s re-examination of the Hodgson Report, published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1986), found significant methodological problems with Hodgson’s handwriting analysis and concluded that the case against Blavatsky was “not proven.” K. Paul Johnson’s The Masters Revealed (1994) advanced the thesis that the Mahatmas were based on real historical individuals whom Blavatsky had encountered during her travels, a thesis that has been challenged by Jinarajadasa, Daniel Caldwell and others on methodological grounds but which, at minimum, established that the Mahatma doctrine cannot be reduced to simple fabrication.

YOGACARA BUDDHISM AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The Yogācāra (Vijñānavāda) school is one of the two principal philosophical schools of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, alongside the Madhyamaka. Standard scholarship credits its founding to the half-brothers Asanga (c. 320–390 CE) and Vasubandhu, who systematized a body of teachings that had been developing in various Mahāyāna sūtras, notably the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra (which may date to as early as the first or second century CE). The key texts attributed to Asanga include the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, the Mahāyānasūtrālaṁkāra, and the Madhyānta-vibhāga. Vasubandhu’s contributions include the Viṃśatikā (Twenty Verses), the Triṃśikā (Thirty Verses), and the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa (Treatise on the Three Natures).

The tradition of Maitreya’s instruction to Asanga in Tushita Heaven is recorded in Paramārtha’s sixth-century Life of Vasubandhu and was confirmed by the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang) in his seventh-century account. Whether “Maitreya-nātha” was an actual historical teacher or a visionary experience has been a matter of scholarly debate. Erich Frauwallner held that Maitreya-nātha was a real person, a position also supported by some Tibetan commentarial traditions. Others, following Sthiramati’s sixth-century commentary, argue that Maitreya was a tutelary deity (yidam) encountered in visionary meditation. Dan Lusthaus’s Buddhist Phenomenology (2002) provides the most philosophically rigorous modern treatment of Yogācāra thought, emphasizing its character as a phenomenological investigation of cognition rather than an idealist metaphysics.

MAURYA DYNASTY IN HISTORICAL SCHOLARHSIP

The Maurya Dynasty (c. 322-185 BCE) remains one of the most extensively studied political formations in South Asian history. Founded by Chandragupta Maurya, who overthrew the Nanda Dynasty with the counsel and strategic genius of Kautilya (also known as Chanakya, the author of the Arthashastra), the Maurya Empire expanded under Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka to encompass the greater part of the Indian subcontinent. The historiography rests on multiple independent evidentiary traditions: the Ashokan Edicts (rock and pillar inscriptions deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837), Greek accounts including Megasthenes’ Indika, the Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles Mahavamsa and Dipavamsa, and extensive archaeological evidence from Pataliputra (modern Patna) and other sites.

Ashoka’s transformation after the Kalinga War (c. 261 BCE) is one of the most famous episodes in ancient Indian history. The rock edicts express his remorse at the carnage, in the the death and deportation of hundreds of thousands and these edicts record his adoption of dhamma (dharma) as state policy. Ashoka dispatched missionaries throughout Asia and, according to tradition, as far as the Mediterranean world, including his own son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka. The Third Buddhist Council, convened at Pataliputra around 250 BCE under Ashoka’s patronage and presided over by Moggaliputta Tissa, was a critical event in the preservation and codification of Buddhist texts, resulting in the dispatch of missionary teams to nine regions and the establishment of Theravāda Buddhism in Sri Lanka. The key modern scholarly treatments for reference points include Romila Thapar’s Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961), B.M. Barua’s Asoka and His Inscriptions (1946), and the corpus of epigraphic studies that have continued to refine understanding of Ashokan governance and ideology.

THE MAURYA DYNASTY: EMPIRE, BUDDHISM AND LEGACY

The Maurya Dynasty was founded c. 322 BCE when Chandragupta Maurya, with the counsel and strategic brilliance of his minister Kautilya (Chanakya), overthrew the Nanda Dynasty and established an empire centered at Pataliputra. Chandragupta’s empire extended from the eastern borders of modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan through the Gangetic plain to the Bay of Bengal. Greek sources, particularly Megasthenes, who served as Seleucid ambassador at Chandragupta’s court, provide corroborating evidence for the empire’s extent and administrative sophistication. Chandragupta’s son Bindusara expanded the empire further, and it reached its greatest territorial extent under his grandson Ashoka, who conquered the eastern kingdom of Kalinga (modern Odisha) in a devastating war c. 261 BCE.

Many Theosophists learn about King Ashoka, and the most significant aspect of this history is the geographical reach. The Kalinga War proved to be a decisive turning point, not only for Ashoka personally but for the entire trajectory of Buddhism as a world religion. The Ashokan rock edicts, particularly the Thirteenth Major Rock Edict, record the emperor’s remorse at the suffering caused by the conquest: the death of 100,000, the deportation of 150,000, and the multiples of those who perished from subsequent famine and disease. Ashoka adopted dhamma as state policy, promoted non-violence, established animal hospitals, planted roadside trees, and patronized the Buddhist Sangha on a scale that transformed Buddhism from a regional Indian movement into a pan-Asian religion. The Third Buddhist Council, convened at Pataliputra c. 250 BCE, codified the Pali Canon and dispatched missionary teams to nine regions, including Sri Lanka (Mahinda and Sanghamitta), the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Northwest, and Southeast Asia.

The dynasty’s decline after Ashoka’s death in c. 232 BCE was gradual. The empire fragmented under his successors, and around 185 BCE the last Maurya emperor, Brihadratha, was assassinated by his Brahmin general Pushyamitra Shunga during a military parade. The Shunga Dynasty that succeeded the Mauryas reversed many of Ashoka’s Buddhist policies, and some Buddhist sources describe a period of persecution. However, the Maurya name did not vanish with the fall of the dynasty. Colonel James Tod, in his monumental Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829), considered “Morya” or “Maurya” a corruption of “Mori,” the name of a Rajput tribe. The Commentary on the Mahavamsa similarly suggests that the princes of the town Mori were called Mauryas. This etymological and genealogical thread, the persistence of the Maurya name in Rajput lineages, is directly relevant to the Theosophical claims about Morya, as we shall see.

THE POST-DYNASTIC MAURYAS: BLAVATSKY’S CLAIMS AND PURANIC EVIDENCE

One of the most remarkable features of Blavatsky’s historical assertions, if you are going to approach it from the outside, is her claim that the Maurya lineage persisted for centuries after the fall of the dynasty, maintaining a continuous connection to Buddhism and eventually establishing a presence in Tibet. In her essay Shakyamuni’s Place in History (published in Collected Writings, Vol. V, pp. 245-259), Blavatsky writes that in 436 CE, an Arhat named Kasyapa, belonging to the Morya clan, departed from the Indian convent of Panch-Kukkutarama carrying the fifth of seven golden statues of the Buddha to a lake in Bod-yul (Tibet), fulfilling an ancient prophecy. Seven years later, the first Buddhist monastery was said to have been established on that spot. She continues:

“Most of the abbots of that monastery ‘were the descendants of the dynasty of the Moryas, there being up to this day three of the members of this once royal family living in India.’” (H.P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, Vol. V, pp. 245-246)

The claim is historically significant because it asserts a direct link between the Maurya dynasty and Tibetan Buddhism, an asserted link for which the Puranic literature of India provides independent, pre-Theosophical corroboration.

In the December 1883 issue of The Theosophist, a letter from R. Ragoonath Row, accompanied by editorial notes from Blavatsky, assembles the following Puranic evidence: The Matsya Purana, chapter 272, states that ten Moryas would reign over India. The Vishnu Purana, Book IV, chapter 4, records a king called Moru who, through the power of devotion (Yoga), is said to be still living in the village of Katapa in the Himalayas, and who in a future age will restore the Kshatriya race in the Solar dynasty. The same Vishnu Purana, Book IV, chapter 24, declares: “upon the cessation of the race of Nanda, the Moryas will possess the earth, for Kautilya will place Chandragupta on the throne.” The Vachaspattya, a Sanskrit Encyclopedia, places the village of Katapa on the northern side of the Himalayas, hence in Tibet. The Bhagavata Purana (Skanda, chapter 12) and the Vayu Purana reinforce this placement.

The significance of these Puranic references cannot be overstated. They establish an independent textual tradition, predating Theosophy by many centuries, connecting the Maurya (or Morya) name to a Himalayan or Tibetan location. The Vishnu Purana‘s reference to Moru living in Katapa through the power of Yoga, awaiting a future age in which he will restore a royal line, is particularly striking. It places a figure bearing the Maurya name in precisely the geographical region where the Theosophical Mahatmas were said to reside. This is not a Theosophical invention and seems to be a datum of classical Indian literature that the Theosophical writers cited and interpreted but did not create.

MORYA-SAKYA CONNECTION

Blavatsky further asserted that the Maurya clan is connected to the clan of Sakyamuni Buddha, the Sakyas. This claim, too, finds support in Buddhist canonical literature. In her editorial notes to the Ragoonath Row letter, Blavatsky cites the Buddhist Mahavamsa, which describes Chandragupta (Chandagatto in Pali) as “a prince of the Moryan dynasty.” The Mahavamsa records that certain Kshatriyas of the Sakya line crossed the Himavanto (Himalayas) and “discovered a delightful location, well watered, and situated in the midst of a forest of lofty bo and other trees. There they founded a town, which was called by its Sakya lords, Morya-Nagara.” This passage establishes, within the Buddhist textual tradition itself, a genealogical connection between the Sakyas and the Moryas — the former founding a city that bears the latter’s name.

The Moriya clan (Pali: Moriya) also appears independently in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, one of the most important texts in the Pali Canon, as a clan contemporaneous with and geographically proximate to the Sakyas. After the Buddha’s cremation, the Moriya clan of Pipphalivana is mentioned as one of the clans that received a portion of the Buddha’s relics. The etymological connection is significant: “Moriya” likely derives from “mayura” or “mora” (peacock), connecting the clan to Karttikeya (Murugan), the Hindu deity whose vehicle (vahana) is the peacock, and to the Maurya dynastic emblem. The peacock appears on Ashokan coinage and architectural remains, reinforcing the Moriya-Maurya identification.

Both Morya and Koot Hoomi, in the Mahatma Letters, claimed their esoteric school was located in the Trans-Himalayan region, and is a claim consistent with the Puranic placement of Katapa “on the northern side of the Himalayas,” as specified by the Vachaspattya. Whether one accepts the metaphysical claims of Theosophy or not, the geographical and genealogical assertions are demonstrably grounded in pre-Theosophical Indian textual traditions. This is a point that the skeptical tradition, from Maskelyne to the present, has almost entirely failed to address.

THEOSOPHICAL MAHATMAS AND THE NINE UNKNOWN: MEETING WITH MORYA (1851)

Blavatsky’s account of her first encounter with the man she called Morya places it in London in 1851, during the year of the Great Exhibition. She described him as a Rajput by birth — a member of the warrior aristocracy of northwestern India, and as a figure of commanding physical presence and authority. According to her account, Morya later lived with the man known as Koot Hoomi in “Little Tibet” (Ladakh, in the Jammu and Kashmir region), where they were associated with a broader community of adepts engaged in the preservation and transmission of esoteric knowledge. K. Paul Johnson, in The Masters Revealed (1994), attempted to identify Morya with specific historical individuals, including the Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Kashmir. While Johnson’s identifications have been contested most notably by Daniel Caldwell, who challenged the evidentiary basis, his work established that Blavatsky’s descriptions of these masters are not obviously incompatible with the existence of real personages operating in the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century India and Central Asia.

The Mahatma Letters themselves, regardless of their disputed provenance, contain extensive philosophical teachings, particularly on the nature of consciousness, karma, reincarnation, and the hierarchical structure of cosmic reality. A point of particular relevance to this article is the assertion, made repeatedly by Koot Hoomi and Morya in these letters, that the initiates are the protectors of “Secret Knowledge” underlying the Shaddarshanas (or six exoteric schools of Indian philosophy): Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, and Vedanta. The implication, stated plainly in the Letters, is that there exists an esoteric foundation beneath the six orthodox schools, and that this foundation is preserved by the adepts of the Trans-Himalayan brotherhood. This claim, extravagant as it may appear to us outside of these traditions, is in fact structurally consonant with a longstanding Indian philosophical tradition of distinguishing between exoteric and esoteric teaching.

COMPARISON WITH THE NINE UNKNOWN

The parallels between Mundy’s The Nine Unknown and the Theosophical claims about the Mahatmas are too striking and too systematic to be coincidental and, given Mundy’s documented commitment to Theosophy, there is no reason to suppose they are.

(a) Both posit a secret society founded in the era of Ashoka. In Mundy’s novel, the Nine Unknown are established by Ashoka after the Kalinga War. In the Theosophical literature, the brotherhood of adepts is traced to the same historical period, in the era of Ashoka’s patronage of Buddhism and the dispatch of missionaries.

(b) Both claim that this society preserves ancient Indian knowledge too dangerous for the uninitiated. In the novel, the Nine guard nine books of secret knowledge covering subjects including propaganda, physiology, microbiology, alchemy, communication, gravity, cosmology, light, and sociology. In Theosophy, the Mahatmas preserve the esoteric foundations of Indian philosophy and Buddhist doctrine.

(c) Both locate the custodians in a hidden, semi-mythological geographic space — in the mountains, the Himalayas, the hidden valleys of India and Tibet. The Theosophical Mahatmas reside in the Trans-Himalayan region. Mundy’s Nine operate from concealed locations throughout India.

(d) Both assert that these custodians are connected to the Buddhist tradition inaugurated by Ashoka’s patronage. In both the novel and the Theosophical literature, the secret society exists within a broadly Buddhist framework — one that transcends the divisions between Theravāda and Mahāyāna.

The argument is not that Mundy’s novel is a faithful transcription of Theosophical doctrine, but the structural architecture of the novel is Theosophical, as comments from the previous version of this article demonstrate.

The key difference from the novel is that in Theosophy, the hidden adepts are presented as real living human beings of extraordinary spiritual attainment who have communicated with specified individuals at documented times and places. In Mundy’s novel, they are fictional characters. But the underlying structure is identical: a secret society of wisdom-keepers, founded in the Ashokan era, preserving knowledge in the hidden spaces of India and the Himalayas.

J.N. MASKELYNE AND THE SKEPTICAL TRADITION

John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917) was one of the most celebrated stage magicians of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and a prolific debunker of spiritualist fraud. His The Fraud of Modern Theosophy Exposed: A Brief History of the Greatest Imposture Ever Perpetrated Under the Cloak of Religion, published in 1912 by George Routledge & Sons, represents the most sustained contemporary polemic against Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. Maskelyne’s expertise was genuine: he was an accomplished conjurer who understood the mechanics of physical deception such as trick cabinets, hidden compartments, confederates, sleight of hand. His exposure of the Davenport Brothers and other fraudulent mediums was a significant contribution to the rationalist critique of Victorian spiritualism.

However, the limitations of Maskelyne’s critique of Theosophy must be squarely acknowledged. His analysis was almost exclusively directed at the phenomenal claims associated with Blavatsky: the “precipitation” of letters from the Mahatmas, the materialization of objects, the so-called “Shrine” at the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Adyar. Maskelyne argued, with considerable plausibility, that these phenomena could be replicated through conjuring techniques. He was not a historian, not an Indologist, not a philosopher, and not a specialist in Buddhist or Hindu textual traditions. He did not engage with the philosophical content of the Mahatma Letters, the Puranic evidence for the Maurya lineage, the consistency of the Theosophical claims with independent Indological scholarship, or the question of whether the esoteric Buddhist traditions described by the secret correspondents relate to anything known from other sources. In short, Maskelyne could demonstrate that a letter had not been “precipitated” from thin air, but he could not and did not attempt to address the question of whether the philosophical content of that letter was consistent with a genuine Buddhist transmission tradition.

The Hodgson Report of 1885, while more methodologically sophisticated than Maskelyne’s polemic, suffered from similar limitations. Richard Hodgson’s investigation also focused on the physical circumstances of the letter phenomena, the construction of the Adyar Shrine, the handwriting of the letters, the testimony of witnesses, and concluded that Blavatsky had fabricated the entire correspondence. However, Vernon Harrison’s meticulous re-examination of the Hodgson Report, published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1986, found significant problems with Hodgson’s handwriting analysis and concluded that the case against Blavatsky was “not proven.” Harrison, himself a professional handwriting analyst and past president of the Royal Photographic Society, demonstrated that Hodgson had made numerous errors in his comparative analysis and had adopted an adversarial rather than impartial investigative stance. Contemporary scholarship, including Godwin (2020) and Tim Rudbøg’s doctoral dissertation (2012), treats the Theosophical sources with considerably greater nuance than the polemical tradition of the early twentieth century.

FURTHER YOGACARA CONNECTION: THE TWO ARYASANGAS

Among the most provocative and least examined of Blavatsky’s historical assertions is her claim that there were two distinct Aryasangas separated by long centuries. The first, she maintained, founded the original Yogacharya school. This was, in her account, neither the northern nor the southern school recognized by later Buddhist historiography, but an esoteric school of early Buddhist teachings transmitted privately within the brotherhood of adepts. The second is the historically known Asanga (c. 320-390 CE), who, in her telling, popularized the teaching in exoteric form, making available to the wider Buddhist world a version of doctrines that had been preserved in their full, esoteric form by the hidden school as explored in The Four Modes of Birth in The Secret Doctrine and the Abhidharmakosa of Buddhism.

Blavatsky was emphatic on this point. She asserted that “none of the genuine Yogâchârya books have ever been made public or marketable.” It appears impossible to verify or falsify through publicly available evidence, but it is structurally consistent with the Indian tradition of restricted transmission (guru-śiṣya paramparā) and the distinction between upadeśa (oral instruction) and śāstra (public treatise).

The standard Indological position is that the Yogācāra school was founded by Asanga in the fourth century CE. However, several observations complicate this picture. The Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, which contains many characteristically Yogācāra doctrines (including the ālayavijñāna and the three natures), may date to as early as the first or second century CE well before Asanga. The Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra is an enormous, complex, and heterogeneous text that appears to synthesize multiple layers of teaching to take on, suggesting a developmental history that predates its final redaction. Emil Schlagintweit, in Buddhism in Tibet (1863), remarked upon the difficulty of determining the precise origin of the Mahāyāna religious books, noting that elements of their content appear to predate Asanga’s systematization. None of this proves Blavatsky’s claim, but it renders the claim less implausible than a naive reading of the standard historical narrative might suggest. The Yogācāra tradition, as we know it, was systematized by Asanga, but the question of whether the ideas systematized by Asanga had a prior history, and, if so, in what form, remains a live question in Buddhist studies.

ASANGA, MAITREYA, AND THE TUSHITA TRADITION

A traditional account of Asanga’s enlightenment, preserved in Paramārtha’s sixth-century Life of Vasubandhu, provides a striking narrative of esoteric transmission. According to this account, Asanga was the eldest of three brothers who trained initially in the Sarvāstivāda school of Buddhism. After learning the Hīnayāna doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā), he found it insufficient and, through years of meditation, ascended to Tushita Heaven, where the future Buddha Maitreya himself instructed him in “the doctrine of nothingness belonging to the Mahāyāna.” Upon his enlightenment, he took the name Asanga, meaning “without attachment.” He then returned to the human world and composed the treatises that established the Yogācāra school.

Scholarly debate around this narrative is directly relevant to the Theosophical claims. If “Maitreya-nātha” was a real historical teacher as Erich Frauwallner argued in his On the Date of the Buddhist Master of the Law Vasubandhu (1951), then Asanga received instruction from an identifiable human master whose teachings constituted the foundation of Yogācāra philosophy. If, on the other hand, Maitreya was a visionary or tutelary deity (yidam) encountered in meditative states as other scholars have argued, then the Yogācāra tradition was, from its very inception, grounded in a mode of esoteric transmission (visionary instruction from a transcendent being) that is structurally similar to the Theosophical model of communication with masters. Either way, the origin narrative of Yogācāra involves precisely the kind of hidden, non-public, initiated transmission that both Theosophy and Mundy’s novel posit as the mechanism for the preservation of secret knowledge.

The Chinese pilgrim Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang), who traveled to India in the seventh century and studied at the great Buddhist university of Nālandā confirmed the Maitreya-Asanga tradition in his own writings, lending it additional historical weight. The tradition was thus well established, independently attested, and transmitted through multiple cultural channels (Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, Tibetan) before the Theosophical Society was founded. Blavatsky’s claim of an earlier Aryasanga can be understood as a radicalization of this tradition, asserting that the Maitreya-Asanga transmission was itself a later, exoteric echo of an even older, esoteric teaching.

YOGACARA

These parallels admit of three possible explanations, each with different implications for the assessment of Theosophical claims. First, they may indicate genuine transmission that Blavatsky and the Mahatmas were drawing upon an authentic Buddhist source tradition, whether the historically known Yogācāra or an earlier esoteric version of it. Second, they may indicate sophisticated appropriation that Blavatsky, who was widely read in the available Indological literature of her time (including the work of Burnouf, Csoma de Kőrös, Schlagintweit, and Max Müller), constructed her system by synthesizing elements drawn from published sources. Third, they may indicate independent philosophical convergence, or that similar problems (the nature of consciousness, the structure of illusion, the conditions of liberation) generate similar solutions in different traditions. Each of these explanations is logically possible, though none can be excluded on the basis of currently available evidence.

THE SHADDARSHANAS AND ESOTERIC FOUNDATIONS

The Theosophical claim that the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy (Shaddarshanas)—Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, and Vedanta possess an esoteric foundation preserved by m sadhus, mahatmas, etc is one of the most ambitious assertions in the entire Theosophical writings. It is asserted in the Mahatma Letters that the adepts are the custodians of the “Secret Knowledge” underlying the six exoteric schools. The implication is that each of the six darshanas, as publicly known and taught, represents a partial and externalized version of a comprehensive esoteric system — a system that integrates the insights of all six schools into a unified philosophical framework.

This claim, while extraordinary, is not without precedent in the Indian philosophical tradition itself. The distinction between exoteric (bahya) and esoteric (āntara) teaching runs throughout Indian intellectual culture. The Upanishads uphold this distinction in the concept of paravidyā (higher knowledge) versus aparavidyā (lower knowledge) where “lower knowledge” includes even the Vedas themselves when studied merely as texts rather than as vehicles of liberating insight. The Mundaka Upanishad (I.1.4-5) distinguishes between the knowledge of the Vedas, phonetics, ritual, grammar, etymology, meter, and astronomy (aparavidyā) and the knowledge “by which the Imperishable is realized” (paravidyā). The Theosophical claim is, in essence, an extension of this indigenous Indian framework: the six darshanas are aparavidyā; and their esoteric foundation is paravidyā.

Furthermore, the tradition of restricted transmission in the guru-śiṣya paramparā (teacher-student lineage) is one of the most ancient and persistent features of Indian intellectual life. Advanced teachings in virtually every Indian philosophical and spiritual tradition are transmitted only to qualified students (adhikārī) who have demonstrated the requisite moral, intellectual, and spiritual preparation. The idea that certain knowledge is “too dangerous” for the unqualified is not a Theosophical innovation, but a foundational principle of Indian pedagogy, operative in contexts ranging from Vedic ritual instruction to Tantric initiation to the guru-disciple relationships of Advaita Vedanta.

The “danger motif” that appears in both the Theosophical tradition and Mundy’s The Nine Unknown is the assertion that secret knowledge would be catastrophic in the wrong hands has deep roots in Indian intellectual culture. It is not, as some critics have suggested, a mere literary device or an excuse for non-disclosure. It reflects a genuine philosophical tradition in which knowledge is understood to be inseparable from the moral and spiritual condition of the knower, and in which the transmission of knowledge without adequate preparation is understood to produce not liberation but distortion, delusion, and potential destruction.

BLAVATSKY ON WESTERN SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

Helena Blavatsky said according to notes transcribed by Laura C. Holloway in The Mahatmas and Their Instruments (The Word, New York, May 1912, pp. 69-76). These statements show the philosophical rationale for the restricted transmission of esoteric knowledge and deserve careful attention:

“Western people are in their first phase of spiritual awakening, and want phenomena at every step.”— H.P. Blavatsky, transcribed by Laura C. Holloway, The Word, May 1912

“People expect too much from others in psychic matters. They demand to know about the Mahatmas and, when answered according to their understandings, they demand that I do just what they tell me by way of proof. When I refuse, they go away and abuse me. You know enough about the law of Karma to realize that I cannot interfere with it.”— H.P. Blavatsky, transcribed by Laura C. Holloway, The Word, May 1912

“I tell every one that it is possible for them to learn occult things; and how little or how big the results obtained will depend upon themselves, and what they have been in other lives. Because I know the Mahatmas and try to serve them, it does not follow that I can make others acquainted with them. It depends entirely upon thinking.”— H.P. Blavatsky, transcribed by Laura C. Holloway, The Word, May 1912

The philosophical position here is that genuine spiritual knowledge cannot be transmitted through external phenomena, demonstrations, or proofs. It can be realized only through internal transformation, through the development of the knower’s own consciousness to the point where direct apprehension becomes possible. This position is not merely a convenient excuse for the absence of proof but a philosophical stance with deep roots in both Indian and Platonic epistemology, where knowledge of the highest realities is held to be a function of the knower’s level of being.

Then, H.P.B. quoting a paragraph from her teacher’s letter written in 1884 and preserved in Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom (compiled by C. Jinarajadasa, Theosophical Publishing House, 1973/77, Vol. 1, p. 20):

“Everyone should try to break through that great Maya against which occult students, the world over, have always been warned by their teachers — the hankering after phenomena. Like the thirst for drink and opium, it grows with gratification. The spiritualists are drunk with it, they are thaumaturgic sots. If you cannot be happy without phenomena you will never learn our philosophy.”— (K.H., Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Vol. 1, p. 20

“The pendulum has swung from the extreme of blind faith towards the extreme of materialistic skepticism, and nothing can stop it save Theosophy. Is not this a thing worth working for, to save those nations from the doom their ignorance is preparing for them?” (K.H., Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Vol. 1, p. 20)

The Yogācāra school asserts that liberation comes through the transformation of consciousness (āśrayaparāvṛtti). In Yogācāra, the source of bondage is the parikalpita nature, or the layer of conceptual construction that overlays reality and produces the illusion of a world of independently existing objects. Liberation consists in the realization of the pariniṣpanna nature, or reality as it is, free from conceptual overlay. This realization cannot be transmitted through words, demonstrations, or phenomena. It must be achieved through direct meditative insight. The Theosophical position on the impossibility of transmitting spiritual knowledge through phenomena is, quite precisely, a restatement of this Yogācāra principle.

THEOSOPHICAL-MAURYA CLAIMS ASSESSED

When the Theosophical claims about the Maurya connection are assessed against independent historical and textual evidence, rather than against the polemics of stage magicians and hostile investigators, they exhibit a degree of coherence that is often underappreciated by critics. This coherence may be summarized in five points:

(a) The Puranas independently attest to a Morya/Moru figure in the Himalayas. This is not a Theosophical invention. The Vishnu Purana‘s reference to King Moru living in the village of Katapa through the power of Yoga, awaiting a future age, is a datum of classical Indian literature that predates the Theosophical Society by many centuries. The Vachaspattya places Katapa on the northern side of the Himalayas in Tibet. Blavatsky, the Theosophists and her contexts cited and engaged with these texts.

(b) The Moriya clan is historically attested in Buddhist texts as contemporaneous with the Sakyas. The Mahaparinibbana Sutta records the Moriyas of Pipphalivana among the recipients of the Buddha’s relics. The Mahavamsa traces the Maurya dynasty’s genealogical connection to the Sakya clan. These are canonical Buddhist sources, available for independent verification.

(c) The Maurya Dynasty’s deep connection to Buddhism is historically established beyond dispute. Ashoka’s patronage of Buddhism, his convening of the Third Buddhist Council, his dispatch of missionaries, and his adoption of dhamma as state policy are among the most securely established facts in ancient Indian history, attested by epigraphic, literary, and archaeological evidence.

(d) The claim of post-dynastic Maurya involvement in Tibetan Buddhism is consistent with the known timeline of Buddhism’s transmission from India to Tibet. Blavatsky’s assertion that an Arhat of the Morya clan transported a Buddha statue to Tibet in 436 CE, leading to the establishment of a monastery, falls within the period of Buddhism’s gradual penetration into Tibet, which culminated in the royal patronage of Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century and the founding of Samye monastery in the eighth. While the specific claim about the Arhat Kasyapa cannot be independently verified, it is not chronologically or geographically implausible.

(e) The philosophical parallels between Yogācāra and Theosophy are precise and systematic. The ālayavijñāna–astral light parallel, the trisvabhāva–epistemological triad parallel, and the bhūmi–initiatic degree parallel constitute a set of structural isomorphisms that cannot be explained by casual acquaintance with Buddhism. They indicate either genuine transmission from a Buddhist source tradition, systematic appropriation from available Indological literature, or an extraordinary degree of independent philosophical convergence.

These five points, taken together, do not prove the Theosophical claims in any strong sense. They do, however, establish that the claims are historically grounded, textually supported, and philosophically coherent to a degree that renders their wholesale dismissal untenable. The question is not whether the claims are true, that question may be unanswerable by historical methods, but whether they deserve the serious scholarly engagement that has been largely denied them.

NOVELISTIC DRAMATIZATION OF THEOSOPHICAL LEGEND

The Nine Unknown should be understood not as an independent literary creation springing from Mundy’s personal imagination but as a novelistic dramatization of Theosophical doctrines that he had absorbed through years of study and community membership. The “clandestine chiefs” of Mundy’s novel, or the nine custodians who guard the nine books of secret knowledge from both the ignorant and the malevolent are fictional avatars of the proposed real masters described in the Theosophical literature of the preceding five decades. Their function in the novel mirrors the function of masters-initiates in Theosophical doctrine: to preserve, protect and selectively transmit knowledge that could transform or destroy civilization depending on the moral condition of its recipients.

The novel clearly brings to question the ethics, morality and nature of secrecy with respect to intelligence agencies, and their interest in paranormal and secret chemist and physics knowledge to advance warfare.

There is a deep irony in the history of the reception of the Nine Unknown concept. Mundy’s fiction has achieved far wider cultural penetration than the Theosophical source material from which it derives. Most people who have encountered the “Nine Unknown Men” through Pauwels and Bergier’s Le Matin des Magiciens (1960) or through the countless popular articles, documentaries, and internet discussions that have proliferated since are entirely unaware of the Theosophical antecedents. The “Nine Unknown” have entered the popular imagination as a free-floating legend, detached from the specific doctrinal context that gave them birth. The legend has been assimilated into the broader genre of “secret history.” This is a genre that includes everything from the Knights Templar to the Illuminati without any recognition that its intellectual architecture was constructed from the specific claims of nineteenth-century Theosophy about the nature, location and function of the Mahatmas.

This history of its reception has had a distorting effect on both literary scholarship and the study of esotericism. Literary scholars who discussed Mundy’s novel tend to treat it as a specimen of “oriental adventure fiction” without recognizing the specificity of its doctrinal commitments. Scholars of esotericism who discuss the Theosophical Mahatmas tend not to notice that the most culturally influential dramatization of the Mahatma concept is a novel that most of them have never read.

LIMITS OF THE SKEPTICAL POSITION UPHELD AGAINST THEOSOPHY

The skeptical tradition, from Maskelyne through the Hodgson Report and beyond, has performed a valuable service in subjecting the phenomenal claims of Theosophy to critical scrutiny. No serious scholar can ignore the evidence that some of the physical phenomena associated with Blavatsky — the “precipitated” letters, the materialized teacups, the Adyar Shrine—were, at minimum, susceptible to naturalistic explanation and, in some cases, were almost certainly produced through ordinary means. The skeptics were right to demand evidence, and to be unsatisfied with the evidence provided.

However, the skeptical critique has a fundamental limitation that must be acknowledged: it addressed the phenomenal claims of Theosophy while largely failing to engage with the philosophical and historical substance. This limitation is not merely academic. It has had the effect of foreclosing scholarly engagement with the substantive content of the Theosophical corpus, which seemed to reveal the limitations of Western scholars themselves in the nineteenth-century. Maskelyne could demonstrate that a letter had not been “precipitated” from thin air—but he could not address the question of whether the philosophical content of that letter was consistent with a genuine Buddhist transmission tradition. Hodgson could analyze the handwriting of the Mahatma Letters, but he did not, and could not, assess whether the doctrines contained in those letters bore a coherent relationship to the Yogācāra tradition, the Puranic literature, or the historiography of the Maurya dynasty. The skeptical critique, in short, was directed at the medium rather than the philosophical system and its positions pointing to an ancient non-dual Wisdom-Tradition, and the history of its custodians.

Vernon Harrison’s 1986 re-examination of the Hodgson Report significantly weakened the evidentiary foundation of the skeptical tradition. Harrison demonstrated that Hodgson had made numerous errors, had adopted an adversarial stance incompatible with impartial investigation, and had reached conclusions that the evidence did not support. While Harrison’s work does not prove the authenticity of the Mahatma Letters, it establishes that the case against their authenticity is far less conclusive than has been assumed. The scholarly landscape has shifted accordingly: contemporary scholars such as Godwin (2020), Rudbøg (2012), and others treat the Theosophical sources as complex historical documents requiring careful contextual analysis rather than as transparent frauds requiring only exposure.

SKEPTICISM AND QUESTIONS OF INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

Intellectual honesty requires the acknowledgment of what remains unproven, and in some cases, what may be unprovable by the methods available to historical scholarship. The following questions remain open to us.

First, the physical existence of specific individuals identified as Morya and Koot Hoomi has not been independently verified. K. Paul Johnson’s attempt to identify them with known historical figures has been challenged on evidentiary grounds. The Mahatma Letters exist as physical documents, but their authorship remains disputed. Yet, what has been presented by previous researchers challenging the early accusations of fraud leads to more new research and questions.

Second, the literal truth of the Tushita narrative, whether Asanga literally ascended to a celestial realm and received instruction from Maitreya is a question that lies outside the competence of historical scholarship. The narrative may be understood as literal, as visionary, or as literary-hagiographic, and the choice among these interpretations depends on philosophical and methodological commitments that precede the evidence.

Third, the existence of genuinely pre-Asanga Yogācāra texts, or the “genuine Yogâchârya books” that Blavatsky claimed had never been made public has not been established. The Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra may predate Asanga, and elements of Yogācāra thought are discernible in earlier Mahāyāna literature, but no extant text has been identified that corresponds to what Blavatsky described.

These open questions are significant but do not invalidate the broader historical and philosophical analysis presented. The coherence of the Theosophical claims with independent scholarship is a datum that requires explanation, regardless of one’s position on the metaphysical claims. A body of assertions that is internally consistent, grounded in identifiable textual traditions, and structurally parallel to independently attested philosophical systems cannot be dismissed as mere fabrication without intellectual cost. We have seen this cost. Whether the explanation is genuine transmission, sophisticated synthesis, or extraordinary convergence, the phenomenon demands scholarly attention. It is not entirely my expertise, but more to the dialogue is provided by going into historical contexts.

LEGACY OF TALBOT MUNDY’S NOVEL

Talbot Mundy’s The Nine Unknown is best understood as a literary manifestation of Theosophical doctrines about hidden custodians of ancient Indian knowledge — doctrines that are themselves grounded in a body of historical, textual and philosophical evidence that deserves rigorous scholarly attention. The novel’s premise of a secret society founded by Ashoka to guard nine books of knowledge too dangerous for the uninitiated is not a literary invention. It is a novelistic dramatization of claims that the Theosophical Society had been making, in detailed and specific terms, for nearly half a century before the novel’s publication in 1923. Mundy’s fiction dramatizes elements from the Theosophical literature with the same confidence that historical fiction draws upon historiography — and the “historiography” in question, while contested, is more solidly grounded than its critics have acknowledged.

The Maurya-Morya connection, as articulated by Blavatsky and the Mahatma Letters, rests on a foundation of independent Puranic evidence that is neither Theosophical in origin nor fraudulent in character. The Vishnu Purana‘s reference to King Moru in the Himalayan village of Katapa, the Matsya Purana‘s enumeration of the Morya kings, the Mahavamsa‘s genealogical connection between the Sakyas and the Moriyas, and the Mahaparinibbana Sutta‘s attestation of the Moriya clan as contemporaries of the Buddha are data of classical Indian and Buddhist literature that establish, at minimum, the antiquity and geographical consistency of the Morya/Maurya tradition. The Theosophical writers cited these sources and did not invent them.

The post-dynastic continuity claims the assertion that Maurya descendants maintained a Buddhist lineage into the Tibetan era are consistent with the known timeline and geography of Buddhism’s transmission from India to Tibet, even if the specific claims about the Arhat Kasyapa and the Morya abbots cannot be independently verified. The Yogācāra parallels, the ālayavijñāna, the trisvabhāva, the bhūmi concepts within the system constitute a set of structural preservation between the Theosophical system and one of the most sophisticated philosophical traditions in Buddhist history, parallels that demand explanation regardless of one’s assessment of their ultimate provenance.

The skeptical critique, as represented by Maskelyne’s polemic and the Hodgson Report, addressed the phenomenal claims of Theosophy but failed to engage with the historical and philosophical substance. Maskelyne’s expertise was in conjuring, not in Indology. Hodgson’s investigation focused on handwriting, not on the consistency of Yogācāra epistemology with the doctrines expounded in the letters he was analyzing. Harrison’s 1986 re-examination weakened the evidentiary foundation of the Hodgson Report. Contemporary scholarship treats the Theosophical sources with greater nuance and complexity than the debunking tradition of the early twentieth century. The case against Blavatsky may be strong on phenomenal grounds, but is far weaker on philosophical and historical grounds, and it has not been adequately made on textual grounds at all.

Talbot Mundy understood, at least intuitively, that the Masonic, Rosicrucian and Theosophical idea of hidden custodians was a powerful narrative, and powerful enough to sustain a novel that has outlived its author by nearly a century. The intellectual tradition from which they emerged is a tradition that connects the Maurya emperors to the Buddhist Mahatmas, the Puranic prophecies to the Himalayan retreats, and the Yogācāra analysis of consciousness to the Theosophical positions on spiritual evolution, which belongs to a serious philosophical tradition. The dismissal of this tradition on the basis of séance phenomena is not skepticism, but plain apathy and incuriosity.

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REFERENCES

• B.M. Barua (1946), Asoka and His Inscriptions, New Age Publishers.
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1883), The Puranas on the Dynasty of the Moryas and on Koothoomi, The Theosophist, December 1883.
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1886), Shakyamuni’s Place in History, In Collected Writings, Vol, V, pp, 245-259, Theosophical Publishing House.
• Daniel H. Caldwell (2000), The Esoteric World of Madame Blavatsky: Insights into the Life of a Modern Sphinx, Quest Books.
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