Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa was the protégé of Charles Leadbeater, and later he held several important positions in the Theosophical Society of Adyar, among the most important were: from 1921 to 1928 he was the vice-president of this organization, and from 1946 until his death in 1953 he was the international president.
And regarding how the book "The Letters of the Mahatmas Kuthumi and Morya to Alfred Sinnett and Allan Hume" was produced, he related the following.
--oOo--
INITIALLY, SINNETT WANTED TO PUBLISH THE LETTERS, BUT THE MASTERS REFUSED
After the letters had been received from both the Mahatmas M. and K. H., the matter of publishing them was presented to the Mahatma K. H. by Mr. Sinnett in 1884.
A reply was received by him in London in the summer of 1884 and is letter LXIII in the book 'The Mahatma Letters'.
In it appears the following:
« My letters must not be published, in the manner you suggest, but on the contrary if you save Djual K. trouble copies of some should be sent to the Literary Committee at Adyar —'about which Damodar has written to you— so that with the assistance of S. Y. K. Charya, Djual K., Subba Row and the Secret Committee (from which H. P. B. was purposely excluded by us to avoid new suspicions and calumnies) they might be able to utilise the information for tire realization of the object with which the Committee was started, as explained by Damodar in the letter written by him under orders. »
In the same letter there appears:
« The letters, in short, were not written for publication or public comment upon them, but for private use, and neither M. nor I will ever give our consent to see them thus handled. »
In another letter LV:
« That was one of the reasons why, I had hesitated to give my consent to print my private letters and specifically excluded a few of the series from the prohibition. »
The same prohibition is referred to in a letter to Mohini M. Chatterjee in a letter of 1884 from the Mahatma K. H.
« You may, if you choose so, or find necessity for it, use in ‘Man’ or in any other book you may chance to be collaborating for, anything I may have said in relation to our secret doctrines in any of my letters to Messrs. Hume or Sinnett. Those portions that were private have never been allowed by them to be copied by anyone; and those which are so copied have by the very fact become thcosophical property.
Besides, copies of my letters —at any rate those that contained my teachings — have always been sent by my order to Damodar and Upasika [Blavatsky], and some of the portions even used in The Theosophist. You are at liberty to even copy them verbatim and without quotation marks. »
(Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, First Series, Letter 39)
Observations
At that time the masters did not want their letters to be published, but given the delusions into which the Theosophical Society of Adyar fell, I think they changed their minds.
And those letters vindicate Blavatsky and William Judge, who were unjustly repudiated by the Theosophical Society of Adyar.
And they condemn Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant for the deceptions that this couple and their accomplices have committed.
SINNETT LATER ALSO REFUSED TO PUBLISH THOSE LETTERS
Below is a letter that Mr. Sinnett sent me:
« 14, Westbournc Terrace Road, W.
December 14th, 1905.
My dear Raja,
In answer to your specific inquiry, or rather to the one you pass on —for I suspect you yourself will have divined my answer— I should certainly be not willing to take any steps which should call renewed attention to any other letters from the Master except those published in “The Occult World.” No others ought ever to have been published. It was contrary to His [Kuthumi] wish and mine that this unfortunate result ensued.
The correspondence as a whole was terribly contaminated by what one can only treat as Madame Blavatsky’s mediumship in the matter, and a great deal of that which has been allowed to get into print by the distinct breach of faith on the part of certain persons to whom I once entrusted copies, the harder it may be to get at them now the better I shall be pleased.
The extracts I published in “The Occult World” were selected with great care, and they, I feel sure, reflected the Master’s thought with sufficient accuracy. But it must always be remembered that correspondence from a Master, precipitated through the mediumship of a chela, cannot always be regarded as His ipsissima verba.
In the beginning of the “Secret Doctrine” some passages are quoted as from a letter by the Master, which I know to be deplorable distortions.*
I do not actually wish this letter to be published, but you need not make any secret of what I say in conversation with others.
Ever yours,
A. P. Sinnett. »
* See Mr. Sinnett's accusation against HPB in his autobiography, which refers to the matter—the famous controversy over Mars and Mercury—in the November 1946 issue of "The Theosophist" magazine.
Observations
On the blog I have shown you that Alfred Sinnett was wrong when he claimed that the planets Mars and Mercury are part of the terrestrial planetary chain, and that Blavatsky was right when she corrected him in The Secret Doctrine.
And Blavatsky did a very good job of passing those letters on to Sinnett, but Sinnett, instead of realizing that he had been wrong in certain aspects of the teaching he received, preferred to blame Blavatsky.
THE STORY OF THE PUBLICATION OF THOSE LETTERS
Mr. AP Sinnett received in India and England, and Mr. AO Hume in India, letters from Mahatmas KH and M.
Soon after the letters began to be received in India, certain parts were copied and sent to the workers at Adyar and a few other persons, by instructions from the Teachers, as mentioned above.
It is this material that is referred to as being for the “Literary Committee” at Adyar. This teaching omitted all reference to persons, and consisted of extracts from the letters which had the nature of instruction concerning the evolution of man, the planetary system, etc.
There was no prohibition regarding any earnest student reading this material. It was largely from this material that Mr. Sinnett in 1883 wrote Esoteric Buddhism, a very remarkable work showing his great ability to co-ordinate and systematize into one coherent scheme teachings given in a fragmentary form in the many letters in answer to questions.
In London, when as a boy I stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Sinnett for two years, I well remember seeing on Mr. Sinnett’s desk in his library a leather covered box which contained these letters.
One night he opened the box when both Bishop Leadbeater and I were present, and showed a few of them, of which I noted especially one of the Mahatma D. K., which is Letter XXXVII, for its unusually neat and small handwriting.
Later when I wrote 'Did Madame Blavatsky Forge the Mahatma Letters?' and I desired to give a reproduction of the D. K. handwriting, I applied to Mr. Barker and lie very kindly had a photograph sent to me of the letter.
Between 1894 and 1895 Mr. Sinnett allowed Dr. Besant to make copies of such of the letters as she wished. She asked her friend Miss Edith Ward to do the copying and copies of a certain number were made and ate still at Adyar.
During a series of meetings of the E. S., Dr. Besant read from these letters and commented upon them. The number copied was not great and I have no knowledge whether Dr. Besant herself selected them or Miss Ward.
In 1923 it occurred to me to publish the material which had been collected by the Literary Committee at Adyar referred to by the Mahatma K.H.
During Bishop Leadbeater’s stay at Adyar from the end of 1884 to 1886 he had made a copy in his neat, fine handwriting in a large bound notebook. When I saw it as a boy in Ceylon many of the pages had been affected by damp, and words here and there were almost undecipherable.
After the printer began setting up the typescript of this material to which I gave the title The Early Teachings of the Masters, Miss Francesca Arundale, who knew of the work I was doing, gave me two other copies of the same material, but transcribed in London, from copies sent by Mr. Sinnctt.
I could supervise only a part of the book through the press, as I was leaving for Europe before the printing could be completed. When putting the material together in book form I sorted it out into sections under topics so far as seemed possible, as Mr. Barker has tried to do with 'The Mahatma Letters'.
About this time in 1923, when I published at Adyar The Early Teachings of the Masters , Mr. A. Trevor Barker published in London 'The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett', which of course contained the material in my book.
Neither of us knew what the other was doing. On reading The Mahatma Letters a year or two after publication, I saw at once that there were many errors in their transcription, and I could correct these from the copies of the letters sent to the Adyar Committee and to London.
Early this year I collected together such of the errors as I had noted, and sent a list of them to Mr. T. C. Humphreys, one of the two executors under the will of Mr. Barker.
I should mention how 'The Mahatma Letters' ever came to be published. A close friend of Mr. Sinnctt during his later years was Miss Maud Hoffman. During his last illness she tended him with the devotion of a daughter. As Mrs. Sinnctt had died and the only son, Denny Sinnett, had died also, it was only natural that Mr. Sinnett should make Miss Hoffman his sole legatee.
Once Mr. Sinnett promised Dr. Bcsant that the letters would be left to her at his death, but after differences had arisen between them on matters of Thcosophical administration, evidently Mr. Sinnett changed his mind.
Mr. E. L. Gardner informs me:
« During his (A. P. Sinnett) last years I used to look in occasionally for an hour with him, and one evening he showed me the whole of the letters that he had carefully filed in three drawers.
They would, said he, probably go to Adyar eventually — but he neither said then nor later that such a course had been arranged. As a matter of fact, he was still resentful that his own later writings were not acceptable! »
When Miss Hoffman decided on making the letters public she chose Mr. A. Trevor Barker as editor. Mr. Barker was once a member of the Parent Theosophical Society at Adyar, and Mr. and Mrs. Barker lived a year at Adyar helping in the work.
Later Mr. Barker left the Parent Society and joined the Point Loma Theosophical Society then under the headship of Dr. G. de Purucker.
Though Mr. Barker knew of the prohibition of the Mahatma K. H. which I have quoted concerning the publication in full of the correspondence, he published all the letters nevertheless.
Had the letters been given to Dr. Besant as was originally planned, whatever parts of them that Dr. Besant decided upon to publish would have been done with an efficiency not possible for Mr. Barker.
The letters in his book arc not in the right order, and it is only at Adyar, where are the diaries of Colonel Olcott from day to day, mentioning events and places where H. P. B. and he visited, that the material exist to find the true sequence of the letters.
This work was done by Miss Mary K. Neff whom Dr. Besant put in charge of the Society’s archives at Adyar. After many months of study, Miss Neff made out the correct order of the letters and sent a list to Mr. Barker.
He, however, replied that The Mahatma Letters had been stereotyped and were already in the form of plates and that it was not possible to recast the whole work and put the letters in the order that they were received.
Miss Neff published in 1940 a pamphlet at the Theosophical Press of the American Theosophical Society, Wheaton, Illinois, U. S. A. giving the correct order of the letters.
A second pamphlet of hers gives the correct order for the book 'The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett'.
A second Index to the letters appeared in U. S. A. “Combined Chronology for use with The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett and The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A.P. Sinnett", arranged by Margaret Conger. 19 pages, Washington D.C., 1939.
Observations
If the letters had been given to Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater would surely have hidden them, or even destroyed them.
And in fact he was very upset when these letters were published, calling them "that abominable book".
WHERE ARE THOSE LETTERS CURRENTLY?
At the death of Mr. A. Trevor Barker, the letters were left to Mr. T. G. Humphreys and Mrs. E. Benjamin as trustees. The letters have been deposited by them in the British Museum, the principal library of Britain which is the custodian of many historical documents.
(The text above is taken from Jinarajadasa's book "The History of the Mahatma Letters")
NOTE
What Jinarajadasa failed to mention is that the theosophical teaching in those letters is identical to the teaching given by Blavatsky and William Judge, but very different from that given by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, thus demonstrating the charlatanism of Leadbeater and Besant.
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