The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (book)

First published in 1923 by A. Trevor Barker, this volume gathers most of the letters sent by Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi to A. P. Sinnett and A. O. Hume between the years 1880 and 1884. This publication, where the letters were arranged under subjects, underwent three editions.

On March 25, 1972, Vicente Hao Chin, Jr. published a fourth edition with the letters arranged in chronological order based on the Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett written by George Linton and Virginia Hanson. This edition also includes brief notes by Hanson regarding the context and circumstances of each letter.

Why A. P. Sinnett?

According to Annie Besant in her book A Study in Karma Mahatma K. H. and Mr. Sinnett had created a karmic link in a previous life:

Many of such helpful karmic links have we seen within the Theosophical Society. Long, long ago, He who is the Master K.H. was taken prisoner in a battle with an Egyptian army, and was generously befriended and sheltered by an Egyptian of high rank. Thousands of years later, help is needed for the nascent Theosophical Society, and the Master, looking over India for one to aid in this great work, sees His old friend of the Egyptian and other lives, now Mr. A.P. Sinnett, editing the leading Anglo-Indian newspaper, The Pioneer. Mr. Sinnett goes, as usual, to Simla; Mme Blavatsky goes up thither, to form the link; Mr. Sinnett is drawn within the immediate influence of the Master, receives instruction from Him, and becomes the author of The Occult World and of Esoteric Buddhism, carrying to thousands the message of Theosophy.

About their publication

From the letters it seems evident that the Masters did not want the letters to be published, at least not in their entirety. In the Summer of 1884 A. P. Sinnett wanted to publish the letters to prove critics that the source for his books was real, but Master K.H. wrote:

When our first correspondence began, there was no idea then of any publications being issued on the basis of the replies you might receive. You went on putting questions at random, and the answers being given at different times to disjointed queries, and so to say, under a semi-protest, were necessarily imperfect, often from different standpoints.

(...)
Therefore, to put before the world all the crude and complicated materials in your possession in the shape of old letters, in which, I confess, much was purposely made obscure, would only be making confusion worse confounded. Instead of doing any good thereby to yourself and others it would only place you in a still more difficult position, bring criticism upon the heads of the “Masters” and thus have a retarding influence on human progress and the T.S. Hence I protest most strongly against your new idea. . . My letters must not be published, in the manner you suggest, but . . . copies of some should be sent to the Literary Committee at Adyar . . . [so that it] might be able to utilise the information.
(...)

The letters, in short, were not written for publication or public comment upon them, but for private use, and neither M. nor I would ever give our consent to see them thus handled.

One of the reasons for this is that the Masters usually precipitated the letters in a hurry and the possibility of error was great. As Master K.H. wrote in one of his letters:

Even an "adept" when acting in his body is not beyond mistakes due to human carelessness. You now understand that he is as likely as not to make himself look absurd in the eyes of those who have no right understanding of the phenomena of thought-transference and astral precipitations — and all this, thro' lack of simple caution. There is always that danger if one has neglected to ascertain whether the words and sentences rushing into the mind have come all from within or whether some may have been impressed from without.

This prohibition was in regards the publication of the whole correspondence. It was desired that the information contained in the letters would be published in suitable ways, and several of the letters were even copied and circulated among Theosophists with the Master's permission. Master K.H. wrote to his chela Mohini:

You may, if you choose so, or find necessity for it, use . . . 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 theosophical 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, and some of the portions even used in The Theosophist. You are at liberty to even copy them verbatim and without quotation marks—I will not call it ‘plagiarism’, my boy.

It is from one set of these copies that C. Jinarājadāsa published the book The Early Teachings of the Masters some months before A. Trevor Barker published the complete collection of letters.

What is included in this book

Mr. Barker chose to include some letters in this volume that another editor might have placed the companion volume, The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett. Boris de Zirkoff clarified this situation in a letter to Fritz Kunz. Mr. Kunz asked:

I know that you have a set of the microfilmed copy of the material in the British Museum catalogued under the heading of the "Mahatma Letters."
I wonder whether you would be so good as to advise me whether the pages entitled "Cosmological Notes" which are published near the very end of H.P.B.'s letter to A.P.Sinnett, are included therein, and if so, in whose handwriting, and whether you could kindly supply me with a sufficiently enlarged print of this so that I might have it at hand for my personal use?

Boris de Zirkoff responded:

Re the "Mahatma Papers", Additional MS.45284, in the British Museum. Now the actual Letters, both those from the Masters and those from H.P.B. to Sinnett, have been bound up in separate volumes, seven in all. The originals of some of the Letters from the Masters, as transcribed in the published volume of Mahatma Letters, were not among the material bequeathed by Sinnett to Miss Maud Hoffman. They exist only as copies made by Sinnett in a separate leather-bound notebook. This notebook has been filmed also, when microfilm was prepared of the entire material. It is in this notebook that the "Cosomological Notes" are to be found; they are therefore in Sinnett's handwriting. THere are 24 pages of this material.

See also

• Mahatma Letters Portal
• Mahatma Letter No. 1

Online resources

Articles

• Some Comments on Publication of The Mahatma Letters and HPB's Esoteric Writings by Daniel H. Caldwell
• The Mahatmas and Their Letters by Alvin Boyd Kuhn.

Video

• The Mahatmas and Their Letters by Steve Schweizer