The Voice of the Silence

The Voice of the Silence is Blavatsky's shortest book and, for many readers, her most beautiful. Against the overflowing erudition of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, there is neither polemic nor cosmology here: only instructions addressed to a disciple, in rhythmic, solemn and at times dazzling prose that moves between aphorism, litany and dialogue between master and pupil.

Blavatsky presented it as a translation of fragments from the "Book of the Golden Precepts", a collection of some ninety small treatises which, according to the preface, were put into the hands of mystic students in the East, thirty-nine of which she claimed to have learned by heart. No original has ever been found, and scholars regard it as her own composition, nourished by Mahayana Buddhist reading, by the Jñāneśvarī — the great Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which she cites in the preface — and by her familiarity with Tibetan vocabulary. That does not diminish its interest: it is probably the first widely circulated text in the West to present as a spiritual ideal the bodhisattva, who renounces personal liberation in order to help others.

The work has three fragments. The first, which gives the book its title, teaches the stilling of the senses and the mind until one hears the "voice of the silence", that is, one's own inner self; it describes three halls — of ignorance, of learning and of wisdom — through which the pilgrim must pass, and warns against the "heresy of separateness". The second, "The Two Paths", sets the "doctrine of the eye", intellectual and exoteric knowledge, against the "doctrine of the heart", inner wisdom; and the "open path", leading to individual liberation, against the "secret path" of compassionate renunciation. The third, "The Seven Portals", goes through the transcendent virtues — charity, harmony, patience, dispassion, energy, contemplation and wisdom — as successive keys to enlightenment.

The thread running through the whole book is compassion. The "law of laws", says the third fragment, is not an attribute but the eternal harmony of the universe. Hence its lasting appeal: it is an ethic of self-giving rather than a doctrine, and it can be read with profit without accepting the rest of the Theosophical system. That is why it has been, for more than a century, the Theosophists' bedside book and one of the nineteenth-century spiritual texts that has kept finding readers outside the movement.