Gautama, an incarnation of pure Wisdom, had yet to learn in His human body and to be initiated into the world's secrets like any other mortal, until the day when He emerged from His secret recess in the Himalayas and preached for the first time in the grove of Benares.

Gautama had sworn inviolable secrecy as to the Esoteric Doctrines imparted to Him. In His immense pity for the ignorance-and as its consequence the sufferings-of mankind, desirous though He was to keep inviolate His sacred vows, He failed to keep within the prescribed limits.

While constructing His Exoteric Philosophy (the "Eye-Doctrine") on the foundations of eternal Truth, He failed to conceal certain dogmas, and trespassing beyond the lawful lines, caused those dogmas to be misunderstood.

In His anxiety to make away with the false Gods, He revealed in the "Seven Paths to Nirvana" some of the mysteries of the Seven Lights of the Arupa (formless) World. A little of the truth is often worse than no truth at all.

Truth and fiction are like oil and water: they will never mix. His new doctrine, which represented the outward dead body of the Esoteric Teaching without its vivifying Soul, had disastrous effects: it was never correctly understood, and the doctrine itself was rejected by the Southern Buddhists. Immense philanthropy, a boundless love and charity for all creatures, were at the bottom of His unintentional mistake; but Karma little heeds intentions, whether good or bad, if they remain fruitless.

If the "Good Law," as preached, resulted in the most sublime code of ethics and the unparalleled philosophy of things external in the visible Kosmos, it biased and misguided immature minds into believing there was nothing more under the outward mantle of the system, and its dead letter only was accepted. Moreover, the new teaching unsettled many great minds which had previously followed the orthodox Brahmanical lead.

Thus, fifty odd years after his death "the great Teacher" having refused full Dharmakaya and Nirvana, was pleased, for purposes of Karma and philanthropy, to be reborn. For Him death had been no death, but as expressed in the "Elixir of Life," He changed A sudden plunge into darkness to a transition into a brighter light.

He was reborn as Samkara, the greatest Vedantic teacher of India, whose philosophy-based as it is entirely on the fundamental axioms of the eternal Revelation, the Sruti, or the primitive Wisdom-Religion, as Buddha from a different point of view had before based His-finds itself in the middle ground between the too exuberantly veiled metaphysics of the orthodox Brahmans and those of Gautama, which, stripped in their exoteric garb of every soul-vivifying hope, transcendental aspiration and symbol, appear in their cold wisdom like crystalline icicles, the skeletons of the primeval truths of Esoteric Philosophy.

Was Samkarâchârya Gautama the Buddha, then, under a new personal form? It may perhaps only puzzle the reader the more if he be told that there was the "astral" Gautama inside the outward Samkara, whose higher principle, or Atman, was, nevertheless, his own divine prototype-the "Son of Light," indeed-the heavenly, mind-born son of Aditi.

This fact is again based on that mysterious transference of the divine ex-personality merged in the impersonal Individuality-now in its full trinitarian form of the Monad as Atma-Buddhi-Manas-to a new body, whether visible or subjective. In the first case it is a Manushya-Buddha; in the second it is a Nirmânakâya.

The Buddha is in Nirvana, it is said, though this once mortal vehicle-the subtle body-of Gautama is still present among the Initiates; nor will it leave the realm of conscious Being so long as suffering mankind needs its divine help-not to the end of this Root-Race, at any rate. From time to time He, the "astral" Gautama associates Himself, in some most mysterious-to us quite incomprehensible-manner, with Avataras and great saints, and works through them.

And several such are named. Thus it is averred that Gautama Buddha was reincarnated in Samkaracharya-that, as is said in Esoteric Buddhism: Samkaracharya simply was Buddha in all respects in a new body. While the expression in its mystic sense is true, the way of putting it may be misleading until explained.

Samkara was a Buddha, most assuredly, but he never was a reincarnation of the Buddha, though Gautama's "Astral" Ego- or rather his Bodhisattva-may have been associated in some mysterious way with Samkaracharya. Yet, it was perhaps the Ego, Gautama, under a new and better adapted casket-that of a Brahman of Southern India.

But the Atman, the Higher Self that overshadowed both, was distinct from the Higher Self of the translated Buddha, which was now in Its own sphere in Kosmos. Excerpted from The Secret Doctrine