Echoes from the Orient: A Broad Outline of Theosophical Doctrines

What appears to the Western mind to be a very strange superstition prevails in India about wonderful persons who are said to be of immense age, and who keep themselves secluded in places not accessible to the ordinary traveler. So long has this been current in India that the name applied to these beings is well known in the Sanskrit language: “Mahâtma,” a compound of two words, maha, great, and âtma, soul. The belief in the existence of such persons is not confined to the ignorant, but is shared by the educated of all castes. The lower classes look upon the Mahâtmas as a sort of gods, and think most of their wonderful powers and great age. The pundits, or learned class, and educated Hindus in general, have a different view; they say that Mahâtmas are men or souls with unlimited knowledge of natural laws and of man’s history and development. They claim also that the Mahâtmas—or Rishees, as they sometimes call them—have preserved the knowledge of all natural laws for ages, not only by tradition among their disciples, but also by actual records and in libraries existing somewhere in the many underground temples and passages in India. Some believers assert that there are also stores of books and records in secluded parts all over that part of Thibet which is not known to Europeans, access to them being possible only for the Mahâtmas and Adepts.