The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:2.1As the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies pen­e­trated south­ward into the Dra­vid­ian Dec­can, they en­coun­tered an in­creas­ing caste sys­tem, the scheme of the Aryans to pre­vent loss of racial iden­tity in the face of a ris­ing tide of the sec­ondary San­gik peo­ples. Since the Brah­man priest caste was the very essence of this sys­tem, this so­cial or­der greatly re­tarded the prog­ress of the Salem teach­ers. This caste sys­tem failed to save the Aryan race, but it did suc­ceed in per­pet­u­at­ing the Brah­mans, who, in turn, have main­tained their re­li­gious hege­mony in In­dia to the pres­ent time.

94:2.2And now, with the weak­en­ing of Vedism through the re­jec­tion of higher truth, the cult of the Aryans be­came sub­ject to in­creas­ing in­roads from the Dec­can. In a des­per­ate ef­fort to stem the tide of racial ex­tinc­tion and re­li­gious oblit­er­a­tion, the Brah­man caste sought to ex­alt them­selves above all else. They taught that the sac­ri­fice to de­ity in it­self was all-ef­fi­ca­cious, that it was all-com­pelling in its po­tency. They pro­claimed that, of the two es­sen­tial di­vine prin­ci­ples of the uni­verse, one was Brah­man the de­ity, and the other was the Brah­man priest­hood. Among no other Uran­tia peo­ples did the priests pre­sume to ex­alt them­selves above even their gods, to rel­e­gate to them­selves the hon­ors due their gods. But they went so ab­surdly far with these pre­sump­tu­ous claims that the whole pre­car­i­ous sys­tem col­lapsed be­fore the de­bas­ing cults which poured in from the sur­round­ing and less ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tions. The vast Vedic priest­hood it­self floun­dered and sank be­neath the black flood of in­er­tia and pes­simism which their own self­ish and un­wise pre­sump­tion had brought upon all In­dia.

94:2.3The un­due con­cen­tra­tion on self led cer­tainly to a fear of the nonevo­lu­tion­ary per­pet­u­a­tion of self in an end­less round of suc­ces­sive in­car­na­tions as man, beast, or weeds. And of all the con­tam­i­nat­ing be­liefs which could have be­come fas­tened upon what may have been an emerg­ing mono­the­ism, none was so stul­ti­fy­ing as this be­lief in trans­mi­gra­tion—the doc­trine of the rein­car­na­tion of souls—which came from the Dra­vid­ian Dec­can. This be­lief in the weary and monotonous round of re­peated trans­mi­gra­tions robbed strug­gling mor­tals of their long-cher­ished hope of find­ing that de­liv­er­ance and spir­i­tual ad­vance­ment in death which had been a part of the ear­lier Vedic faith.

94:2.4This phil­o­soph­i­cally de­bil­i­tat­ing teach­ing was soon fol­lowed by the in­ven­tion of the doc­trine of the eter­nal es­cape from self by sub­mer­gence in the uni­ver­sal rest and peace of ab­so­lute union with Brah­man, the over­soul of all cre­ation. Mor­tal de­sire and hu­man am­bi­tion were ef­fec­tu­ally rav­ished and vir­tu­ally de­stroyed. For more than two thou­sand years the bet­ter minds of In­dia have sought to es­cape from all de­sire, and thus was opened wide the door for the en­trance of those later cults and teach­ings which have vir­tu­ally shack­led the souls of many Hindu peo­ples in the chains of spir­i­tual hope­less­ness. Of all civ­i­liza­tions, the Vedic-Aryan paid the most ter­ri­ble price for its re­jec­tion of the Salem gospel.

94:2.5Caste alone could not per­pet­u­ate the Aryan re­li­gio-cul­tural sys­tem, and as the in­fe­rior re­li­gions of the Dec­can per­me­ated the north, there de­vel­oped an age of de­spair and hope­less­ness. It was dur­ing these dark days that the cult of tak­ing no life arose, and it has ever since per­sisted. Many of the new cults were frankly athe­is­tic, claim­ing that such sal­va­tion as was at­tain­able could come only by man’s own un­aided ef­forts. But through­out a great deal of all this un­for­tu­nate phi­los­o­phy, dis­torted rem­nants of the Mel­chiz­e­dek and even the Adamic teach­ings can be traced.

94:2.6These were the times of the com­pi­la­tion of the later scrip­tures of the Hindu faith, the Brah­manas and the Up­an­ishads. Hav­ing re­jected the teach­ings of per­sonal re­li­gion through the per­sonal faith ex­pe­ri­ence with the one God, and hav­ing be­come con­tam­i­nated with the flood of de­bas­ing and de­bil­i­tat­ing cults and creeds from the Dec­can, with their an­thro­po­mor­phisms and rein­car­na­tions, the Brah­manic priest­hood ex­pe­ri­enced a vi­o­lent re­ac­tion against these vi­ti­at­ing be­liefs; there was a def­i­nite ef­fort to seek and to find true re­al­ity. The Brah­mans set out to dean­thro­po­mor­phize the In­dian con­cept of de­ity, but in so do­ing they stum­bled into the griev­ous er­ror of de­per­son­al­iz­ing the con­cept of God, and they emerged, not with a lofty and spir­i­tual ideal of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther, but with a dis­tant and meta­phys­i­cal idea of an all-en­com­pass­ing Ab­so­lute.

94:2.7In their ef­forts at self-preser­va­tion the Brah­mans had re­jected the one God of Mel­chiz­e­dek, and now they found them­selves with the hy­poth­e­sis of Brah­man, that in­def­i­nite and il­lu­sive philo­sophic self, that im­per­sonal and im­po­tent it which has left the spir­i­tual life of In­dia help­less and pros­trate from that un­for­tu­nate day to the twen­ti­eth cen­tury.

94:2.8It was dur­ing the times of the writ­ing of the Up­an­ishads that Bud­dhism arose in In­dia. But de­spite its suc­cesses of a thou­sand years, it could not com­pete with later Hin­duism; de­spite a higher moral­ity, its early por­trayal of God was even less well-de­fined than was that of Hin­duism, which pro­vided for lesser and per­sonal de­i­ties. Bud­dhism fi­nally gave way in north­ern In­dia be­fore the on­slaught of a mil­i­tant Is­lam with its clear-cut con­cept of Al­lah as the su­preme God of the uni­verse.