Quest Magazine

The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710

by David Stevenson
(Cambridge: University Press, 1988, reprinted 1993), xvii + 246 pp.

The history of Freemasonry is a mixture of myth, legend, inference, documentation, and imagination. It is usual, especially in those histories of the Craft written in England or under English influence, to begin Masonic history proper with the formation of the United Grand Lodge in 1717, which brought together four existing London lodges. Obviously, Freemasonry and Freemasonic lodges must have existed earlier; otherwise there would have been nothing to unite into the Grand Lodge. But of the earlier forms of those lodges and their practice, little heretofore has been documented.

David Stevenson, the author of The Origins of Freemasonry, is Professor of Scottish History at the University of St. Andrews. As a good Scotsman, he finds the origins of modern Freemasonry, not in England, but in Scotland more than a century before the formation of the English Grand Lodge. Even more interesting, he also finds those origins partly in the esoteric currents that swept Europe at the time of the Renaissance, thus linking modern Freemasonry with the Wisdom Tradition of the Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Hermeticists, and others.

In the Middle Ages, skilled workers were organized into trade guilds, which served a number of purposes. They helped to regulate the trades by maintaining standards of competence among the workers and preserving the secrets of their crafts from interlopers. They provided religious, moral, and charitable reinforcement for their craftsmen. They served as social clubs. They developed ceremonies of initiation for newcomers. They developed mythical histories about the origins of their crafts.

Among the various trades, that of the stonemason was unusually suitable for an elaborate craft organization. Whereas most craftsmen were settled in a particular locality, stonemasons were traveling men, moving to sites where their skill was in special demand. Thus they had more need than most for the support of their fellows.

In addition to conventional guilds, which were bodies incorporated by a particular township, stonemasons developed a lodge system, not under municipal control. The early lodge structure was a building on a construction site probably for the use of stonemasons as a workshop, temporary living quarters, and social club.

Trans. Edith Deri
Paris: Editions Adyar, 1995. Pp. [vii] + [146] (71 double pages + [4]). Paper.

Les histoires de Gopal (The Stories of Gopal) center upon a disciple whose dialogues and parables illustrate a philosophical system embodying the concept of God, who exists universally and thus in the consciousness of human beings and in all animate and all inanimate objects; the basis for morality, the means of awakening consciousness in a world of illusion; and the realization of the self.

The format is a series of brief dialogues between Gopal, the disciple, and his Master. Often the Master's questions are subtle, returning Gopal to the concept that the world and all human experiences are illusion. Occasionally, familiar dialogues occur, such as the sequence in which the Master carries a young girl across the water.

Space and time seem nonexistent in some of the dialogues. If the Master asks Gopal to go for water to quench his thirst, Gopal does not question where he will find water in the desert but may become lost in time as well as space during his search. Eventually he finds his way back to the Master with the jug miraculously filled with fresh water. The margin between dream and reality is very thin here as elsewhere in the stories.

Occasionally rather than answers there are only rhetorical questions--the disciple must intuit the appropriate procedure. Unity of existence is never forgotten and serves as guide; it is stressed throughout the collection.

Although death is conceived as the real joy, the Master clarifies that the disciple needs to experience all of life—human love not excluded. Each is a part of the whole, including sinfulness, and must be confronted or even experienced. Even so, all is illusion, and unanswered questions may be the greatest source of learning for the reader.

-Mary Jane Newcomb

July 1997

Medical Intuition: How to Combine Inner Resources with Modern Medicine

by Ruth Berger
Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995. Pp. 143. Paper.

The author of Medical Intuition, Ruth Berger, is a psychic and a consultant: in the field of intuition who is known to television and radio audiences. Medical Intuition is her second publication, the first being The Secret Is in the Rainbow: Aura Interrelationships, which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

Although the praises of two medical physicians preface the text, the author draws attention to an unorthodox approach to health care when she refers in her opening paragraph to persons with supposedly incurable ailments who feel that they are guinea pigs hoping for some "magical treatment" to be discovered in time to save their lives. Berger's response is that their reaction should be to stop waiting and to "listen" to their own bodies.

The direct approach of the book, written in the second person to address the reader directly, is an attractive feature. The format is sometimes a catalog of symptoms and a list of seemingly futile events in an individual's search for recovery.

The author employs lay terms throughout. The general advice is to trust one's instincts as guidance to the right doctor and the right staff (or health care. Yet, states Berger, doctors are not gods.

Medical intuition is described as not about diagnosing illness but about locating energy blockages. The author also considers past-life recall in the healing process as a means of releasing the pain of the past and also of escaping the traumas of childhood. All of this, states Berger, is part of understanding and identifying one's fears and problems. The author never states that any of this is easy; yet she stresses that tapping into the universal consciousness is possible for all through meditation and faith in one's inherent abilities.

Creating order in one's life is one of the keys, says Berger. Medical Intuition may contain information and advice that anyone with pain or other health difficulties is seeking.

-Mary Jane Newcomb

July 1997

A Treatise on the Pâramîs, from the Commentary to the Cariyâpitaka

by Acariya Dhammapala
Trans. Bhikkhu Bodi. Kandy, SriLanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996. Pp. 76.

The third section of H. P. Blavatsky's spiritual guidebook, The Voice of the Silence, called "The Seven Portals," is devoted primarily to a consideration of the Buddhist paramitas, or transcendent qualities to be developed on the Path. The paramitas are generally associated with Northern Buddhism as the qualifications to be developed by a Bodhisattva, but they appear in the Southern canon as well, as does also the concept of the Bodhisattva. The Southern exposition of these qualities is the subject of this book.

The early suttas of Southern Buddhism, written in the sacred language Pali and corresponding to the Sanskrit sutras, mention three types of persons who have attained Nirvana by following three distinct "vanes" or vehicles (that is, spiritual paths):
1. sammasambuddha, a perfectly enlightened Buddha, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and teaches the dharma to others, founding a dispensation;
2. paccekabuddha, a solitary enlightened person, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and does not reach others or found a dispensation;
3. arahat, a disciple who achieves Buddhahood through the instruction of a perfectly enlightened Buddha and then teaches others within the bounds of the dispensation of a sammasambuddha.

Later Buddhist writings include stories about the backgrounds of these three types of enlightened persons, including the Bodhisattva, a candidate for Buddhahood, a "germinal Buddha" of the first type. The Bodhisattva became the great ideal of the Northern School, which then tended to treat the other two types (in Sanskrit pratyekabuddha and arhat) as merely provisional or lesser ways. Although the Bodhisattva concept was present also in the Southern School, it lacked the privileged status it had in Northern Buddhism.

One of the jataka (or previous birth) tales of the Southern canon tells that eons ago, the Buddha, then a Bodhisattva born as the ascetic Sumedha, vowed before the Buddha Dipankara (the twenty-fourth Buddha of antiquity) that he would renounce his right to enter nirvana so that he might become a teaching Buddha in the future and thus save multitudes of beings. Having made that vow, he reflected on the qualities needed to achieve it; they were the ten "paramis" (Sanskrit "paramitas''}, which became the "requisites of enlightenment."

The Sanskrit term "paramira'' is from the root "param'' meaning "supreme, beyond." The word is sometimes analyzed as ending in "ita" meaning "gone" and thus is interpreted as "gone beyond" or "gone to the supreme," the notion being that these qualities are those needed by the one who has so gone. The ten paramitas were described by the sixth century Pali commentator Acariya Dhammapala in his "Treatise on the Paramis" as qualities necessary for deliverance. That treatise is put into English in this short book.

The Sanskrit and Pali canons give the following lists of Paramiras:

Sanskrit                                                Pali
giving (dåna)                                         giving
virtue (shîla)                                          virtue                            renunciation
patience (kshânti)                                  patience                        determination
energy (vîrya)                                       energy                          equanimity
meditation (dhyâna)                              [meditation]                  loving-kindness
wisdom (prajñā)                                   wisdom                        truthfulness

The Sanskrit canon has six basic paramitas (those in the first column above, for which Sanskrit terms are given). The Pali canon typically has ten paramis (listed in the second and third columns above). Meditation is not one of those ten, but is added when the ten qualities are reduced to six; then the five qualities in the third column are included in the six of the second column, which are identical with the traditional six paramitas of the Sanskrit tradition.

To these six qualities, Blavatsky added another, which she put in the fourth position, namely virâga, translated as "nonattachment'' or "indifference to pleasure and to pain." They are the seven keys to the seven portals on the path of The Voice of the Silence.

The transcendent qualities are the Buddhist equivalent of the Christian seven cardinal and theological virtues (fortitude, temperance, prudence, justice, faith, hope, and charity). They are part of a universal tradition of ideals of conduct on the Path. The value of this short Treatise is that it sets forth clearly and helpfully the Southern Buddhist version of that tradition.

-M.D.

July 1997