The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

It says;
For although to reveal itself to us, the concealed of all the concealed sent forth
the Ten Emanations [Sephiroth] called the Form of God, Form of the
Heavenly Man, yet since even this luminous form was too dazzling for our
vision, it had to assume another form, or had to put on another garment, which
is the Universe. The Universe, therefore, or the visible world, is a farther
expansion of the Divine Substance, and is called in the Kabalah “The Garment
of God.” [Zohar, i.2a. See Dr. Ch. Ginsburg’s essay on The Cabbalah, its
Doctrines, Developments and Literature.]
This is the doctrine of all the Hindu Puranas, especially that of the Vishnu Purâna. Vishnu
pervades the Universe and is that Universe; Brahmâ enters the Mundane Egg, and issues
from it as the Universe; Brahmâ even dies with it and there remains only Brahman , the
impersonal, the eternal, the unborn, and the unqualifiable. The Ain-Suph of the Chaldeans
and later of the Jews is assuredly a copy of the Vaidic Deity; while the “Heavenly Adam,” the
Macrocosm which unites in itself the totality of beings and is the Esse of the visible Universe,
finds his original in the Puranic Brahmâ. In Sod,“the Secret of the Law,” one recognizes the
expressions used in the oldest fragments of the Gupta Vidyâ, the Secret Knowledge. And it is
not venturing too much to say that even a Rabbi quite familiar with his own special
Rabbinical Hebrew would only comprehend its secrets thoroughly if he added to (Page 180)
his learning a serious knowledge of the Hindu philosophies. Let us turn to Stanza I. of the
Book of Dzyan for an example.
The Zohar premises, as does the Secret Doctrine, a universal, eternal Essence, passive -
because absolute - in all that men call attributes. The pregenetic or pre-cosmical Triad is a
pure metaphysical abstraction. The notion of a triple hypostasis in one Unknown Divine
Essence is as old as speech and thought. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara - the Creator,
the Preserver, and the Destroyer - are the three manifested attributes of it, appearing and
disappearing with Kosmos; the visible Triangle, so to speak, on the plane of the ever-invisible
Circle. This is the primeval root-thought of thinking Humanity; the Pythagorean Triangle
emanation from the ever-concealed Monad, or the Central Point.
Plato speaks of it and Plotinus calls it an ancient doctrine, on which Cudworth remarks that:
Since Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, who all of them asserted a Trinity of
divine hypostases, unquestionably derived their doctrine from the Egyptians, it
may be reasonably suspected that the Egyptians did the like before them. [
Cudworth, I. iii. quoted by Wilson. Vishnu Purana, i. 14, note.]
The Egyptians certainly derived their Trinity from the Indians. Wilson justly observes:
As, however, the Grecian accounts and those of the Egyptians are much more
perplexed and unsatisfactory than those of the Hindus, it is most probable that
we find amongst them the doctrine in its most original, as well as most
methodical and significant form. [ Vishnu Purana. I, 14 ]
This, then, is the meaning:
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