Deeper Secrets of Human Development in the Light of the Gospels
GA 117 — 18 October 1909, Berlin
II. The Gospels, Buddha and the Two Jesus Children
Last time, I related the content of the Basel lecture cycle, which dealt with the Gospel of Luke. We pointed out the question that someone might ask: Yes, if so much has already been said in relation to the Gospel of John and, following on from that, about the image of Christ Jesus, is it possible that there is something to be said with regard to the other Gospels as well, that in a sense one could gain an understanding just as profound as that obtained from the Gospel of John?
If that were so, then an explanation of the three other Gospels would not be in the sense of spiritual research. For what we seek in spiritual scientific research is not to be taken from any document; it is not to approach us as something handed down, but as something that can be researched by the means of spiritual research.
The spiritual researcher sets himself the task of exploring how the event of Palestine presents itself without using any records. He begins his research without taking any records into account. He then tries to show how the same truths and accounts shine out to us from the records.
We have chosen the approach of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John, which we have taken from the enormous scope of the Akasha Chronicle, which can be found in the Gospel of Luke and in the Gospel of John. By applying the research of spiritual researchers to these gospels in this way, one gets to know them in a certain sense. I have shown that the Gospel of Luke offers an opportunity to discuss something different from that of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John begins with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth at the time when he was thirty years old. There we encounter in him the high solar being, the Christ-entity. We are dealing here with the last three years of the life of Christ Jesus.
The Gospel of Luke, on the other hand, allows us to get to know those significant events that made it possible for this significant being of Christ to flow into the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, to show the confluence of Zarathustrianism and Buddhism, and we have seen how these two powerful spiritual currents meet and unite precisely in Jesus of Nazareth. He presented himself to us for the last time as a human personality, who was born as a child with very special inner gifts, but not initially with those gifts that would have led the person particularly to an understanding of the external, present physical world. Above this personality, which appeared to us as a child in the Nathanic child Jesus, the actual Jesus of Nazareth, we see radiating what we called the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, what we see as the aura of this child. It is the form which the Buddha took after his last incarnation, in which he became Buddha. We have been able to emphasize that what we call our Occidental esoteric teaching fully justifies what is contained in the Oriental scriptures: that the individuality before the incarnation of the Buddha, in which it appeared in the sixth century before Christ, was a Bodhisattva.
Such a bodhisattva becomes a Buddha in a very specific incarnation. This meant that the individuality had reached such a stage of development that it no longer needed to be embodied on earth in a physical body. It is a great achievement when an individuality no longer needs to incarnate. But whether this is possible depends not only on the level of development of an individuality, but also on the nature of that individuality. After this incarnation, the Bodhisattva Buddha no longer had to undergo an earthly, carnal incarnation. He then no longer embodied himself in an earthly-fleshly body, but only in that, as the lowest bodily-fleshly entity, what we call the etheric or life body. Henceforth, such an individuality embodied itself in that. He no longer descended to a fleshly embodiment, this Buddha, but only to one in the etheric body.
Such an etheric body, in which an individuality has developed, does not look like another body, which exists on earth as a physical body, when it is seen. What we see as a physical body when an individuality descends to embodiment in the physical body is a closed unit. There is no interruption. But such an etheric body, in which an individuality like the Buddha embodies itself, is not a closed spatial unit. It is a multitude of unconnected links. Let us remember the so-called splitting of the personality that occurs when a person develops more and more. This process is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is connected as a whole in the ordinary human being, the forces that we call thinking, feeling and willing, then, so to speak, each stands alone. Man will become master over these once; he is afterwards a trinity, one could even say a multiplicity, as it is explained in my “Occult Science in Outline”.
In such a case, as with the embodiment of the Buddha in later times, we have such an etheric body that consists of non-cohesive beings. In the case of ordinary people, it is only the principle of the physical body that holds the etheric body together.
When such a Bodhisattva Buddha reappears in the etheric body, he appears as a multitude, as a host of beings, when he becomes visible. The writer of the Gospel of Luke speaks of this host of beings when he talks about the angels that appeared to the shepherds in the field. This ethereal body, which is called the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, hovered over the Nazarene child Jesus. It is he who becomes the inspirer, who instills everything that the Buddha was into Christianity in this way. So we see how Buddhism flows into Christianity here. We have to think of this in very concrete terms, not just in the abstract. If you want to understand how this happens in reality, you have to be able to point to a specific event where the Buddha, having progressed to the next stage, integrates with Christianity. This is described in the Gospel of Luke, in the host of angels that is the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha.
Then we described how there is a second Jesus child, whom we can call the Jesus child of Bethlehem, and we said how he is none other than the re-embodied Zarathustra. It is an extraordinarily precocious child. In that child, Zarathustra is re-embodied. This is expressed in the Gospel of Matthew. For in the Gospel of Matthew the individuality is to be described which was particularly comprehensible to the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, which brought the stream of Zarathustrianism to Christianity. Therefore, it is also described that this boy descended from the royal line of Solomon's house of David, while the Jesus of Luke's Gospel descended from the Nathanic line of the house of David, the priestly line.
If we want to understand Christianity in its full and deep meaning, then we must realize that the most important currents from the world had to converge. We see that the Davidic royal line splits into a Solomonic and a Nathanic line. In the Solomonic line the royal qualities are handed down, in the Nathanic line the priestly qualities. The royal qualities come to expression particularly in the first two periods of human life; the qualities that lead, so to speak, to an understanding mastery of world affairs, to everything that brings man into harmony with world affairs. This can only happen when the forces of the physical and etheric bodies are properly developed. Since Zarathustra had particularly developed these qualities in an inward way, he now had to make use of all the aptitudes that emerged in the physical and etheric bodies, especially up to the twelfth year. Such aptitudes could be given to him in a special way through the qualities inherited in the Solomonic line. But for the task he had to fulfill, he also needed the great abilities of the I-bearer, the great abilities of the astral body. These could only be given to him by a line that inherited precisely these abilities from generation to generation. If Zarathustra had remained in the body until the age of thirty, when the etheric body and the physical body were particularly developed, he would not have been able to deepen his being in this way. Therefore, in his twelfth year, he passed over into the Nazarene Jesus, so that from the twelfth year onwards, the individuality of Zarathustra was absorbed in the same child in which the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha dwelled. Thus these two currents merged in this Nazarene Jesus in his twelfth year.
The third stream that should be added is the ancient Hebrew stream. Only through this confluence could that individuality arise that took up the Christ.
We now ask ourselves how the Old Hebrew spiritual current was incorporated into this. Let us see how we are to understand the very essence of the Old Hebrew spiritual current. Let us also consider what we have regarded as the nature of the Buddha's development. What happened when the Bodhisattva became a Buddha?
This individuality, which was embodied in the Bodhisattva-Buddha, had the task of handing down from epoch to epoch what can be called the teaching of compassion and love. If we want to understand this, we must realize that in the past man was in a completely different state of consciousness. We must not be short-sighted like today's science, which believes that the same abilities have always been there, gradually developing from primitive beginnings, and that man was previously at the stage of animality. It was not like that. What we call human thinking, feeling and willing today was not always there. The further we go back in the evolution of mankind, the more this present state of consciousness becomes a dreamlike, twilight clairvoyance. Therefore, everything that was to be given as teaching in ancient times had to be given differently than it is given today. Today one can express certain moral principles; people understand these. When he hears such principles, he can say today: “Certainly, my own reason tells me that.” But for that, reason and conscience had to be developed first. It can be clearly demonstrated from external history that conscience had a beginning. Aeschylus does not yet speak of it. This particular power of the soul only emerged at a certain time; it was not present before.
Before man had a conscience, before there was logical thinking, if you had appealed to his conscience, to his thinking, it would have been as if you were talking to a stone or a plant.
At that time, the soul needed strength and impulses, and these had to be instilled into the soul. For example, anything related to love was suggestively entered by the individuality called the Bodhisattva when this individuality, called the Bodhisattva, was present as the Buddha. The time had come when people could gradually gain the teaching of compassion and love from within themselves, the teaching of the so-called eight-limbed path. This teaching, which previously had to be given from above, could only be given as a teaching when the Buddha was there. That is why the Bodhisattva had to become a Buddha.
Everything that takes place in human development must take place in its own particular place and among a particular people, from which a number of people are singled out who have an understanding of the teaching. Perhaps a contradiction will be found between this and what was said earlier, because it was said earlier that it was the mission of Christ to spread love. But when something like that is said, it is necessary to listen very carefully. It was Buddha's mission to bring the teaching of compassion and love; but Christ is the power of love. He brought love itself. It is one thing to bring the teaching of something, and quite another to bring the thing itself. It was precisely this that made it possible for the power of love to flow down and reveal itself through this high solar being on earth, for this teaching was brought by the Buddha. But it was also necessary for this power of love to reveal itself in an earthly way among a people who had undergone a different development from that through which the Buddha had passed.
How does what was brought to the world by the Buddha differ from what was brought by the individuality of Moses? What the Buddha brought is rightly called the great law, Dharma. The Buddha brought the law in such a way, in a definite form, that it could be recognized by the soul in that form, so that people could find it within their own souls. Moses brought a law in a completely different way; he brought it as a commandment. It could not be regarded by the people to whom he brought it as a law rooted in the soul itself, but as a divine law given from on high. Buddha said: You will find in the deepest power of the soul itself the law that I tell you. But Moses said: There is the law of God, who is to come.
It was necessary, so to speak, for a law to be given to one people on the assumption that this people stood on a younger stage than the other. It had not yet developed certain powers. All development is based on the fact that things do not continue in a straight line.
It is usually assumed that the following always emerges from the earlier. But development does not happen that way. Evolution comes about through quite different conditions. When we observe a plant as it grows, we first see the germ, then the stalk growing upwards, and then how it puts out leaf after leaf and finally the blossom. Now there comes a point where the later no longer develops simply out of the earlier, but fertilization occurs. Something else must flow in, a little grain of dust from another plant. Especially in spiritual life, the most diverse circumstances and currents must now flow together. In Palestine, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and then a completely different current had to unite. This current was able to supply younger life forces under certain conditions. For a long, long time, the commandments of Yahweh had been at work within this people. If this people had been at the stage that Buddha could have appealed to the soul of these people six hundred years before Christ, then the people would not have had the youthful strength later. Therefore, their lawgiver had to give them commandments that did not appeal to their own souls. This people in the Near East had to be held back at an earlier stage.
We can hypothetically cite similar examples for the individual human life. Imagine that someone wants to artificially induce a person to develop particularly creative abilities at a certain age. But don't try this! Then a child would have to be developed quite differently than it would otherwise be. For if I try to teach him in the seventh year what he is taught at school today, I have thereby rendered the soul incapable of developing certain powers later on. I will therefore wait until the tenth year. Then this child comes to me with quite different powers. Then he has retained some of the freshness of youth. Powers then emerge that are creative powers, which would otherwise have been killed.
You see how this was carried out in the Near East. The Hebrew people were held back. They were not yet able to absorb the Buddha's teachings of compassion and love. This was given to them as a commandment. They had not received the Buddha's appeal to develop the teaching of compassion and love from within themselves. Only at one point in the development of the earth, where people were most advanced, could the Bodhisattva Buddha bring this teaching. When completely different forces had been developed, this current was united with the other at another point.
Where do we now look for that which flows down through the generations of a people? What does it depend on? How does a person absorb that which depends on the whole people? From the first to the seventh year, the human being is still wrapped in an etheric covering, which he then sheds. Then the astral covering still surrounds him, which he discards at sexual maturity. The astral body is only then born. When the astral body is born in the human being between the ages of twelve and fifteen, it is the one in which all the forces are that the human being has in common with the folklore. This astral shell, which the human being now sheds, contains all the qualities that the human being could have inside him until then. It is this covering that determines to which particular folk a person belongs. What happens to this covering when it is shed? This covering, which is being shed, contains everything that the person has in common with his folk. It then joins all the coverings that the ancestors have also shed. We have, as it were, such a chain.
Until the age of fourteen, the human being has this within himself, and he is attached to a chain that goes up to the ancestors. Up to which link of the ancestors does it go? It goes up to the forty-second link, the six times seventh link! The human being is thus connected to his ancestors. This was known in ancient times. It is also known today within spiritual science. Because man is connected with his ancestors in this way, the ancient Egyptians had it written in their Book of the Dead that after death a person would appear before forty-two judges of the dead.
If a certain quality in a person is to come out so that it belongs to the people, then these ancestors must lie in such a way that all these individual members express the particular qualities of the people. If the Zarathustra is to embody himself, then it had to be in a shell that had the essential qualities of his people.
Therefore Matthew has Zoroaster born into the forty-second generation after Abraham, which had all the characteristics of the people. Thus these influences entered into the third current.