Behind the visible history of human civilisation stands an invisible one. Known teachers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shaped culture from within the stream of ordinary human life. However, behind them — working through them, inspiring them, preparing humanity’s spiritual development across vast spans of time — stand beings of a higher order. Rudolf Steiner calls these beings Bodhisattvas.
The Bodhisattva is a concept familiar from Buddhist tradition. However, Steiner’s spiritual-scientific account goes far deeper than any exoteric religious teaching. He describes them in GA 130 (“Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz”) and GA 116 (“The Christ Impulse and the Development of Ego-Consciousness”) as real spiritual individualities — specific cosmic beings on a specific evolutionary path, each carrying a specific mission within the overall development of humanity.
What a Bodhisattva Is
Steiner describes the Bodhisattvas as beings who stand at a specific and exalted stage of spiritual development — far beyond the ordinary human level, yet still within the stream of evolution that began with humanity. They are not members of the celestial hierarchies in the strict sense. Rather, they are beings who began their evolution within the human stream but advanced far beyond the stage that ordinary human beings have yet reached.
A Bodhisattva has developed to the point where he no longer needs earthly incarnation for his own spiritual development. However, rather than withdrawing into the higher spiritual worlds, he freely chooses to remain in connection with earthly humanity — taking on an earthly body at specific moments in history when his presence and guidance are needed.
Furthermore, Steiner indicates in GA 130 that twelve Bodhisattvas work with Earth evolution at any given time. Each carries a specific cosmic wisdom that humanity needs at a specific stage of its development. Together they serve the overall mission of Earth evolution under the guiding impulse of the Christ.
The Path from Bodhisattva to Buddha
The completion of a Bodhisattva’s mission marks his transition to an even higher spiritual status. At that point he becomes what Buddhism calls a Buddha — a being who has completed his earthly mission and whose influence continues from entirely within the spiritual world.
Steiner describes in GA 116 how Gautama Buddha had been a Bodhisattva through a long series of previous incarnations. His final earthly incarnation as Siddhartha Gautama was the culmination of his mission — the moment at which he achieved Buddhahood and completed his cycle of earthly incarnations. Consequently, his influence did not cease but continued from the spiritual world — a significant force in the development of early Christianity and in the spiritual forces working through Luke’s Gospel as described in GA 114 (“The Gospel of Luke”).
The Maitreya Bodhisattva
Among the twelve Bodhisattvas, one holds particular significance for the present and future of humanity. The Maitreya Bodhisattva — destined to become the future Maitreya Buddha — is currently working in the spiritual world and through specific human individualities. His mission is connected with the development of a new form of the Word — the capacity to bring genuine spiritual truth into human language with a clarity and transformative power that ordinary speech cannot achieve.
Steiner indicates in GA 130 that the Maitreya Bodhisattva will eventually incarnate on Earth in approximately three thousand years. In that incarnation he will bring a new form of spiritual teaching suited to the stage of human development humanity will have reached by then — making accessible to general consciousness what is today available only to the most advanced spiritual students.
The Bodhisattvas and the Christ Impulse
One of the most important things Steiner says about the Bodhisattvas concerns their relationship to the Christ. They are not independent spiritual authorities. They work in service of the Christ impulse — each carrying a specific dimension of the spiritual wisdom that the Christ event made available to humanity.
Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Bodhisattvas worked as the primary spiritual teachers of humanity — bringing from the spiritual world the wisdom each cultural epoch needed. The great teachers of pre-Christian humanity — Zarathustra, the ancient Hebrew prophets, the teachers of the Indian and Egyptian mystery traditions — worked under the direct inspiration of specific Bodhisattvas.
After Golgotha the relationship changed. The Christ event placed within the Earth a spiritual force of a completely new order — one working not from above but from within the earthly human being’s own spiritual development. The Bodhisattvas’ work from that point onward is to help humanity understand and integrate this Christ impulse.
The Great Arc of Spiritual Teaching
The teaching of the Bodhisattvas reveals something of the grandeur and purposefulness of human spiritual history. What appears, from the outside, as a bewildering multiplicity of religions and spiritual traditions is, from within, a coordinated process — a long education of humanity conducted by specific spiritual beings working with specific missions under the overall guidance of the Christ impulse.
Every genuine spiritual teaching — however different its outer form — reflects, at its deepest level, one or another of the twelve streams of Bodhisattva wisdom working through the history of human consciousness. The great teachers of humanity are not simply historical figures. They are cosmic beings whose work continues in the spiritual world and through the living tradition of genuine spiritual science their successive missions have built across the millennia.
The full article on Substack covers the specific identification of Zarathustra as a Bodhisattva incarnation, the precise way Bodhisattva inspiration works through individual human thinkers today, and Steiner’s complete account of the Maitreya Bodhisattva’s mission and the new form of the Word he will bring. This is a paid article.
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