The Translations

Theosophical publishing houses issued cheap editions of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the Tao Te Ching and Buddhist texts, in English, for a mass audience, for decades.

However bad the cosmology was, this was real and it was enormous. A great many Western readers met Indian and Chinese philosophy for the first time in a Theosophical edition — which is also why the framing in those editions mattered so much, and why the perennialist introduction printed in front of the text is part of the transmission.