According to Blavatsky, The voice of the Silence is a translation of fragments from a sacred book she encountered during her studies in the East, called "The Book of the Golden Precepts". A reviewer for D. T. Suzuki's Eastern Buddhist Society commented: "Undoubtedly Madame Blavatsky had in some way been initiated into the deeper side of Mahayana teaching and then gave out what she deemed wise to the Western world...Here is the real Mahayana Buddhism".