Light of Asia, Book VIII
So much has this doctrine proved a stumbling block for Western
students, that those who have understood it not at all have seen in it a proof that the Buddha
taught that doctrine which of all others he most strenuously denied: the existence in man of an
immortal Soul, which, like the Jivatma of the Vedanta Philosophy, passes at death from one
corporeal frame into another, itself unchanging and eternal; even as a man, casting from
himself the worn-out raiment of a day, clothes himself in new vestures, yet is himself in
nowise changed.
Others, better comprehending the Buddhist doctrine, yet going to the other extreme, have
supposed that the true teaching of the Master was that at the death of a man, that man himself,
as an individual, a separate entity in the Ocean of Existence, perished forever, whilst of his
Doing naught survived save the effect of his life and speech and thought had had on all his
fellows; even as, in common imagery of speech, we say that Shakespeare is immortal and still
lives amongst us, in that his marvellous works still dwell within out hearts, inspire our minds
and mould our actions; though of the man himself nothing whatever endures.
To most Occidental minds, indeed, this Buddhist doctrine of Transmigration appears either as
a mystification or as a paradox, and for this fact it is not difficult to account. We are so
steeped in the soul-theory, it has held so large a part in our education and in our heredity, that
it is difficult for us to follow, at first consideration at least, any hypothesis concerning future
existence in which, at the very beginning, the existence of a soul is denied.
"How," asks the Western student of Buddhism, "How, if there is no Soul, no permanent
entity which passes over from life to life, no reincarnating Ego or Self in man, how can we
understand this saying, that a man's character and his destiny are but the fruits of his thoughts
and words and actions in unnumbered past existences?
"How can we reconcile with such a doctrine the statement, so often put forward in the
Tipitaka by the Teacher at the termination of some story of the past, that He Himself was such
a person in the tale that He had told, and Ananda or another of His disciples was such
another; how can we reconcile it with the tales so common even now in Buddhist lands, tales
of past lives remembered and their details confirmed; or yet again with the fact that one of the
meditation practices of Buddhism has for its aim the gaining of this very faculty of
recollecting, that we may learn therefrom a lesson, lives that are hidden from us by the veils
of birth and death?
How can these things be, if indeed there is no Soul or Self that has passed over, that can
remember its past experiences and former lives, even as we now remember the scenes and
doings of our childhoods' days?"
That such questions should arise at all is, as we have said, an instance of the hold the
soul-theory has over the mind of man. We are so apt to centre all our thoughts and actions in
an imaginary Self within us, that the great lesson of Buddhist Psychology "This is not Mine,
this I am not, there is no self herein" seems, till we have given it some thought, as but a
paradox at best; and all our hopes and notions of the future life are founded on this Self, as
something that shall endure, after the life we know has passed away.
So strong, indeed, is this our human thirst for life, that the idea of an undying principle within
is perhaps the widest-spread of all principles of religious belief, and it is mainly on the ground
of this soul-theory that the great conflict between Revealed Religion and Science has been
and will be fought, the adherents of the various Religions other than Buddhism fighting to the
last for the hope of a future life so dear to man; whilst, step by step, Science, by clear and
irrefragable proofs, is analysing this same "Soul" into the various mental elements of which it
consists, and seeking to prove that all we know of man, character and mind as well as this
corporeal frame, ends with the life of the body that maintained it, and leaves behind, at death,
only a few decaying ounces of brain-stuff; - out of the total of the life of man, heir to
immemorial ages of evolution, only this piteous clay, food for the fire and the worm.
Buddhism, true to its doctrine of the Middle Way, steers its clear course between these two
extremes, maintaining, on the one hand, with our latterday psychologists, that that which we
name "Soul" is but a collection of mental phenomena and faculties, and, as such, fleeting and
transient as are all things phenomenal; but, on the other, teaching that the Kamma, the Doing
of each individual life, survives the disruption of the mind that wrought it, and, till Nibbana's
Peace shall be attained, continues to manifest itself in countless lives; death being but the gate
of birth, and birth the prelude to another death. And it is just this Middle Doctrine that is to
the Western mind, reared in another school of thought, so difficult to comprehend or hold as
true. If you believe in a living Soul, a Ghost that hides behind these walls of flesh, looks
through our eyes in seeing, and uses the brain but as we use a subtle mechanism; then for us
of the West the way seems clear to talk of future life - it is this Ghost which has left the body
at death and when the Seer and the Actor has gone, how should there be more a Seeing or a
Doing? And, on the other hand, if, with clearer vision and with truer comprehension, you
grasp the fact that to speak of Vitality or Life apart from all this bodily mechanism is, as a
great scientist has aptly put it, like talking of the "Horologity" of a clock, by way of
explaining its going; then it seems to us as though, when the bodily mechanism has run down
and all its functions fall asleep in death, it were in vain to talk of any future life; for what
power shall gather again the atoms of the dewdrop into one, when once the radiance of the
rising sun has seized upon it, and it has melted in the morning air?
Thus it is that the Buddhist hypothesis seems strange to animist and scientist alike - to the
one, because it denies the existence of any Soul to pass; and to the other, because it maintains
that the forces of a life yet hold together and persist as one, when Death has broken up the
mechanism that produced them, and the winds have flung every particle that once composed
the living organism wide over the land and sea.
"Naca o, na ca anna," -"It is not he, and yet is not another," - this is the Buddhist statement of
the extent of the persistence of identity between the man just dead and the being who,
according to Buddhist ideas, springs into life in this world or another, at the very instant of
the other's death. It is the first part of this statement, with its denial of identity, that seems
impossible to the vitalist; the latter part, with its inference of a continued individuality, that
the psychologist is unable to accept. Let us consider these two positions from the Buddhist
standpoint, and see whether there is any common meeting-place between the two.
Two men are standing by the shore of a great lake, and are watching the waves upon its
surface; that, starting far away upon the horizon, seem to draw near and nearer, and break at
last in foam before their feet. Both are watching the same phenomenon, and yet to each it
bears a different meaning. One has no knowledge of the laws of nature, but possesses a fund
of what he terms good common sense; and - for his eyes tell him that this is so - to him there
is a distant mass of water, which, impelled by the moving air that fans his face, travels from
the horizon towards him, retaining always its identity and shape; and, if you ask him what a
wave is, he will tell you it is a mass of water that moves over the surface, by the power of the
wind.
The other has the trained mind of the scientific observer, and is acquainted with such few of
the laws of nature as in the last few hundred years have become known to men, and to him the
moving wave carries a very different meaning. For he knows that really there is no mass of
water in his direction, that at each point upon the surface of the lake the particles of water are
only rising and then falling in their places, and that each particle in its turn, is passing on its
motion to its next neighbour. To him there is no translation of matter, as to the other, but
only a translation of force. In other words, the first man sees a motion of something material,
and, owing to his ignorance of natural laws, mistakes the evidence of his sense for fact; the
other, having a dynamic, and not a material, conception of the phenomenon, sees only the
translation of a portion of the universal energy, as it were individualized momentarily into a
wave.
We know of course that the latter man, the man with the dynamic conception of the universe,
is right; we know that there is no translation of water from place to place, but only the
transference of an oscillatory force. Let us apply this lesson to existence. Let us grant for the
moment that the two men we have spoken of are gifted with the power of seeing, not the
heaving waves of an earthly lake, but the surging sea of conscious life - the power of looking
back through past existences, till the mental vision fades on the far horizon of past eternity.
Then the man of common sense will say of a certain wave that it itself is one enduring and
unchanging thing, a separate portion of the waters of existence, retaining its identity, whilst
its position and its surroundings chance with each moment of the passing hours; he will have
the point of view of the vitalist or of the Vedantist, and will believe in the existence of a Soul,
itself unchanging and unchangeable, passing through the universe from place to place in time,
yet never altering in its changeless individuality. But the instructed man will see only the
translation of an individualized force; he will know that of the life which sprung into
existence in the distant past, no element remains the same for even two succeeding moments;
and that the wave upon life's ocean which now mounts into being in one place is not the same
as that which but a moment previous sank to apparent rest, inasmuch as it has no particle in
common with the previous life, yet is the same, inasmuch as it is the result of the passing-on
of the Character, the Mental Forces, the Doing or Energy of the other life. "It is not he, nor is
it yet another," and, as we take it, the precise difference between the founders of the Vedanta
and the Buddha was as that between these two men in our simile - both have been looking
with the Higher Insight on the same phenomenon - the one has held that vision all-sufficing,
proof of the Soul's existence and immortality; the other, with clearer knowledge, has
perceived the actual truth, that nowhere is there an enduring Soul, but only a transference of
Character, the fruit of mental Action in the past.
The Vedantist has seen Substance, an enduring Principle, an Ens; the Buddhist only Qualities,
themselves in all their elements ever changing, but the sum total of their Doing passing
steadily on, till the wave breaks on Nibbana's shore and is no more a wave for ever.
This is the Buddhist answer to the animist, to him who, whether in high or low, in gross or
subtle, imagines the existence of an enduring principle in man, a Soul which passes on from
life to life,as the wave seems to pass from point to point of the sea. And to those who would
maintain that it is difficult to conceive how the Character of one being can at the moment of
his death in any way endure as such, or cause the existence of a similar individual; how, in a
word, the individuality of the forces can persist after death, instead of being distributed
throughout the universe, to these a similar analogy may serve to explain the Buddhist idea.
In the fierce radiance of a distant star a score of different elements are flaming, each tiny
molecule of each tilting and trembling in its own peculiar way; and each, as it swings to and
fro under the impact of the surging Aethyr, is sending forth a series of vibrations, the total of
its Doing, the effect of its work upon the universe. Can either time or space avail to quench
the individuality of one single wave, or take one flaming line from out the spectrum of each
element? Not even when the star itself has faded into dissolution. But yesterday we beheld,
flaming with a new glory in the skies, the light of Nova Persei kindled anew by some
tremendous conflagration: we read its message from the gulfs of space, and identified many a
different element in its spectrum; and yet that outburst happened nigh upon three centuries
ago, and Nova Persei may now be dead and cold.
And could we travel with a greater velocity than that of light away from that dead star, once
again might we behold that strange upheaval, and yet again and again, far off and farther off,
we might learn the secret of that conflagration, learn the identity, nowise unchanged by time
or space, of each separate element that took part in that bygone cataclysm. The mechanism
that gave rise to all that complex quivering of the Aethyr might indeed have ceased to operate
ten million years, yet were our velocity great enough, our instruments perfect enough, our
vision keen enough, we could again and again read that message flung wide into the abysses
of the infinite, we would know that hydrogen had flamed out in that star, albeit it had died
unnumbered centuries ago. And if the story Nova Persei told us still is telling somewhere in
the depths of space, and will be telling so for so long time as time shall endure, or the ocean
of Aethyr extend; if, centuries and millenniums after that conflagration is at end, the Doing of
each element that took part in it still preserves and may record its individuality, how shall it
seem strange that the vastly more complex Doing of the life and thought of man should
similarly survive; and still be able, given the necessary mechanism, to reproduce, on earth or
elsewhere, the Character and the Nature of what had once been a man?
For what is it that we really mean when we speak of a particular man? Surely not the mere
matter of his body - that we know is changing every minute as he lives and breathes. Not,
also, Buddhism says, any enduring soul within him; but the sum total of his tendencies, his
mental and other faculties; in a word, it is the Character we call John Smith. And for us
conscious beings, that Character is made up for the most part of certain energies, mental and
other; and, when we analyse these energies further, we must conclude that they affect the
universe around him, in a fashion altogether peculiar to himself, in exactly the same way as a
molecule of hydrogen affects it i.e we may suppose that the ultimate of John Smith is a
particular very highly complex vibration in the Aethyr.
To put it more crudely, the human body is a machine, and the total of its energies may be
estimated, like that of any other machine, by the fuel (in the form of food) needful to keep a
man in health. When we calculate this to heat-units, we find that the total energy may be set
down as roughly half a horsepower. Where, in the body, does that energy go? Largely
towards carrying on the vital functions, and to doing any physical work in which the man may
be employed. But there is one organ, the most important of all, namely the brain, which does
no work that we can estimate directly, and yet it absorbs a large amount of the whole energy
of the man.
We may fairly take the amount of deoxidated blood that comes from any organ as a rough
measure of the work that organ is doing. Of the total blood supply of the body, quite a fifth is
used up in the brain; and, as the returning blood is if anything more deoxidated than usual, it
is certain that the brain has somehow absorbed roughly a tenth-horsepower for its functioning.
Setting aside this very liberal allowance of half of this for the control centres of the lower
functions, we still have at least a twentieth of a horsepower expended on what we know as
thought, the perceptions and cognitions that make the peculiar Character of the man.
Now a twentieth of a horsepower is a large amount of energy. Still following purely physical
lines, let us conceive that some part, perhaps the most, of all this output of energy, finds its
expression in the man's perceptions, in what we call Thought in general, from the cognition of
a simple sensation up to the most complex act of reasoning. Whatever Thought is, we must
presume that it either results from, or is in some way accompanied by, molecular changes
occurring in the structure of the brain. This would follow from the deoxidation of the blood
coming from the organ, and from the fact that when a man is doing hard mental work the
cerebral blood supply is much increased.
But all molecular changes with which we are acquainted impose strains upon the Aethyr,
which result in setting up some sort of vibration in that medium. So we may regard thought
as consisting in, or accompanied by, certain characteristic vibrations in the Aethyr; which we
may conclude are vastly more complex than those, for instance, which iron gives off when it
is intensely heated.
On this view, even during a life, a man is, so long as he is thinking and perceiving, constantly
emanating a series of vibrations peculiar to himself - as characteristic of him in their totality
as the spectrum of iron is characteristic of that metal; and, had we a subtle vision and a
spectroscope capable of perceiving and analysing those vibrations, we should be able to
identify our friend John Smith so long as he lived and affected the Aethyr in his own peculiar
way. It may not even be many years before the substance is discovered which will react to
these thought-emanations, even as selenium reacts to particular waves of common light; and
then, like many another seemingly far-fetched theory, the dream of thought-transference may
become an actual fact.
John Smith, then, in a sense is immortal; nay, every thought he thinks is deathless, and will
persist, somewhere in the depths of infinity, ages after his form has crumbled into dust. But it
is not this part of his energy that results in the formation of a new being when he dies - that is
another matter; and, still further following this simile,I shall endeavour to show how it may
happen. At the same time it must of course be understood that it is only a simile - or rather
one way of putting things, looking at the universe as composed of Substance matter or
Aethyr; whilst the actual view of the Buddhist is that it is a mental state that we call matter,
and that apart from the conception of it there is no form or matter or substance at all.
We may then consider the moment of John Smith's death. During his life he has not alone
been setting in vibration the great ocean of the Aethyr, he has most of all been affecting, with
every changing thought and mood, his own mental structure, as summed up in the fabric of
his brain. So that, at the moment before his death, all his life, nay, all the life as his ancestry,
and, as we Buddhists would say, also his own past lives, is as it were existing pictured in a
definite and characteristic molecular structure, a tremendously complicated representation of
all that we have meant by the term John Smith; but which, unknown to him and unperceived
by all, is really the outcome of the ages - the ages when John Smith was in the making, the
record of the thoughts and doings of unnumbered lives. Each tiny cell of all the million
which may compose the grey stuff of his brain may be likened to a charged Leyden jar, the
nerve paths radiating from it thrill with its discharges, carrying its meaning and its message
through the man's whole body, and, through the Aethyr, even to the infinitudes of space.
Each cell is as it were provided with its own laboratory of appliances, its resistances,
insulators, switches, and through these, when it is functioning normally, its total discharge is
prevented, so that never at any time can more than a fraction of its stored up energy be
dissipated - no more than the busy blood corpuscles can repair at once. And every separate
cell of all those myriads has stored up in it a tremendous energy, a portion of all the energies,
the passions, the desires, the hopes, the noble aspirations, that together go to make up the
marvel that we name a man.
And then Death comes; and, in the moment of its coming, all that locked-up energy flames on
the universe like a newborn star, for through the wondrous laboratory that we call the brain a
sudden final cataclysm has shattered all the subtle apparatus; and, the restraining and
inhibiting appliances having broken down, each little cell is utterly discharged. Imagine a
being whose eyes were sensitive to the range of vibration known as thought, and he would see
the man's death as we see Nova Persei - a sudden conflagration in the galaxies of mind,
revealing, could one but analyse it in some psychic spectroscope, the mental record of what
was once a man; and, like the story of the stellar cataclysm, speeding on and on through
space, so that the observer on a distant star might now be watching at the death of Newton or
of Rameses the Great.
Now, setting aside the question of the possible existence of a substance opaque to our
thought-vibrations, there is but one way we know whereby the waves produced by a man's
death might be arrested and their energy absorbed. If we have a flame, giving off, let us say,
the yellow light of sodium, that light will, barring the presence of an opaque object, go on to
all eternity, except and unless it comes to a layer of sodium vapour, i.e to the one substance in
the universe which is similar in structure to the molecule which emitted it. Then a very
strange thing will happen - a thing so strange that we have no clear and simple explanation for
it, although we know that it will always happen. For the sodium vapour will absorb the
sodium light, and probably every element in suitable physical state will absorb the rays that
element itself gives off when heated to a higher temperature - a phenomenon well manifested
in stars of the same type as our sun, where the elements in the gaseous envelope about it all
take up light of the same order as that which they emit at higher temperatures, giving a
continuous spectrum crossed by black absorption lines,
What has become of the energy they thus absorb we do not know - only that, as energy is
indestructible, it must somehow still be existent, presumably in the substance that has
absorbed it, locked up and latent, may be, yet still there. And we may perhaps see in this
absorption a type of what occurs at a man's death, and the secret of the spring-up of life in
dependence on the first.
For what substance can present so similar a structure to the dying brain, save only the brain
of a child or a being at that instant born, which by its physical heredity is akin to the brain of
the man who dies? And it is some such action that we Buddhists think does really occur. Our
books teach us, indeed, of the existence of innumerable worlds, and of six great divisions of
existence in our own little world. But, as the nature of those worlds is different, and as man
necessarily resembles man more than any other creature, we may confine our considerations
to the world of men alone. Somewhere, at the moment of a man's death, there is being born a
child of parentage such that the little brain can respond to and absorb the Character of the
dying man - a brain that, without just that sort of stimulus, will never be galvanized into
individual life.
The man dies, and his death perturbs the Aethyr in the very complex way characteristic of that
man - and, at the same instant, almost, a newborn child, hovering then very near to death,
receives the impact of the death-wave, and its brain thrills to a new life; the heart and
respiratory centres suddenly are galvanized into action - the newborn child draws breath and
lives, or, as our Buddhist Scriptures put it, "the new lamp is lighted from the dying lamp".
This image may serve also as an explanation of another difficulty, namely, the part that
heredity plays in the theory of transmigration; and how it is that the Buddhist teaching on this
matter maintains that when a good man dies it will be as a child of virtuous parents that his
rebirth Kamma will react; how learning of a special nature is thus carried over, and in short,
how the new life presents a group of mental and moral characteristics in every way similar to
those of the past life. We may see this clearer from a consideration of what syntony implies.
If, here in Rangoon, there is an apparatus for producing the Aethyric waves discovered by
Hertz, and so adjusted that it produces waves of but one special wavelength,; and if all around
there are receiving appliances in which Aethyric waves will close an electric circuit and so
repeat a signal, yet these appliances are tuned or syntonised so as only to respond to other
waves; then there will be no response in all those instruments. But if at Mandalay or at
Calcutta there is a receiving appliance nearly syntonised, then that appliance, distant though it
may be, will respond to the waves produced - the local electric circuit will be closed, and the
existence of the wave made manifest.
So, we may take it, it is with the passing-over of the forces of a man at death. There might be
a hundred children being born at that moment in the town around him, but if he were, say, a
profoundly learned man, and all these children were born of parents having no similar
heredity, then that man's death-wave would affect none of these; but would pass unabsorbed
until it came. perhaps, to a far distant child, having, by virtue of a special heredity, a brain
capable of responding within a small range near to that learned sort of death-wave. And in
like manner with all sorts of men; some few, with lives and instincts but little above the
brutes, may at their death only evolve such waves as can stimulate some animal to life; whilst
others may so have lived that only a higher birth than that of man can fulfil the nobler life
they led.
Thus, in this theory, the phenomena of heredity are accounted for - it is only where a suitable
heredity exists that the death-wave can thrill the newborn brain into action, just as the rightly
syntonised apparatus alone can respond to the Aethyric wave. And, of course, in following
this analogy, if must always be remembered that the child's life does not come from the action
of the death-wave on its brain; the latter serves but as the Aethyric wave acts, in closing the
circuit of the coherer - it is the instigator of the life, but not its cause; it acts on cells all
perfect, ready to respond and thrill to life, in the same fashion that an Aethyric wave will act
in starting an arc or spark between two terminals, themselves at a difference of potential
incapable of bridging the gulf that lies between them.
The actual structure of the brain, the blood, the body and the latency of life are all, of course,
the direct progeny of the parents; but, according to our ideas, there is needed something else
than these, the subtle energy needful to start that mechanism into individual being; and that,
we think, can only come from what, in my simile, I have termed the death-wave - from the
Kamma of a being who at that moment has expired. Where the appropriate stimulus in this
respect is lacking, then, although brain and body all are perfect, although the latency of life is
there, yet there can be no galvanizing into life, and the child never lives; or seems to carry on
vital functions for a few seconds only, as it were automatically, without ever waking into
individual life.
And now, before proceeding further, a few words of caution may be necessary, lest what I
have written should be misunderstood. As I have already said, the hypothesis that I have been
giving is intended only as an illustration, as one way of looking at what from another aspect
may appear in quite a different light. Personally, it seems to me that some such mechanism as
that I have suggested may serve to temporarily bridge over the gulf of our ignorance of the
passing over of a life. To present such a thing as a physical possibility is, to my mind, a far
more satisfactory way of working than to go beyond the laws of physics; for once that is done,
the theory is a possible working hypothesis no longer, but has entered into the realm of mere
speculation or faith.
If we adhere to physics in our hypotheses, we have the great advantage of knowing that, given
certain definite conditions, such-and-such results must certainly ensue; we can to a certain
extent test our hypotheses, and can follow them out with a fair degree of logical correctness.
And the reason of this lies in the fact the the physical sciences are founded on the
mathematical correlation of phenomena, and insofar as they are mathematical they are
expressions of relative truth.
But, of course, it must always be remembered that we are not acquainted with a material
universe at all - the collection of phenomena to which we give that name is in reality a
collection of mental, not material, phenomena; and when, for example, we speak of a cubic
centimetre of water as weighing one gram, we are merely expressing certain relations in our
own minds; and we have no proof that there is any Thing-in-itself, outside and beyond our
minds, to which our statement always applies; or indeed that there is any universe, or time, or
space, or other conditionings, outside of the limits of our own consciousness. When we
dream, for example, there is apparently a universe, and time, and space - sometimes a
different sort of time and space to that with which we are acquainted in the waking life; but
nobody but a hopeless animist imagines that he goes in dreams to a new sort of world where
the conditions are different - it is of course merely a change, not in the universe, the States of
Consciousness within. In so far, then, as the physical sciences supply us with a means of
illustrating and clarifying our ideas, and of expressing certain relationships in the form of
relative truth, their use is both legitimate and necessary; but we must not be led away by the
idea that the universe of which they treat is a real universe, a Thing-in-itself outside of our
own minds, for this we have no possible means of ascertaining.
It is the mental phenomena only, which we cognize, and the relations of which we determine;
and all our science is but the expression of certain laws, relations, and limitations of our own
minds. If an order of beings existed, gifted with an intelligence similar to ours, but with a
different structure in terms of time and space, the laws of the universe deduced by such beings
would be entirely different to those which we have arrived at; still more different if the
intelligence itself were of a different order altogether.
And this is really the view taken of this question of Transmigration in the Buddhist
Scriptures. All question of a physical machinery is ignored, and the sole thing dealt with is
the transference at the moment of death of the Sankharas or Tendencies of the individual.
And the actual manner of this transference is said to be incognisable - we can only get a
glimmering of the fashion in which it occurs by the use of similes, such as the standard one
given in the Buddhist Books of the new lamp being lighted from the dying flame, or such
more elaborate images as I have employed in the foregoing pages. We see, in a word, the
phenomena, and at that all our knowledge ends. We have considered in what manner this
passing-over of the character of an individual may take place, and must now pass on to the
discussion of the arguments in support of the Buddhist statement that it does take place at all.
This statement is, for the majority of mankind at least, a pure hypothesis - as much a
hypothesis, for example, as the existence of a Aethyr of modern physical science. Nobody,
using those mental faculties and sense which are common to all mankind, ever has had any
direct testimony as to the existence of the Aethyr at all; and yet we take the Aethyr as a
convenient working hypothesis, because what we mean by that term offers an explanation for
otherwise obscure phenomena, and fulfils the requirements of the several sciences. We have,
then, to enquire whether there seems to be any need for a theory of Transmigration to account
for several phenomena; and whether that theory will cover the known facts about human
births and deaths.
We may conveniently divide these arguments into four heads in progressive order of
importance as follows:- (1) the argument from experience, (2) the argument of Moral Law,
(3) the argument from the insufficiency of heredity to account for the observed conditions,
and (4) the argument from vital statistics.
As regards the first of these, not much is to be said, for the simple reason that such experience
can, for the most part, be convincing only to the person experiencing it. Briefly it is to the
effect that certain persons allege themselves able to remember events of their past lives - a
faculty which may be natural or may be acquired by the practice of a special mental training
given in Visuddhi Magga and elsewhere. This does not, we must hasten to add, imply
anything mysterious or magical - it is simply an extension of the ordinary powers of memory.
Of course such cases are entirely without value except where the statements can be shown to
be outside the normal knowledge of the percipient, and to be founded on facts with which he
could not have become acquainted in the normal course of things.
In Buddhist countries, it is no very unusual thing to have children gravely claiming to have
had such-and-such a name, and to have lived in such-and-such a place, in their previous lives;
and occasionally these claims are in a sort of fashion substantiated.
Such children are in Burma called Winzas, and it is no uncommon thing for a sort of rough
test to be carried out by taking a Winza to the scene of his former life, when it is said that he
or she can generally identify his former dwelling and friends, and can state facts known only
to the dead person and one other living man. These Winzas are so relatively common in
Burma that their existence is commonly taken for granted; the power of remembering the past
life is generally stated to disappear as the child grows up, though we have met adult Winzas
who still claim to remember the past. For the present it will be best to proceed directly with
the enumeration of the arguments advanced in support of Transmigration.
The argument as to the Moral Law is a species of argumentum ad hominem, and is cogent
only with those who believe in the existence of a Moral Law in the universe. It may be stated
thus:- Here in our human life alone we see men and women born in all manner of different
positions, in every species of environment, with possibilities for good and evil the most
diverse; and the question naturally arises, to what previous cause can the diversity of these
conditionings be assigned? The answer on the lines of this argument will be that if there exist
a Moral Law in the universe, then, as we know that no effect is produced without a cause,
these differences of position and opportunity are the fruit of a moral condition in the past i.e
in a past existence; and to account for them in a manner compatible with human ideas of
justice etc, the theory of Transmigration (or equally the Hindu idea of Reincarnation) seems
the only tenable hypothesis.
For, on that theory, if a man is suffering now, it is because he has done evil in past lives, and
vice versa; and so the apparent injustices of life are apparently set aside. We see, in effect,
this "Moral Law" working in the lives of men - how certain forms of wrongdoing carry with
them an inevitable penalty of suffering, and it is not difficult to understand the Buddhist
position that a man who apparently goes scatheless in this life has so far damaged his own
mind by his misdeeds that he will certainly suffer in after lives, for all the evil he has done in
this; for it is his mind alone that starts the forced which go to build the future life. The
difficulty which many have in conceiving a Moral Law - for all the Laws we know act equally
on good and bad alike - may be lessened if this view, that a man by doing "evil" harms his
own mind, be accepted; and Morality will then take a place higher than mere sentiment can
give it, as a species of science of mental hygiene.
As to the argument from heredity, we know that the ascertained facts of life can only be
imperfectly solved on this ground. If heredity were an absolute law, then all the children of
the same parents - or at all events all twins - should have exactly the same mental abilities.
We know they have not, we know that every individual child is different; and the Buddhist
accounts for this fact by saying that heredity is only a little part, and that each child has really
the Kamma of its own past lives as the foundation of its character - that the heredity of a man
only acts in so far as his own Kamma is concordant with it, by the process of selective
absorption set forth in our physical analogy.
Apart from trivial variations, the theory of heredity pure and simple is quite unable to account
for the remarkable instances of sporadic genius which occasionally occur; cases of children
born of illiterate parents who, even in early childhood have manifested the most remarkable
talents, such as a wonderful memory, a capacity for mathematics, music, for the sciences.
The theory of Transmigration, and that theory alone, would seem to cover all these
phenomena. It is not a sufficient explanation to set them down as due to accidental
variations, for there can be no such thing as accident - that to which we assign that name is
only a cloak for our own ignorance of some unknown law. The law which will explain the
divergences from heredity is the law of Transmigration.
Now we come to the final argument, that from vital statistics,
and here, for the present, I can give but the barest outlines of that argument, leaving the facts
to be dealt with in a separate paper in future, for the matter is one of special importance.
Briefly, it may be stated thus. In civilised races there is less tendency to extremes of
individuality than in semi-civilised, and we may take it for granted that many of the mental
characteristics, say, of a Londoner, are common to most Londoners; and different to those,
say, of a Parisian. With such accentuated characteristics, it is natural to expect, on the theory
of transmigration, that the dying Londoner will tend to take rebirth as a Londoner, not as a
Parisian. But if the majority of dying Londoners actuate a London birth, then, balancing off
the normal rise in population, we will expect to find that any variation in the death rate of
London will be accompanied by a similar variation in the birth rate. And this - as I shall show
for various towns and countries in a future article - is an almost invariable rule.
The divergencies from the average of London death rates and birth rates are synchronous - a
fact which can only be explained by the theory of Transmigration; for it is impossible to
suppose that the condition which causes a rise of death rate can be suitable for causing a rise
of birth rate also. Especially this syntony is noticeable in the case of catastrophes which
unusually increase the death rate. When the Black Death swept over Europe it was
everywhere followed by an unusual rise in the birth rate, and double and even triple births
were very common.
The same is true of wars. When the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 raised the French death rate
considerably above the normal, it was followed by a sudden rise in the birth rate; and the
noticeable thing about this rise was that the male births were far in excess of the female - a
fact which would exactly fit the Transmigration theory, and which can be accounted for on
that theory alone. It is only men who are killed in modern warfare, and according to Buddhist
ideas such men as would be killed in battle would be the sort of men that would take rebirth
as men, and not as women.
Many other similar instances must be left to a future occasion - suffice it now to say that, as a
general rule, there is a syntony between the death and birth rates; a syntony which, in our
opinion, can only be accounted for by the Buddhist hypothesis of Transmigration.
We have now taken a general survey of all that is implied to Buddhists in the word
transmigration, and it only remains to consider what this Buddhist theory really amounts to.
The first thing that will probably occur to the Western reader is that there is here nothing at all
of personal immortality. We are immortal, in the Buddhist view, only in so far as we are a
portion of the forces of the great Ocean of Existence.
All life is one in very truth, and that which today our ignorance calls "I" was yesterday the
force that flamed in a bygone star, and will tomorrow be speeding outwards to eternity;
entering here a new life and there awaking in a distant alien mind the thought that once was
ours; life flashing as light from star to star, and nowhere an end of it, nowhere a beginning, so
long as Thought, Thought that has built the Universe around us, shall endure. Thus, in the
Buddhist view of life, there is no conception of personal immortality - "Abbhantare jivo
n'atthi" - "there is no future life" - for life as we have known it is but a little ripple in the
Ocean of Existence, which yesterday was not, and tomorrow shall be no more for ever.
And if to those trained in another way of thought, if to him who has cherished the chimera of
selfhood till all the universe were vain without his personal and continued life, if to such a
one the Master's teaching should seen dreary and forlorn, yet to the true Buddhist otherwise
appears this solemn lesson of the mystery of life. For him it is great and heart-inspiring, this
doctrine of the transmigration, and the secret source of all true happiness; to him who knows
himself as the Master Of Eternity - the Moulder and the Fashioner this day of a new and
grander life to come - what matter if another should enjoy the fruits, so long as he may have
the privilege of sowing them?
And so his hopes and aspirations, free of the sad and selfish dream of personal immortality,
are fixed, not on the future, but on the life he lives - the one life over which he has a very
great control, which he may make grander and more pure and noble than it came to him from
bygone immemorial lives. To live in love with all that lives, not seeking or not yearning for
tomorrow's guerdon; to make of his life an oasis in the desert of self-desire; to strive ever,
even here and now, after true Love and Wisdom and the Perfect Peace; - this is for the
Buddhist the supreme ideal, the glory of his Dhamma and the hope of all his ways.
All else - all thought of future gain on life for self - is but a mockery and delusion. As
something real and true, as Buddhaghosa tells us, there rises in us the thought "I am," "I was,"
or "I shall be." And it is all illusion, the dewdrop deeming itself a permanent and separate
entity, though the waters which compose it lay yesterday in the ocean's depths, and with the
dawning light will rise and melt into the wandering airs. But if this universal life be ever
changing, sorrowful, and without a Soul, there is still, our Religion teaches, an End and a
Cessation. Thought is the Creator of these worlds, the Builder of this earthly tabernacle, the
Maker of Illusion; and to him who gains the victory over Thought comes in this life the
Unutterable Peace. He is the Victor who here and now has overcome all Passion, Hatred and
Illusion, and has passed where nevermore the woes of the earth can come. To him is joy
beyond all joy we know, the joy of Liberation from this vanity of life; who knows that for him
rebirth is finished and his toil at end; and that, when Death shall claim his body, there will be
no more of Change or Sorrow or Delusion, even as the Master has said:-
Decay must come to all that is,
Impermanent the Elements of life!
What has been born must cease to be;
Surely in Cessation alone is Happiness!
Next to the very difficult question of the true significance of the word Nibbana, there can be
no doubt that, of all the doctrines of the Buddhist Religion, the one which is the least
comprehensible to Occidental students, the one which has given rise to the greatest number of
misconceptions, is that for which we are compelled, for want of a better expression, to
employ the very inadequate word "Transmigration" - the passing over of the Kamma or
Doing, the Sankhara or Tendencies, the Character or Destiny, of one being to another at the
moment of death or birth.
Reprinted from the pages of 'Flowing Star' the Journal of British Shingon Buddhism.
This essay by Ananda Maitreya Thera (Allan Bennet Macgregor 1872-1923) first appeared in
the pages of the journal 'Buddhism' published in Rangoon. Burma. Dec 1903 and is
reproduced here unaltered.