English
If a man labours, for example, during a whole life at some branch of science, at some art, or at some special department of study, the specific acquirements he may possess at the end of his life are not passed over, it is true, to the next life exactly as he lays them down. ‘They would probably be of very little use to him in the altered circumstances of the world when he comes back, if they were. But they are thrown into manifestation again at his Re-incarna- 70 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. tion in the appropriate form of highly developed aptitudes for the line of acquisition he has formerly been concerned with. Do we not observe, for instance, in such a very earthly matter as the power of learning languages, great gulfs of difference between the aptt- tudes of different people ? Some will learn a dozen languages with less difficulty than others will learn one. “They have an inborn faculty,’ says the careless commonplace critic, content as usual to libel Nature by setting down to the accident of birth the symmetrical outcome of exquisitely adjusted law. So with the glaring examples of re-incarnating acquirements pre- sented to us by the case of people who show extra- ordinary genius for music at an age when less “ gifted ”’ contemporaries can barely distinguish a tune. There is no gift in the matter—there is acquirement faithfully preserved in the karmic affinities of the Ego and in its true individuality. Surely no one who appreciates, even imperfectly, the fulness with which the doctrines of Re-incarnation satisfy the problem of life and human evolution, will be surprised to remember that it has always, as far as philosophical history can look back, been accepted as the keynote of spiritual science by the vast majority of mankind. Buddhism finds it established as the corner-stone of Brahminical teaching and takes it over as a matter of course. This is a consideration which should not be too lightly put aside by European thinkers over prone to assume that their own age,— which has been glorified by an extraordinary advance in knowledge and intelligence relating to the physical RE-INCARNATION. 41 plane of Nature,—is entitled to a monopoly of our intellectual respect. Modern scholarship which is only now beginning to unlock the mysteries of Samnscrit literature may well stand aghast at its discoveries. Not for the moment to raise any question about the real age of this literature ; it is established at all events, that far back behind the beginning of European philosophy, there lies a complete literature exhibiting profound sagacity and subtlety on the part of its authors in regard to the problems of the mind and the speculations of metaphysics. Take the Bhagavat Gita for example—at all events an existent literary work —or, as occultists and native Indian scholars maintain, already a work of profound antiquity when Britain was a Savage island, and the race destined to commence its civilisation, only beginning its own struggle for existence among the warring tribes of Italy. Now that the boundlessly elaborate meaning of the allegory embodied in that poem is shining forth for us by degrees, it is plain at least that its authors were deep students already of the mysteries of human life and death, that they were filled with spiritual aspiration of the purest kind, that their conception of the relations between the finite embodied and the infinite conscious- ness have left nothing for later theologians to refine upon. And the stupendous epic in which the Bhagavat Gita is embedded, is no less remarkable for the finished delicacy of its poetic feeling, for the loftiness of its ethical code, for the intricate abundance of its sym- bology, for all the characteristics which mark the literary work of a highly cultured race. Europeans 72 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. are children in metaphysical speculation beside the Hindus of old, and if we could imagine an impartial inquirer from another sphere, acquainted with the intellectual history of these two races, and informed that the Hindus of old believed in Re-incarnation while the modern Europeans rejected it, he would certainly smile at the anti-climax involved in such a statement. Modern theology should show some credentials more effective than its ignorance of ancient records and its obliquity of vision in regard to the bearings of its own sacred writings—to which I will come directly—before it can justly claim to impose its own negations on the minds of people who are now beginning to look around them in an inquiring spirit. I have just said that Buddhism took over the Brah- minical doctrines of Re-incarnation as a imatter of course—and this is the case. But Buddha’s teaching on all vital points connected with spiritual growth has been so wildly caricatured and distorted by com- mentators who have approached it without any interior illumination as to its meaning, that I may fairly ask the reader’s attention for a little while to the true significance on this subject of the Buddhist scriptures. The sacred books of Eastern religions are written, for the most part, in a style which is rather a disguise than an expression of the meaning they are intended to convey. Figurative phraseology and _ intricate symbols are, at all events, so little in harmony with Western habits of thought, that such vehicles of philosophic teaching may easily be mistaken by readers RE-INCARNATION. 73 accustomed to a more lucid treatment of religious doctrine, for the wild conceptions of a crude supersti- tion. And even when simpler topics than the avatars of Vishnu are under treatment, the same habits of speech which veil cosmological theories with narratives of Divine incarnations in animal forms, lead Oriental writers to describe even such events as Buddha’s death and cremation in the circuitous language of symbols, rather than in plain and matter-of-fact prose. Thus, in one of the Pali ‘ Sutta’s,”’ or Buddhist Gospels—the Maha-parinibbana “Sutta’’—for the English version of which we are indebted to the admir- able scholarship of Dr. Rhys David, we are told how “the Blessed One” died from an illness which super- vened upon a meal of “ dried boar’s flesh,” served to him by a certain Kunda, a worker in metals at Pava. A prosaic interpretation of this narrative has passed into all epitomes of Buddhism current in European literature. Mr. Alabaster, for instance, in his ‘‘ Wheel of the Law,’’ calmly quotes a missionary authority for. the statement that Buddha died “ of dysentery caused by eating roast pork”’; and even Dr. Rhys David himself gives further currency of this ludicrous miscon- ception in his well-known treatise on Buddhism, pub- lished by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. One might have supposed that students of the subject, even without a clue to the meaning of the “dried boar’s flesh’’ in the legend, would have been startled at the notion of finding the simple diet of so confirmed a vegetarian as we must suppose any Indian religious teacher to have been, invaded by so 44 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. gross an article of food as roast pork. But one after another, European writers on Buddhism are content to echo this absurdly materialistic version of the figurative Eastern story. If they had sought to check their interpretation of it by reference to living exponents of the Buddhist faith, they would have fallen easily on the track of the right explanation. The boar is an Oriental symbol for esoteric knowledge, derived from the boar avatar, of Vishnu—that in which the incarnate god lifted up the earth out of the waters in which it was immersed. In other words, according to Wilson’s translation of the Vishnu Purana, the avatar in ques- 6 tion “allegorically represents the extrication of the world from a deluge of iniquity by the rites of religion.” ‘In the Ramayana we may find another version of the same allegory, Brahma in this case assuming the form of a boar to hoist up the earth out of primal chaos. Boar’s flesh thus comes to symbolise the secret doctrine of the esoteric initiates, those who possessed the inner science of Brahma, and dried boar’s flesh would be such esoteric wisdom prepared for food; reduced, that is to say, to a form in which it could be taught to the multitude. It was through the too daring use of such dried boar’s flesh—through his attempt to bring the multitude, to a greater degree than they were prepared for it, within the area of esoteric teaching—that Buddha died; that is to say, that his great enterprise came to an end. That is the meaning of the story so pain- fully debased by European writers; and that meaning once assigned to its central idea, will be followed through many variations in the details of the Pali RE-INCARNATION. 75 narrative, even as translated by Dr. Rhys David, apparently without any suspicion on his part of its true intention. Buddha, for instance, before the feast, directs that he only should be served with the dried boar’s flesh, while ‘‘ the Brethren,’ his disciples, are to be served with cakes and rice; also, that what- ever dried boar’s flesh may be left over after he has done, shall be buried, for none but himself. he says, can digest such food—a strange remark for him to have made, according to the materialistic interpretation of the story, which represents him as not able to digest such food. The meaning of the injunction plainly is that after him none of the Brethren shall attempt the task of giving out esoteric secrets to the world.