الفصل الفصل 12 · THE IDEA OF PRE-EXISTENCE

. THE IDEA OF PRE-EXISTENCE

"If A Bikkhu should desire, O brethren, to call to mind his

various temporary states in days gone by--such as one birth, two

births, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one

hundred, or one thousand, or one hundred thousand births,--in all

their modes and all their details, let him be devoted to quietude

of heart,--let him look through things, let him be much alone."

--Akankheyya Sutta.

I

Were I to ask any reflecting Occidental, who had passed some

years in the real living atmosphere of Buddhism, what fundamental

idea especially differentiates Oriental modes of thinking from

our own, I am sure he would answer: "The Idea of Pre-existence."

It is this idea, more than any other, which permeates the whole

mental being of the Far East. It is universal as the wash of air:

it colors every emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly,

almost every act. Its symbols are perpetually visible, even in

details of artistic decoration; and hourly by day or night, some

echoes of its language float uninvited to the ear. The utterances

of the people,--their household sayings, their proverbs, their

pious or profane exclamations, their confessions of sorrow, hope,

joy, or despair,--are all informed with it. It qualifies equally

the expression of hate or the speech of affection; and the term

_ingwa_, or _innen_,--meaning karma as inevitable retribution,

--comes naturally to every lip as an interpretation, as a

consolation, or as a reproach. The peasant toiling up some steep

road, and feeling the weight of his handcart straining every

muscle, murmurs patiently: "Since this is ingwa, it must be

suffered." Servants disputing, ask each other, "By reason of what

ingwa must I now dwell with such a one as you?" The incapable or

vicious man is reproached with his ingwa; and the misfortunes of

the wise or the virtuous are explained by the same Buddhist word.

The law-breaker confesses his crime, saying: "That which I did I

knew to be wicked when doing; but my ingwa was stronger than my

heart." Separated lovers seek death under the belief that their

union in this life is banned by the results of their sins in a

former one; and, the victim of an injustice tries to allay his

natural anger by the self-assurance that he is expiating some

forgotten fault which had to, be expiated in the eternal order of

things.... So likewise even the commonest references to a

spiritual future imply the general creed of a spiritual past. The

mother warns her little ones at play about the effect of

wrong-doing upon their future births, as the children of other

parents. The pilgrim or the street-beggar accepts your alms with

the prayer that your next birth may be fortunate. The aged

_inkyo_, whose sight and hearing begin to fail, talks cheerily of

the impending change that is to provide him with a fresh young

body. And the expressions _Yakusoku_, signifying the Buddhist

idea of necessity; _mae no yo_, the last life; _akirame_,

resignation, recur as frequently in Japanese common parlance as

do the words "right" and "wrong" in English popular speech.

After long dwelling in this psychological medium, you find that

it has penetrated your own thought, and has effected therein

various changes. All concepts of life implied by the idea of

preexistence,--all those beliefs which, however sympathetically

studied, must at first have seemed more than strange to you,--

finally lose that curious or fantastic character with which

novelty once invested them, and present themselves under a

perfectly normal aspect. They explain so many things so well as

even to look rational; and quite rational some assuredly are when

measured by the scientific thought of the nineteenth century. But

to judge them fairly, it is first necessary to sweep the mind

clear of all Western ideas of metempsychosis. For there is no

resemblance between the old Occidental conceptions of soul--the

Pythagorean or the Platonic, for example--and the Buddhist

conception; and it is precisely because of this unlikeness that

the Japanese beliefs prove themselves reasonable. The profound

difference between old-fashioned Western thought and Eastern

thought in this regard is, that for the Buddhist the conventional

soul--the single, tenuous, tremulous, transparent inner man, or

ghost--does not exist. The Oriental Ego is not individual. Nor is

it* even a definitely numbered multiple like the Gnostic soul. It

is an aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity,--the

concentrated sum of the creative thinking of previous lives

beyond all reckoning.

II

The interpretative power of Buddhism, and the singular accord of

its theories with the facts of modern science, appear especially

in that domain of psychology whereof Herbert Spencer has been the

greatest of all explorers. No small part of our psychological

life is composed of feelings which Western theology never could

explain. Such are those which cause the still speechless infant

to cry at the sight of certain faces, or to smile at the sight of

others. Such are those instantaneous likes or dislikes

experienced on meeting strangers, those repulsions or attractions

called "first impressions," which intelligent children are prone

to announce with alarming frankness, despite all assurance that

"people must not be judged by appearances": a doctrine no child

in his heart believes. To call these feelings instinctive or

intuitive, in the theological meaning of instinct or intuition,

explains nothing at all--merely cuts off inquiry into the mystery

of life, just like the special creation hypothesis. The idea that

a personal impulse or emotion might be more than individual,

except through demoniacal possession, still seems to

old-fashioned orthodoxy a monstrous heresy. Yet it is now certain

that most of our deeper feelings are superindividual,--both those

which we classify as passional, and those which we call sublime.

The individuality of the amatory passion is absolutely denied by

science; and what is true of love at first sight is also true of

hate: both are superindividual. So likewise are those vague

impulses to wander which come and go with spring, and those vague

depressions experienced in autumn,--survivals, perhaps, from an

epoch in which human migration followed the course of the

seasons, or even from an era preceding the apparition of man.

Superindividual also those emotions felt by one who, after having

passed the greater part of a life on plain or prairies, first

looks upon a range of snow-capped peaks; or the sensations of

some dweller in the interior of a continent when he first beholds

the ocean, and hears its eternal thunder. The delight, always

toned with awe, which the sight of a stupendous landscape evokes;

Or that speechless admiration, mingled with melancholy

inexpressible, which the splendor of a tropical sunset

creates,--never can be interpreted by individual experience.

Psychological analysis has indeed shown these emotions to be

prodigiously complex, and interwoven with personal experiences of

many kinds; but in either case the deeper wave of feeling is

never individual: it is a surging up from that ancestral sea of

life out of which we came. To the same psychological category

possibly belongs likewise a peculiar feeling which troubled men's

minds long before the time of Cicero, and troubles them even more

betimes in our own generation,--the feeling of having already

seen a place really visited for the first time. Some strange air

of familiarity about the streets of a foreign town, or the forms

of a foreign landscape, comes to the mind with a sort of soft

weird shock, and leaves one vainly ransacking memory for

interpretations. Occasionally, beyond question, similar

sensations are actually produced by the revival or recombination

of former relations in consciousness; but there would seem to be

many which remain wholly mysterious when we attempt to explain

them by individual experience.

Even in the most common of our sensations there are enigmas never

to be solved by those holding the absurd doctrine that all

feeling and cognition belong to individual experience, and that

the mind of the child newly-born is a _tabula rasa_. The pleasure

excited by the perfume of a flower, by certain shades of color,

by certain tones of music; the involuntary loathing or fear

aroused by the first sight of dangerous or venomous life; even

the nameless terror of dreams,--are all inexplicable upon the

old-fashioned soul-hypothesis. How deeply-reaching into the life

of the race some of these sensations are, such as the pleasure in

odors and in colors, Grant Allen has most effectively suggested

in his "Physiological Aesthetics," and in his charming treatise

on the Color-Sense. But long before these were written, his

teacher, the greatest of all psychologists, had clearly proven

that the experience-hypothesis was utterly inadequate to account

for many classes of psychological phenomena. "If possible,"

observes Herbert Spencer, "it is even more at fault in respect to

the emotions than to the cognitions. The doctrine that all the

desires, all the sentiments, are generated by the experiences of

the individual, is so glaringly at variance with facts that I

cannot but wonder how any one should ever have ventured to

entertain it." It was Mr. Spencer, also, who showed us that words

like "instinct," "intuition," have no true signification in the

old sense; they must hereafter be used in a very different one.

Instinct, in the language of modern psychology, means "organized

memory," and memory itself is "incipient instinct,"--the sum of

impressions to be inherited by the next succeeding individual in

the chain of life. Thus science recognizes inherited memory: not

in the ghostly signification of a remembering of the details of

former lives, but as a minute addition to psychological life

accompanied by minute changes in the structure of the inherited

nervous system. "The human brain is an organized register of

infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of

life, or rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms

through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of

the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been

successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly

amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain

of the infant--which the infant in after-life exercises and

perhaps strengthens or further complicates--and which, with

minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we

have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and

the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every

individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the

absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all

the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific

assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic

sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven

matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind

insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of

sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by

millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the

emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord with

Buddhism, avows the Ego composite, and, like Buddhism, explains

the psychical riddles of the present by the psychical experiences

of the past.

(1) Principles of Psychology: "The Feelings."

III

To many persons it must seem that the idea of Soul as an infinite

multiple would render impossible any idea of religion in the

Western sense; and those unable to rid themselves of old

theological conceptions doubtless imagine that even in Buddhist

countries, and despite the evidence of Buddhist texts, the faith

of the common people is really based upon the idea of the soul as

a single entity. But Japan furnishes remarkable proof to the

contrary. The uneducated common people, the poorest country-folk

who have never studied Buddhist metaphysics, believe the self

composite. What is even more remarkable is that in the primitive

faith, Shinto, a kindred doctrine exists; and various forms of

the belief seem to characterize the thought of the Chinese and of

the Koreans. All these peoples of the Far East seem to consider

the soul compound; whether in the Buddhist sense, or in the

primitive sense represented by Shinto (a sort of ghostly

multiplying by fission), or in the fantastic sense elaborated by

Chinese astrology. In Japan I have fully satisfied myself that

the belief is universal. It is not necessary to quote here from

the Buddhist texts, because the common or popular beliefs, and

not the philosophy of a creed, can alone furnish evidence that

religious fervor is compatible and consistent with the notion of

a composite soul. Certainly the Japanese peasant does not think

the psychical Self nearly so complex a thing as Buddhist

philosophy considers it, or as Western science proves it to be.

_But he thinks of himself as multiple_. The struggle within him

between impulses good and evil he explains as a conflict between

the various ghostly wills that make up his Ego; and his spiritual

hope is to disengage his better self or selves from his worse

selves,--Nirvana, or the supreme bliss, being attainable only

through the survival of the best within him. Thus his religion

appears to be founded upon a natural perception of psychical

evolution not nearly so remote from scientific thought as are

those conventional notions of soul held by our common people at

home. Of course his ideas on these abstract subjects are vague

and unsystematized; but their general character and tendencies

are unmistakable; and there can be no question whatever as to the

earnestness of his faith, or as to the influence of that faith

upon his ethical life.

Wherever belief survives among the educated classes, the same

ideas obtain definition and synthesis. I may cite, in example,

two selections from compositions, written by students aged

respectively twenty-three and twenty-six. I might as easily cite

a score; but the following will sufficiently indicate what I

mean:--

"Nothing is more foolish than to declare the immortality of the

soul. The soul is a compound; and though its elements be eternal,

we know they can never twice combine in exactly the same way. All

compound things must change their character and their

conditions."

"Human life is composite. A combination of energies make the

soul. When a man dies his soul may either remain unchanged, or be

changed according to that which it combines with. Some

philosophers say the soul is immortal; some, that it is mortal.

They are both right. The soul is mortal or immortal according to

the change of the combinations composing it. The elementary

energies from which the soul is formed are, indeed, eternal; but

the nature of the soul is determined by the character of the

combinations into which those energies enter."

Now the ideas expressed in these compositions will appear to the

Western reader, at first view, unmistakably atheistic. Yet they

are really compatible with the sincerest and deepest faith. It

is the use of the English word "soul," not understood at all as

we understand it, which creates the false impression. "Soul," in

the sense used by the young writers, means an almost infinite

combination of both good and evil tendencies,--a compound doomed

to disintegration not only by the very fact of its being a

compound, but also by the eternal law of spiritual progress.

IV

That the idea, which has been for thousands of years so vast a

factor in Oriental thought-life, should have failed to develop

itself in the West till within, our own day, is sufficiently

explained by Western theology. Still, it would not be correct to

say that theology succeeded in rendering the notion of

pre-existence absolutely repellent to Occidental minds. Though

Christian doctrine, holding each soul specially created out of

nothing to fit each new body, permitted no avowed beliefs in

pre-existence, popular common-sense recognized a contradiction of

dogma in the phenomena of heredity. In the same way, while

theology decided animals to be mere automata, moved by a sort of

incomprehensible machinery called instinct, the people generally

recognized that animals had reasoning powers. The theories of

instinct and of intuition held even a generation ago seem utterly

barbarous to-day. They were commonly felt to be useless as

interpretations; but as dogmas they served to check speculation

and to prevent heresy. Wordsworth's "Fidelity" and his

marvelously overrated "Intimations of Immortality" bear witness

to the extreme timidity and crudeness of Western notions on these

subjects even at the beginning of the century. The love of the

dog for his master is indeed "great beyond all human estimate,"

but for reasons Wordsworth never dreamed about; and although the

fresh sensations of childhood are certainly intimations of

something much more wonderful than Wordsworth's denominational

idea of immortality, his famous stanza concerning them has been

very justly condemned by Mr. John Morley as nonsense. Before the

decay of theology, no rational ideas of psychological

inheritance, of the true nature of instinct, or of the unity of

life, could possibly have forced their way to general

recognition.

But with the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms

of thought crumbled; new ideas everywhere arose to take the place

of worn-out dogmas; and we now have the spectacle of a general

intellectual movement in directions strangely parallel with

Oriental philosophy. The unprecedented rapidity and

multiformity of scientific progress during the last fifty years

could not have failed to provoke an equally unprecedented

intellectual quickening among the non-scientific. That the

highest and most complex organisms have been developed from the

lowest and simplest; that a single physical basis of life is the

substance of the whole living world; that no line of separation

can be drawn between the animal and vegetable; that the

difference between life and non-life is only a difference of

degree, not of kind; that matter is not less incomprehensible

than mind, while both are but varying manifestations of one and

the same unknown reality,--these have already become the

commonplaces of the new philosophy. After the first recognition

even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict

that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be

indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to

keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And to-day

for the student of scientific psychology the idea of

pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of

fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery

quite as plausible as any other. "None but very hasty thinkers,"

wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of

inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that

of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it

may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is

capable of supplying(1)."

Now this support, as given by Professor Huxley, is singularly

strong. It offers us no glimpse of a single soul flitting from

darkness to light, from death to rebirth, through myriads of

millions of years; but it leaves the main idea of pre-existence

almost exactly in the form enunciated by the Buddha himself. In

the Oriental doctrine, the psychical personality, like the

individual body, is an aggregate doomed to disintegration By

psychical personality I mean here that which distinguishes mind

from mind,--the "me" from the "you": that which we call self. To

Buddhism this is a temporary composite of illusions. What makes

it is the karma. What reincarnates is the karma,--the sum-total

of the acts and thoughts of countless anterior existences,--each

existences,--each one of which, as an integer in some great

spiritual system of addition and subtraction, may affect all the

rest. Like a magnetism, the karma is transmitted from form to

form, from phenomenon to phenomenon, determining conditions by

combinations. The ultimate mystery of the concentrative and

creative effects of karma the Buddhist acknowledges to be

inscrutable; but the cohesion of effects he declares to be

produced by tanha, the desire of life, corresponding to what

Schopenhauer called the "will" to live. Now we find in Herbert

Spencer's "Biology" a curious parallel for this idea. He explains

the transmission of tendencies, and their variations, by a theory

of polarities,--polarities of the physiological unit between

this theory of polarities and the Buddhist theory of tanha, the

difference is much less striking than the resemblance. Karma or

heredity, tanha or polarity, are inexplicable as to their

ultimate nature: Buddhism and Science are here at one. The fact

worthy of attention is that both recognize the same phenomena

under different names.

(1) Evolution and Ethics, p.61 (ed 1894).

V

The prodigious complexity of the methods by which Science has

arrived at conclusions so strangely in harmony with the ancient

thought of the East, may suggest the doubt whether those

conclusions could ever be made clearly comprehensible to the mass

of Western minds. Certainly it would seem that just as the real

doctrines of Buddhism can be taught to the majority of believers

through forms only, so the philosophy of science can be

communicated to the masses through suggestion only,--suggestion

of such facts, or arrangements of fact, as must appeal to any

naturally intelligent mind. But the history of scientific

progress assures the efficiency of this method; and there is no

strong reason for the supposition that, because the processes of

the higher science remain above the mental reach of the

unscientific classes, the conclusions of that science will not be

generally accepted. The dimensions and weights of planets; the

distances and the composition of stars; the law of gravitation;

the signification of heat, light, and color; the nature of sound,

and a host of other scientific discoveries, are familiar to

thousands quite ignorant of the details of the methods by which

such knowledge was obtained. Again we have evidence that every

great progressive movement of science during the century has been

followed by considerable modifications of popular beliefs.

Already the churches, though clinging still to the hypothesis of

a specially-created soul, have accepted the main doctrine of

physical evolution; and neither fixity of belief nor intellectual

retrogression can be rationally expected in the immediate future.

Further changes of religious ideas are to be looked for; and it

is even likely that they will be effected rapidly rather than

slowly. Their exact nature, indeed, cannot be predicted; but

existing intellectual tendencies imply that the doctrine of

psychological evolution must be accepted, though not at once so

as to set any final limit to ontological speculation; and that

the whole conception of the Ego will be eventually transformed

through the consequently developed idea of pre-existence.

VI

More detailed consideration of these probabilities may be

ventured. They will not, perhaps, be acknowledged as

probabilities by persons who regard science as a destroyer rather

than a modifier. But such thinkers forget that religious feeling

is something infinitely more profound than dogma; that it

survives all gods and all forms of creed; and that it only widens

and deepens and gathers power with intellectual expansion. That

as mere doctrine religion will ultimately pass away is a

conclusion to which the study of evolution leads; but that

religion as feeling, or even as faith in the unknown power

shaping equally a brain or a constellation, can ever utterly die,

is not at present conceivable. Science wars only upon erroneous

interpretations of phenomena; it only magnifies the cosmic

mystery, and proves that everything, however minute, is

infinitely wonderful and incomprehensible. And it is this

indubitable tendency of science to broaden beliefs and to magnify

cosmic emotion which justifies the supposition that future

modifications of Western religious ideas will be totally unlike

any modifications effected in the past; that the Occidental

conception of Self will orb into something akin to the Oriental

conception of Self; and that all present petty metaphysical

notions of personality and individuality as realities per se will

be annihilated. Already the growing popular comprehension of the

facts of heredity, as science teaches them, indicates the path by

which some, at least, of these modifications will be reached. In

the coming contest over the great question of psychological

evolution, common intelligence will follow Science along the line

of least resistance; and that line will doubtless be the study of

heredity, since the phenomena to be considered, however in

themselves uninterpretable, are familiar to general experience,

and afford partial answers to countless old enigmas. It is thus

quite possible to imagine a coming form of Western religion

supported by the whole power of synthetic philosophy, differing

from Buddhism mainly in the greater exactness of its conceptions,

holding the soul as a composite, and teaching a new spiritual law

resembling the doctrine of karma.

An objection to this idea will, however, immediately present

itself to many minds. Such a modification of belief, it will be

averred, would signify the sudden conquest and transformation of

feelings by ideas. "The world," says Herbert Spencer, "is not

governed by ideas, but by feelings, to which ideas serve only as

guides." How are the notions of a change, such as that supposed,

to be reconciled with common knowledge of existing religious

sentiment in the West, and the force of religious emotionalism?

Were the ideas of pre-existence and of the soul as multiple

really antagonistic to Western religious sentiment, no

satisfactory answer could be made. But are they so antagonistic?

The idea of pre-existence certainly is not; the Occidental mind

is already prepared for it. It is true that the notion of Self as

a composite, destined to dissolution, may seem little better than

the materialistic idea of annihilation,--at least to those still

unable to divest themselves of the old habits of thought.

Nevertheless, impartial reflection will show that there is no

emotional reason for dreading the disintegration of the Ego.

Actually, though unwittingly, it is for this very disintegration

that Christians and Buddhists alike perpetually pray. Who has not

often wished to rid himself of the worse parts of his nature, of

tendencies to folly or to wrong, of impulses to say or do unkind

things,--of all that lower inheritance which still clings about

the higher man, and weighs down his finest aspirations? Yet that

of which we so earnestly desire the separation, the elimination,

the death, is not less surely a part of psychological

inheritance, of veritable Self, than are those younger and larger

faculties which help to the realization of noble ideals. Rather

than an end to be feared, the dissolution of Self is the one

object of all objects to which our efforts should be turned. What

no new philosophy can forbid us to hope is that the best elements

of Self will thrill on to seek loftier affinities, to enter into

grander and yet grander combinations, till the supreme revelation

comes, and we discern, through infinite vision,--through the

vanishing of all Self,--the Absolute Reality.

For while we know that even the so-called elements themselves are

evolving, we have no proof that anything utterly dies. That we

are is the certainty that, we have been and will be. We have

survived countless evolutions, countless universes. We know that

through the Cosmos all is law. No chance decides what units shall

form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall

be locked in granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and

in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from analogy,

the cosmical history of every ultimate unit, psychological or

physical, is determined just as surely and as exactly as in the

Buddhist doctrine of karma.

VII

The influence of Science will not be the only factor in the

modification of Western religious beliefs: Oriental philosophy

will certainly furnish another. Sanscrit, Chinese, and Pali

scholarship, and the tireless labor of philologists in all parts

of the East, are rapidly familiarizing Europe and America with

all the great forms of Oriental thought; Buddhism is being

studied with interest throughout the Occident; and the results of

these studies are yearly showing themselves more and more

definitely in the mental products of the highest culture. The

schools of philosophy are not more visibly affected than the

literature of the period. Proof that a reconsideration of the

problem of the Ego is everywhere forcing itself upon Occidental

minds, may be found not only in the thoughtful prose of the time,

but even in its poetry and its romance. Ideas impossible a

generation ago are changing current thought, destroying old

tastes, and developing higher feelings. Creative art, working

under larger inspiration, is telling what absolutely novel and

exquisite sensations, what hitherto unimaginable pathos, what

marvelous deepening of emotional power, may be gained in

literature with the recognition of the idea of pre-existence.

Even in fiction we learn that we have been living in a hemisphere

only; that we have been thinking but half-thoughts; that we need

a new faith to join past with future over the great parallel of

the present, and so to round out our emotional world into a

perfect sphere. The clear conviction that the self is multiple,

however paradoxical the statement seem, is the absolutely

necessary step to the vaster conviction that the many are One,

that life is unity, that there is no finite, but only infinite.

Until that blind pride which imagines Self unique shall have been

broken down, and the feeling of self and of selfishness shall

have been utterly decomposed, the knowledge of the Ego as

infinite,--as the very Cosmos,--never can be reached.

Doubtless the simple emotional conviction that we have been in

the past will be developed long before the intellectual

conviction that the Ego as one is a fiction of selfishness. But

the composite nature of Self must at last be acknowledged, though

its mystery remain. Science postulates a hypothetical

psychological unit as well as a hypothetical physiological unit;

but either postulated entity defies the uttermost power of

mathematical estimate,--seems to resolve itself into pure

ghostliness. The chemist, for working purposes, must imagine an

ultimate atom; but the fact of which the imagined atom is the

symbol may be a force centre only,--nay, a void, a vortex, an

emptiness, as in Buddhist concept. "_Form is emptiness, and

emptiness is form. What is form, that is emptiness; what is

emptiness, that is form. Perception and conception, name and

knowledge,--all these are emptiness._" For science and for

Buddhism alike the cosmos resolves itself into a vast

phantasmagoria,--a mere play of unknown and immeasurable forces.

Buddhist faith, however, answers the questions "Whence?" and

"Whither?" in its own fashion, and predicts in every great cycle

of evolution a period of spiritual expansion in which the memory

of former births returns, and all the future simultaneously opens

before the vision unveiled, even to the heaven of heavens.

Science here remains dumb. But her silence is the Silence of the

Gnostics,--Sige, the Daughter of Depth and the Mother of Spirit.

What we may allow ourselves to believe, with the full consent of

Science, is that marvelous revelations await us. Within recent

time new senses and powers have been developed,--the sense of

music, the ever-growing faculties of the mathematician.

Reasonably it may be expected that still higher unimaginable

faculties will be evolved in our descendants. Again it is known

that certain mental capacities, undoubtedly inherited, develop in

old age only; and the average life of the human race is steadily

lengthening. With increased longevity there surely may come into

sudden being, through the unfolding of the larger future brain,

powers not less wonderful than the ability to remember former

births. The dreams of Buddhism can scarcely be surpassed, because

they touch the infinite; but who can presume to say they never

will be realized?

NOTE.

It may be necessary to remind some of those kind enough to read

the foregoing that the words "soul," "self," "ego,"

"transmigration," "heredity," although freely used by me, convey

meanings entirely foreign to Buddhist philosophy, "Soul," in the

English sense of the word, does not exist for the Buddhist.

"Self" is an illusion, or rather a plexus of illusions.

"Transmigration," as the passing of soul from one body to

another, is expressly denied in Buddhist texts of unquestionable

authority. It will therefore be evident that the real analogy

which does exist between the doctrine of karma and the scientific

facts of heredity is far from complete. Karma signifies the

survival, not of the same composite individuality, but of its

tendencies, which recombine to form a new composite

individuality. The new being does not necessarily take even a

human form: the karma does not descend from parent to child; it

is independent of the line of heredity, although physical

conditions of life seem to depend upon karma. The karma-being of

a beggar may have rebirth in the body of a king; that of a king

in the body of a beggar; yet the conditions of either

reincarnation have been predetermined by the influence of karma.

It will be asked, What then is the spiritual element in each

being that continues unchanged,--the spiritual kernel, so to

speak, within the shell of karma,--the power that makes for

righteousness? If soul and body alike are temporary composites,

and the karma (itself temporary) the only source of personality,

what is the worth or meaning of Buddhist doctrine? What is it

that suffers by karma; what is it that lies within the illusion,

--that makes progress,--that attains Nirvana? Is it not a self?

Not in our sense of the word. The reality of what we call self is

denied by Buddhism. That which forms and dissolves the karma;

that which makes for righteousness; that which reaches Nirvana,

is not our Ego in our Western sense of the word. Then what is it?

It is the divine in each being. It is called in Japanese

Muga-no-taiga,--the Great Self-without-selfishness. There Is no

other true self. The self wrapped in illusion is called

Nyorai-zo,--(Tathagata-gharba),--the Buddha yet unborn, as one in

a womb. The Infinite exists potentially in every being. That is

the Reality. The other self is a falsity,---a lie,--a mirage. The

doctrine of extinction refers only to the extinction of

Illusions; and those sensations and feelings and thoughts, which

belong to this life of the flesh alone, are the illusions which

make the complex illusive self. By the total decomposition of

this false self,--as by a tearing away of veils, the Infinite

Vision comes. There is no "soul": the Infinite All-Soul is the

only eternal principle in any being;--all the rest is dream.

What remains in Nirvana? According to one school of Buddhism

potential identity in the infinite,--so that a Buddha, after

having reached Nirvana, can return to earth. According to

another, identity more than potential, yet not in our sense

"personal." A Japanese friend says:--"I take a piece of gold, and

say it is one. But this means that it produces on my visual

organs a single impression. Really in the multitude of atoms

composing it each atom is nevertheless distinct and separate, and

independent of every other atom. In Buddhahood even so are united

psychical atoms innumerable. They are one as to condition;--yet

each has its own independent existence."

But in Japan the primitive religion has so affected the common

class of Buddhist beliefs that it is not incorrect to speak of

the Japanese "idea of self." It is only necessary that the

popular Shinto idea be simultaneously considered. In Shinto we

have the plainest possible evidence of the conception of soul.

But this soul is a composite,--not a mere "bundle of sensations,

perceptions, and volitions," like the karma-being, but a number

of souls united to form one ghostly personality. A dead man's

ghost may appear as one or as many. It can separate its units,

each of which remains capable of a special independent action.

Such separation, however, appears to be temporary, the various

souls of the composite naturally cohering even after death, and

reuniting after any voluntary separation. The vast mass of the

Japanese people are both Buddhists and Shintoists; but the

primitive beliefs concerning the self are certainly the most

powerful, and in the blending of the two faiths remain distinctly

recognizable. They have probably supplied to common imagination a

natural and easy explanation of the difficulties of the

karma-doctrine, though to what extent I am not prepared to say.

Be it also observed that in the primitive as well as in the

Buddhist form of belief the self is not a principle transmitted

from parent to offspring,--not an inheritance always dependent

upon physiological descent.

These facts will indicate how wide is the difference between

Eastern ideas and our own upon the subject of the preceding

essay. They will also show that any general consideration of the

real analogies existing between this strange combination of

Far-Eastern beliefs and the scientific thought of the nineteenth

century could scarcely be made intelligible by strict

philosophical accuracy in the use of terms relating to the idea

of self. Indeed, there are no European words capable of rendering

the exact meaning of the Buddhist terms belonging to Buddhist

Idealism.

Perhaps it may be regarded as illegitimate to wander from that

position so tersely enunciated by Professor Huxley in his essay

on "Sensation and the Sensiferous Organs:" "In ultimate analysis

it appears that a sensation is the equivalent in terms of

consciousness for a mode of motion of the matter of the

sensorium. But if inquiry is pushed a stage further, and the

question is asked, What, then, do we know about matter and

motion? there is but one reply possible. All we know about motion

is that it is a name for certain changes in the relations of our

visual, tactile, and muscular sensations; and all we know about

matter is that it is the hypothetical substance of physical

phenomena, _the assumption of which is as pure a piece of

metaphysical speculation as is that of a substance of mind_." But

metaphysical speculation certainly will not cease because of

scientific recognition that ultimate truth is beyond the utmost

possible range of human knowledge. Rather, for that very reason,

it will continue. Perhaps it will never wholly cease. Without it

there can be no further modification of religious beliefs, and

without modifications there can be no religious progress in

harmony with scientific thought. Therefore, metaphysical

speculation seems to me not only justifiable, but necessary.

Whether we accept or deny a _substance_ of mind; whether we

imagine thought produced by the play of some unknown element

through the cells of the brain, as music is made by the play of

wind through the strings of a harp; whether we regard the motion

itself as a special mode of vibration inherent in and peculiar to

the units of the cerebral structure,--still the mystery is

infinite, and still Buddhism remains a noble moral

working-hypothesis, in deep accord with the aspirations of mankind and

with the laws of ethical progression. Whether we believe or

disbelieve in the reality of that which is called the material

universe, still the ethical significance of the inexplicable laws

of heredity--of the transmission of both racial and personal

tendencies in the unspecialized reproductive cell--remains to

justify the doctrine of karma. Whatever be that which makes

consciousness, its relation to all the past and to all the future

is unquestionable. Nor can the doctrine of Nirvana ever cease to

command the profound respect of the impartial thinker. Science

has found evidence that known substance is not less a product of

evolution than mind,--that all our so-called "elements" have been

evolved out of "one primary undifferentiated form of matter." And

this evidence is startlingly suggestive of some underlying truth

in the Buddhist doctrine of emanation and illusion,--the

evolution of all forms from the Formless, of all material

phenomena from immaterial Unity,--and the ultimate return of all

into "that state which is empty of lusts, of malice, of

dullness,--that state in which the excitements of individuality

are known no more, and which is therefore designated THE VOID

SUPREME."

XIII