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834
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
thing surprising in the statement. The power to defy death is the natural result, or culmination, of a course of life characterised by the severest forms of asceticism. We have had occasion to refer to this power ere this, but we shall now go into the matter more deeply.
To begin with, we must ascertain the true significance of death. Since souls are not liable to disintegration or destruction, death must be a process fully conipatible with the survival of the jîva. But we have seen (ante, pages 824-825) that it is not as a pure disembodied spirit that the soul outlives the disintegration of its physical body, for its leârmâna and tai jasa sariras do not leave it till destroyed by tapa, preparatory to the attainment of moksha. It follows from this that death signifies the departure of the soul with its two inner bodies, the kärmâna and the taijasa, from the body of gross matter. Now, since the law of transmigration, to which all living beings involved in the samsara are subject, implies an alternating succession of births and deaths, death necessarily becomes the first step towards rebirth.
There would be little to dread death for in this sense, since it is like an obliging friend ever ready to change the old, the useless and the worn out with that which is fresh and young and healthy, were it not for the fact that it is also the most strictly just and incorruptible judge, giving to every one neither a tittle more nor less than what is deserved and merited by him. Thus, those who have earned merit and laid by store of virtue find in death a kiod friend whose agency enables them to rise higher and higher in the scale of being, while those who have
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