Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

Page 97

GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
It is useless to multiply instances taken from the Bible. For every candid Christian student must acknowledge that the truth of the doctrine of Reincarnation does not depend on a scriptural mention. But some people may say-if this doctrine is true, how is it that we do not remember our past incarnations. I will ask such, people-In what way do we exercise the faculty of memory? Certainly, so far as we are living in a body, we exercise it through the brain. In passing from one incarnation to the other, the soul does not carry its former brain in the new body. Even during the course of one life, do we always remember our past doings? Can any one remember that wonderful epoch, the infancy?
we find this passage-(Proverbs VIII. 22-31). Here all the passages except the last two, prove the pre-existence of soul, and notits creation at a certain time. The last two passages even prove a prior physical life. Let us turn to Jeremiah 15. "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee". This shows that the prophets too had existed before. Even in the New Testament there is sufficient evidence for re-incarnation, In John IX 2- a question is put to Jesus by his disciples-Which did sin; this man or his parents that he was born blind? This refers to two popular theories of the time one that of Moses who taught that the sins of fathers would descend on the children to the third and the fourth generation and the other that of re-incarnation doctrine. He merely says that neither that man's sin nor his father's sin was the cause of his blindness; he does not deny the pre-existence of that man. For in Galatians Ch. VI 7 we find for whatever a man soweth that he shall also reap. Paul does not here mean that what a man soweth in this physical existence that he shall reap in spiritual existence. For in the next passage he says: -- for he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life ever lasting. Even the words of Jesus confirm the doctrine. In St. Mathew Ch. XI he says: "Verily I say unto you among them that are born of women, there has not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth, violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John, and if he will receive it this is Elias, which was far to come." Does not Jesus mean that John was re-incarnating Elias?
The one chief point is that theory of Karma is not the theory of fatalism in which the human being is tied down, bounded by the force of something outside him. In one sense only will there be fatalism, we are free to do many things, we are also not free to do other things, and we cannot be freed from the results of our acts. Some results may be manifested in great strength, others very weakly, some may take a very long time and others a very short time; some are of such a nature that they are removed like simply washing with water, in the matter of acts done incidentally without any settled purpose or any fixed desire. In such a case with reference to many acts we may counteract their effects by willing to do so.
So the theory of Karma is not in any sense a theory of fatalism, but we say that all of us are not going towards one goal without any desire on our part, not that we are to teach that state without any effort on our part, but that our present condition is the effect of our acts, thoughts and words in the past state. To say that all will reach the perfect state merely because